More Crowdsourcing: Track Illicit Antiquities with Wikiloot

Crowdsourcing is going to play a big role in archaeology's future. This month I'm bringing you four projects that use it to harness the enthusiasm of ordinary people to fuel innovative research. 

WikiLoot is a project by Jason Felch, one of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum. The idea is to "create an open source web platform, or wiki, for the publication and analysis of a unique archive of primary source records and photographs documenting the illicit trade in looted antiquities." Says Felch:

The inspiration for WikiLoot is the vast amount of documentation seized by European investigators over the past two decades during investigations of the illicit trade in Classical antiquities smuggled (primarily) out of Greece and Italy. The business records, journals, correspondence and photographs seized from looters and middlemen during those investigations comprise a unique record of the black market.

Much of that documentation remains tangled in legal cases that are likely to end inconclusively, like that of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht. Despite remarkable investigative work by authorities in Italy and Greece, only the trial of Italian dealer Giacomo Medici reached a verdict.

WikiLoot will make these records and photographs publicly available on the web and will enlist collaborators around the world to tag and analyze them. As with Wikipedia, participants will be given credit for their contributions. Ultimately, we hope to create the world’s most authoritative dataset of a black market whose size and reach is still poorly understood. (Estimates of the illicit antiquities trade range from $200 million a year to $10 billion dollars a year.)

This Polaroid seized from the warehouse of dealer Giacomo Medici shows the Getty Museum's Statue of Apollo shortly after it was looted from a tomb in Southern Italy.

Researchers and the interested public are invited to collaborate to help fight the destruction of archaeological sites for the antiquities trade. They've applied for funding from the Knight News Challenge.

While the project is still in development, the WikiLoot Facebook page has become a nexus for fascinating discussions about collecting, looting and museums. The posts and comment threads are a regular who's who of scholars and journalists researching the antiquities trade, including David Gill, Derek Fincham, Larry Rothfeld, Neil Brodie, Fabio Isman, and others. This is a project worth following - it has the potential to not only be tremendous fun but also an innovative precedent for future research projects.

Crowdsourcing Week: Valley of the Khans Project, Mongolia

Crowdsourcing is going to play a big role in archaeology's future. This week I'm bringing you four projects that use it to harness the enthusiasm of ordinary people to fuel innovative research. 

National Geographic

The Valley of the Khans Project  is using non-invasive methods to map and discover archaeological sites in a remote part of Mongolia traditionally considered the homeland of Genghis Khan. Led by UCSD researcher Albert Lin, the project relies on a combination of high-tech remote sensing with a huge amount of free unskilled labor.

Procrastinators with a computer (or 'Citizen Scientists' as the project calls them) can go to the National Geographic website and scan high-resolution satellite photos, tagging interesting features like roads, rivers, ancient structures, and modern features. Lin explains how it works:


The interface is easy and fun to use, and it's fascinating to see the variety of Mongolian landscapes: deserts, deep forests, rivers, steppe. There's plenty of empty images but a surprising number of features to find. So far 16,000 volunteers have placed over one million tags on 785,000 image tiles. That's several years of drudgery, virtually for free. Go over to NatGeo and check it out!

The key to getting good results with crowdsourcing is repetition. The 'average' person doesn't spot everything, but show the same image to a hundred people and their cumulative responses will catch almost everything. Once interesting features are identified, the research team is using a host of high-tech contraptions - including electro-resistive tomography, ground-penetrating radar, and a remote-controlled, six-blade helicopter (!) - to ground truth them. 

The 'hexacopter', probably the most ridiculously high-tech archaeology gadget ever (Nat Geo)

The era of the lone researcher sitting at a desk is coming to an end. This here is the future of archaeology: non-invasive methods and public participation.  

Crowdsourcing Week: Save Flag Fen!

Crowdsourcing is going to play a big role in archaeology's future. This week I'm bringing you four projects that use it to harness the enthusiasm of ordinary people to fuel innovative research.

