Seandálaíocht - Irish for Archaeology

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.

Seandalaiocht finally has a corner of the facebook world to call its own. This is part of an embracing of the various social networks that I started a while ago with the launch of Seandalaiocht's twitter feed. 

Anyway, rock on over to the facebook page now and hit that Like button!

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.

People may be interested in this newly launched portal that provides a searchable database of open-access (i.e. free!) publications from various Irish institutions. 

I've already had a quick look and there are quite a few archaeology papers up already. 

So what lies in store for the vast grey library Ireland has amassed during its recent splurge in archaeological spending? This is potentially the most important issue facing Irish archaeology and, to be fair, has been discussed almost ad nauseum by the profession (e.g. Archaeology 20:20, Review of Research Needs in Irish Archaeology, RIA Report on Irish Archaeology). There are a number of key problems which need to be overcome. The first is immediate and involves preserving, compiling and completing reports. The next stage needs to be making these reports available. Real accessibility needs to follow eventually and is the ultimate payback to a society which has already paid dearly for the generation of archaeological data.

The immediate risk from the recession and a lack of funds is the halting of post-excavation work and report completion. This has always been an issue but the recent collapse of multiple commercial companies compounds the issue. In some cases the problem goes beyond a lack of a report: site archives, samples and artefacts are likely to be at immediate risk of being lost. There is no easy solution to this but hopefully the opening of the new NMI storage facility might stop the worst consequences of the economic collapse, assuming they will take in incomplete archives.

Assuming it exists in the first place, making grey literature available is the next step. This means making it easy for anyone to access unpublished reports. In theory this is possible already as the DoEHLG holds all reports from licensed excavations but this requires travel to Dublin at restricted times, knowing exactly what you want in advance and dealing in paper copies. Nonetheless this centralisation of reports negates some of the problems of scattered reports our neighbours across the water need to deal with. There have been plenty of rumors in recent years that the DoEHLG has reports digitised and ready to go. Whatever issues are holding things back they need to be sorted and the reports urgently put online, preferably linked in to the exisiting geospatial database. In reality the grey literature will probably trickle out through a variety of web outlets (such as those referred to in the first post in this series) but this will inevitably make availability difficult and patchy. 

Making the material truly accessible or in other words digestable by people other than hardcore archaeologists is perhaps the most difficult, expensive and time-consuming difficulty when dealing with grey literature. It does not mean dumbing down; the reality is most grey literature is barely readable to research archaeologists and requires a lot of work before anyone in their right mind would call it interesting or valuable. Important steps have already been taken in this respect, primarily through INSTAR funded projects (For a list of INSTAR project websites have a look here). The project I am most familiar with is the Early Medieval Archaeology Project in UCD. EMAP has succeeded with limited resources in assessing the scale of the grey literature problem in Irish early medieval archaeology and taken that process one step further by actually beginning to make it accessible through its recent settlement and dwellings report. Future plans include online interactivity with the project database as well as more traditional conferences and publications. Of course that all depends on adequate funding. 
 
In reality the situation in Ireland is not completely dire, an awful lot of work is being done but there is a huge danger that drastic cuts in funding of things like INSTAR which cost minor amounts in the grand scheme of things could result in the loss of data which cost orders of magnitude more to produce. Much information has already been lost but the priority has to be to save what can still be saved and make it widely available as soon as possible. Grey literature represents a gigantic investment by the state and for a very small further investment it can be transformed into a resource that could, through participation, engagement and dialogue with the public, transform the way we as a society view our past and ourselves.  

This is the final part of a series of 3 posts on Grey Literature and Archaeology.

The County Museum Dundalk, Co. Louth which has been mentioned on this blog before, is undertaking a series of streaming webcasts to a school in the US. the idea is to bring local studies to a wider audience. 

Its a great idea and will hopefully get a big listenership. The first broadcast was this afternoon (apologies for getting the post up a bit late) although I had difficulties logging onto it. I'll try again next time.

For more info and a schedule of upcoming webcasts click "Read More" below

Update: There were technical difficulties with the webcast today but a podcast will be posted tomorrow.