Bless me readers for I have sinned. It has been almost a month since my last post. However, things are set to change and I plan on posting much more frequently, starting with this report on a conference I spoke at recently in the Louth County Museum. The conference was called 'Reach the Future through the Past" (you can see a previous post about it here) and aimed to look at some of the ways in which heritage can engage with new technologies. 

I was invited to speak about my experiences with Seandalaiocht.com and share my thoughts on archaeology and the internet in Ireland. You can see my presentation above, created using an online powerpoint alternative called Prezi. The presentation is fairly self-explanatory and incorporated many of the ideas I talked about in a previous blog post called "Web 2.0 and Archaeology" so I won't re-hash them here.

Instead I'll give a quick run through of some of the other speakers on the day. The second presentation of the day (after my good self) was given by Paul Young of Cartoon Saloon, the company behind the Oscar nominated animated film The Secret of Kells. I must say I was blown away by how they had used Irish heritage, mainly from the early medieval period but also from the Iron Age and earlier as inspiration for a style of animation that is truely unique and owes nothing to Disney or Dreamworks. I've since bought the DVD and been even more impressed by their use of Irish history in an original, unpatronising way that doesn't resort to cliché. 

Next up was Ciaran McGuinness (from Archer Heritage) and Graham O'Rourke (from Mor Solutions; follow him on Twitter @morsolutions). They talked about a new mobile app they are developing with Louth County Museum which will provide audio, video and textual information on heritage sites in the county as well as detailed information about how to get to each site. The app looks very impressive and, as a way for a heritage company to diversify its business, it makes a huge amount of sense. I've written about the potential for mobile apps and archaeology before and I think they will become much more common in coming years. 

The afternoon session had a talk from Susan Cahill from Newstalk who talked about Talking History, the popular history/archaeology focussed radio talk show. Susan had some very interesting comments to make about identifying the audience demographic for heritage and tips on how to make content interesting for a popular audience while drawing in those with more specialist passions. Some of what she said certainly gave me food for thought in terms of the content that I'll be putting on Seandalaiocht in the future. 

The next presenter Mark Hawkes-Green talked about the setting up and running of an Art College in the Burren while Yanky Faschler talked about the potential for using heritage in the future, drawing parallels with the development of Jewish cultural identity in Israel. 

Finally, Niall Roycroft talked about the Archaeological Scene Investigation exhibition developed by the NRA and the Louth County Museum. The exhibition, which dealt with the archaeology of the M1 motorway has now been published as a website www.asi-louth.ie that incorporates the innovative and entertaining approach taken by the original exhibition. This kind of web publication points to a way of disseminating archaeological findings without resorting to expensive monographs that few buy and less read. 

It was a fascinating and unique conference and congratulations are due to Brian Walsh of the Louth County Museum for coming up with the idea and carrying it through so successfully. 

Incidentally, you can have a look at Graham O'Rourke's far more punctual blog post about the conference here.

As promised in an earlier post I am proud to launch Seandalaiocht's first mobile app! It is fairly basic, providing a few photos, an RSS reader and some contact info for the site but considering I have no programming skills and its one of only a handful of archaeology-related apps in existence I'm quite chuffed with it. 

The app was created online using www.buildanapp.com and should have cost just $19 but because my weird non-postcoded address in Ireland wouldn't work with their system they were generous enough to publish it for free! So needless to say I highly recommend them.

Andoid users can get the app by scanning the barcode on this post, searching the Android Market for Seandalaiocht or downloading this file and putting it on their phone. Blackberry and Windows users can find versions on the Seandalaiocht App page. 

Unfortunately publishing an iphone app is just too expensive at the moment but for those who want to experience the app on their iphone they can surf to a web version at i.seandalaiocht.com. A mobile version of the site is available for non-smart phones at m.seandalaiocht.com.

Smartphone apps have been around for a few years now with Apple breaking the ground and Google's Android platform now taking the concept open-source. I had my first iphone over two years ago now but took a break from smartphones after it self destructed after one year of use. I have very recently been tempted back into the smartphone world by the HTC Desire which runs a version of Android.  

This has got me thinking about the potential of apps for archaeologists. The many geospatial functions of the phones such as GPS and compass combined with satellite mapping available through the internet have obvious uses for archaeologists in the field (see here for an account of one archaeologist making use of his iphone during excavations and here for a list of useful apps for archaeologists). Co-ordinate capture, field note taking, instant uploading of geo-tagged photos, weather forecasts, access to the web (and thus journals, databases, other archaeologists etc) and even leveling tripods can all be easily assisted by smart phones right now.

However, their is scope for much much more. Practical apps are one thing but more general interactive apps will, I think, be a big thing in the next few years. The National heritage Board of Sweden have recently released an Android app (beta version) which searches heritage data in your locality and presents it in your hand with locational information. An Irish equivalent would be typing in ringfort to your mobile and being shown the locations of the ringforts in your vicinity and any information available on them. Of course the GPS ability of your smartphone would also tell you how to navigate to them. The next step on from this is the idea of 'augmented reality'.

Augmented reality apps such as Layar overlay information from the web onto the real world through your phone's camera and screen. Electric Archaeology has recently reported on two such apps, one developed by the Museum of London and another, Voyager XDrive. These apps are both capable of overlaying historical and archaeological material onto real landscapes in real time creating incredible tools for re-constructing and interpreting past landscapes in the present. 

As yet, app development is at a very early stage and their use for archaeology is rare (although watch this space for a Seandalaiocht App to be launched very soon), but with the opening up of mapping data in the UK and hopefully someday in Ireland, along with open-source repositories of information such as wikipedia there is scope for the development of new realities experienced through handheld devices that were only a sci-fi fantasy twenty years ago. 

UPDATE: I came across this post the day after I published mine. It showcases a soon-to-be-released Italian iphone app that provides info on ticketing etc for museums in Italy.