Crowd- and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research

This project will not only use 'crowd-sourcing' methods to enable academics and other archaeological communities to co-produce innovative open datasets, but it will also pioneer a novel approach to co-designing and crowd-funding follow-up research. Archaeology has long been successful in piquing the interest of professional practitioners, volunteer societies and the wider public. These different archaeological enthusiasts do sometimes collaborate over archaeological fieldwork, interact via museum exhibitions or interact over other engagement activities, but beyond the edge of the excavation trench or the gallery case, they rarely cooperate on developing archaeological knowledge or on designing new research agendas. This project explores this untapped potential in three promising areas: transcription of archaeological archives, low-cost 3D object modelling and 'follow-up' research. We want to deepen existing links between two major London research institutions, the British Museum (BM) and University College London (UCL), and several well-established communities associated with (a) the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) and (b) some of archaeology's most famous archival and object collections from Flinders Petrie, Kathleen Kenyon and colleagues' early excavations in the eastern Mediterranean. These two strands capitalise on considerable expertise, heritage assets and interest within London itself, but each also offers wider national or international reach, opening up opportunities to explore how best to blend the respective research inputs of pre-existing online communities of interest, and a further 'crowd' of potential contributors worldwide. Together, we will crowd-source the transcription of hard copy archives and pioneer the construction of large numbers of 3D artefact models from ordinary photographs. The existing communities, new contributors and traditional academics brought together by these efforts will collectively also design attractive follow-up projects that might, over the longer term, be financed via individually small but collectively important online donations.

We will seek wide national and international impact with four kinds of non-academic beneficiary. First, the project's collaborative remit will lead to direct impacts on local archaeological societies, other established archaeological communities and new crowdsourcing contributors who might not have had any previous engagement with archaeology. The two research institutions involved (the UCL Institute of Archaeology and the British Museum) will take this opportunity to broaden digital participation amongst their existing audiences and reach new ones. Community participants will themselves have an opportunity to steer the project's impact, by co-designing follow-up research that must be both of immediate interest to them and appealing to a wider set of potential micro-funders. By taking part, individuals and communities will also strengthen their own analytical, digital and photographic skills.

Second, above and beyond the impact on people and groups who contribute directly, the project's outcomes will be beneficial to archaeological practitioners working in resource management and the commercial archaeological sector as new open data will support enhanced resource impact statements and desk-based archaeological assessments. We will reach this group both directly through the project forum and social media, and via representative bodies such as the Council for British Archaeology and the Institute of Field Archaeologists. In the eastern Mediterranean, our project is also very relevant to the work of heritage NGOs in Gaza and the West Bank, and we will build on the team's extensive contacts to raise awareness.

Third, we will connect with two types of digital practitioner outside of traditional academic circles. Programmers and modellers will be able to use the open data produced by this project to develop a rich range of online resources, for example incorporating 3D artefact representations into multimedia applications or immersive virtual environments and we will engage with this sector thanks to the advisory group's professional links and via UCL's centre for entrepreneurship and business interaction. We will also support the group of digital professionals working in higher education and in the Galleries, Library, Archives and Museum (GLAM) sector, by producing technical guidelines detailing how crowd-sourcing can be used as tool for low-cost community engagement and for diversifying funding possibilities. These guidelines will be made available via the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement and GLAM-related representative bodies and organisations such as the Museum Association and The Audience Agency. In addition, the project team will make efforts to expand our recent links with the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre in order to demonstrate the potential for greater involvement by these 'open society' movements in archaeology.

The fourth and final group that will benefit from this research comprises those who provide professional training and those who shape policy in the cultural sector. The former will be made aware of our conclusions about how to support the participation of people with only basic digital skills and will be able to repurpose our own digital training resources. Targeted executive summaries will allow bodies such as the Department for Culture Media and Sport, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England and English Heritage to invoke the project's results as case studies as part of their own white papers and policy-making.