Preserving the impossible: conservation of soft-sediment hominin footprint sites and strategies for three-dimensional digital data capture.

Human footprints provide some of the most publically emotive and tangible evidence of our ancestors. To the scientific community they provide evidence of stature, presence, behaviour and in the case of early hominins potential evidence with respect to the evolution of gait. While rare in the geological record the number of footprint sites has increased in recent years along with the analytical tools available for their study. Many of these sites are at risk from rapid erosion, including the Ileret footprints in northern Kenya which are second only in age to those at Laetoli (Tanzania). Unlithified, soft-sediment footprint sites such these pose a significant geoconservation challenge. In the first part of this paper conservation and preservation options are explored leading to the conclusion that to 'record and digitally rescue' provides the only viable approach. Key to such strategies is the increasing availability of three-dimensional data capture either via optical laser scanning and/or digital photogrammetry. Within the discipline there is a developing schism between those that favour one approach over the other and a requirement from geoconservationists and the scientific community for some form of objective appraisal of these alternatives is necessary. Consequently in the second part of this paper we evaluate these alternative approaches and the role they can play in a 'record and digitally rescue' conservation strategy. Using modern footprint data, digital models created via optical laser scanning are compared to those generated by state-of-the-art photogrammetry. Both methods give comparable although subtly different results. This data is evaluated alongside a review of field deployment issues to provide guidance to the community with respect to the factors which need to be considered in digital conservation of human/hominin footprints

Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scholarship

This paper examines the impact of the emerging digital landscape on long term access to material created in digital form and its use for research; it examines challenges, risks and expectations.

Radiography in Palaeopathology: Where Next?

YesRadiography has frequently been used during palaeopathological research, and plays an important role in the differential diagnosis of many diseases, including Paget¿s disease and carcinomas. Traditionally, radiographs were taken in hospitals with clinical equipment. However industrial radiography techniques have gradually become more commonly used, as their superior image quality and improved potential for diagnoses become recognised. The introduction of radiographic scanners has facilitated the digitisation of these images for dissemination and publication. However this is not all that radiographic digitisation can offer the researcher. Digital image processing (DIP) allows the researcher to focus on an area of interest and to adjust the brightness and contrast of the captured image. This allows the investigation of areas of high radio-opacity and radio-lucency, providing detailed images of the internal structures of bone and pathological lesions undetectable by the naked eye. In addition 3D effects, edge enhancement and sharpening algorithms, available through commonly used image processing software, can be very effective in enhancing the visibility of specific features. This paper will reveal how radiographic digitisation and manipulation can enhance radiographic images of palaeopathological lesions and potentially further our understanding of the bony manifestations of disease

Back to the Future? Presenting archaeology at the Green Man Festival

In the summer of 2011, Cardiff Osteoarchaeology Research Group was invited to present a number of archaeological engagement activities at the Green Man music festival as part of the Einstein’s Garden science learning area. The project, called Back to the Future?: Animals and archaeology in Einstein’s Garden comprised a number of activities, designed to cater for a wide range of ages as the festival audience typically includes young people and families. Over four days more than 2000 people visited the stall. This paper will briefly outline the activities presented, and will reflect on the challenges posed by outreach at a music festival, in particular how to hook the main festival demographic, and how to evaluate success

Publishing archaeological excavations at the digital turn

This paper engages with repeated calls within archaeology for a re-envisioning of the excavation report, contextualized by the transformation of scholarly communication taking place across the humanities and social sciences. This widespread transformation is rooted in a growing interest in showing data together with synthesis and argument, the importance afforded to public engagement, and the proliferation of digital platforms that enable creative presentations of scholarly work. In this context, we discuss our experience producing an excavation report that attempts to integrate several forms of scholarly and public-facing communication on a digital platform, and aims engage audiences at multiple levels, while simultaneously facilitating data reuse and laying out the authors’ current interpretations. We consider the benefits and challenges of producing work in this way through the example of the process of producing the Gabii Project’s first volume, A Mid-Republican House from Gabii, developed through a collaboration between the Gabii Project team and the University of Michigan Press. This experience is contextualised within the broader discourse surrounding changing expectations about open access, authorship and credit, and sustainability of digital scholarship in academic publishing

Learning from Loss : Eroding coastal heritage in Scotland

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.