Digventures and Crowdsourcing at Flag Fen

The Museum at Flag Fen

Flag Fen is one of Britain's most important Late Bronze Age sites. Between about 1300 and 1000 BC a huge timber ceremonial  platform was built out into a marsh near Peterborough, surrounded by a palisade of around 60,000 wooden posts. Marshy conditions have preserved the timbers and other artifacts, which offer amazing insights into Bronze Age life. Drainage of surrounding land, however, threatens the site - if the wood dries out, it will immediately decay. Flag Fen has only a couple decades left, at maximum - making continued excavation urgent.

3000-year-old preserved timbers

Enter Digventures, who this summer will carry out 'Europe's first ever crowd-sourced and crowd-funded archaeological excavation'. They've got one month left to raise £25,000 to support the field season. A sponsorship gives you inside access to the project (you can even go in the field with them!):

Starting at the £10 level, you will have a ‘backstage’ pass to the Site Hut, a password-protected area on our website offering daily updates on the project, and loads of original content including apps, blogs, on site streaming, interviews, lectures from archaeological superstars, photos, finds news and more. This access is for the duration of one year, until the 2013 season gets underway next April.
The field school at Flag Fen (for those who purchase a benefit at £125 and above) will be really exciting this year. We’ve put a lot of thinking into making this the best experience possible, whether you are digging for a day, a week, two weeks, or the whole project. There will be dedicated staff providing orientation, training and instruction, as well as evening lectures, fun outings and plenty of time for questions. And some surprises, of course!
Places in the field school (from 23rd July – 12th August 2012) are limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, and are only for those aged 17 and older.

This is a pilot project: Digventures plans to expand. It's mission is to provide

seed capital and build audiences for archaeology projects worldwide. We’re changing the game, by putting the public in the driver’s seat – and giving you the chance to get on site, digging with us. All of us here at DV mission control are archaeologists; we come from all aspects of the discipline, and have an international perspective on what’s working, and what isn’t. Let’s be honest: the economy isn’t great, and for lots of reasons that means that archaeology is under threat. We’ve joined forces to try something new.

Given the ongoing global massacre of funding for anything not controlled by a former Goldman Sachs employee, the idea is timely. It's also smart: there's a huge amount of enthusiasm and interest in archaeology but few ways to channel it productively into saving sites. I'm interested to see how it goes over the next few years, especially if Digventures expands into countries with less well-developed traditions of public giving and participation than the UK or the US. (In Italy, for instance, charitable giving by individuals is almost unknown.)

For a bit more, check out archaeologist Francis Pryor on the discovery of Flag Fen and the threats facing it today:

Old Maps Online

I think I just mortgaged a few months of my life. Old Maps Online, launched last week, lets you browse a Google Maps-based interface for historical maps of places you like, anywhere in the world. A thrilling and dangerous proposition for us historical map obsessives.

So if I want, say, an old map of Emilia-Romagna (where I live) I can zoom into northern Italy, then choose from the list of maps on the right sidebar.

Say I want to go hiking in the hills above Bologna, but with a 17th-century map? I click on the map of the 'Parte Alpestre del Territorio Bolognese' to get some info about it.

Hm, 1620s sounds about right. Clicking through takes me to the site of the Moravian Library (Czech Republic), where I can zoom around the digital version of the map itself and plan my walk, maybe to a village that no longer exists!

 

The concept is fantastically simple: link existing digital map collections in obscure libraries around the world with a simple interface that everyone knows how to use. The execution is great, too - the site is easy to use and feels intuitive. The project is a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland and funded by the UK government.

They plan to expand to other libraries' holdings, and are offering assistance in digitizing collections and georeferencing already-scanned maps. A crowdsourcing project to georeference maps in the British library using Klokan's cloud-hosted software took only 4 days. Keep your eyes out for more opportunities to help build this historical resource/incredible time suck. And pity me as I turn into a drooling map wretch.