Seandalaiocht is now a paid up member of the Twitterati with its own profile page and even a few followers. I've avoided Twitter for some time now, not really understanding what the point of it was, but I'm already seeing its addictive effects and I've only been on it for a few days.

If you call yourself a twitter fiend and you'd like to get shorter versions of the random ramblings on this blog then start following me!

I've also set up a twitter account for the events page which will update whenever I add something to the events calendar. You can sign up for it here.

I've posted previously about the events page on the blog where you can find a calendar of archaeology related events going on in Ireland. To highlight the calendar and how useful it can be I've decided to try out a weekly post listing the events for that week.

• Thursday at 16:00 sees the last lecture in the UCD School of Archaeology's seminar series will be given by Dr Ingelise Stuijts of the Discovery Programme
• At 19:30 in the National Print Museum a lecture entitled Hand Papermaking and Paper Art – Traditional and contemporary practices at the 20th IAPMA Congress, Tasmania, Australia will be presented by Tunde Toth
• On Saturday and Sunday the South Kildare Medieval Festival takes place in Athy, Co. Kildare. More info here. 
• “Communication routes in the western area of the de Lacy Lordship of Meath” is the title of a lecture to be given in Lismullin Conference Centre, Navan on Thursday 22 April at 8.00 p.m.  The speaker is Linda Doran.
  

The list is based only on what turns up in my inbox so if there's anything missing please contact me and I'll add the event to the calendar.

You can add the calendar to your calendar application or your Google Calendar by using the links on the events page. 

EDIT 20/04/10  : An additional event has been added

RTE are currently looking for entrants for a new archaeology programme involving fifth and sixth class students. There's a website to go with the show that gets applicants to play an interactive game where they identify a variety of archaeological objects that belong to a Bronze Age burial (I'm going to pretend I got them all first time..). Its really well done and actually informative! 

I presume this is connected with the archaeology element of the school curriculum which recently saw the launch of a transition year resource pack to go along with the primary school one. You can play the game yourself on the programme's website but I'm afraid you can't enter unless you're in fifth or sixth class and are happy to 'don an archaeologist's hat'. 

There's no indication that I can find of how the programme will work or what format it will follow but I'm a big advocate of this kind of popularisation of archaeology. Getting kids, and by extension their tax-paying parents, interested and involved in archaeology is the best way to justify our largely publicly-funded research.

The production company doesn't appear to have any background in historical/archaeological programming (judging by a brief glance at their website) and a lot of their recent stuff falls into the category of very light entertainment (e.g. 'Celebrity Jigs and Reels') but the website shows promise so I'll withhold judgement for now.

EDIT: More info on how to apply here.

Last month I noticed a very flattering note on the Eachtra website about myself and this site. It invites comment from me but unfortunately I can't see anywhere to comment on their website so I decided I might just waffle away here as usual.

The title of the Eachtra post was "Brian Dolan + Web 2.0 = www.seandlaiocht.com". While being aware of the concept of Web 2.0 I had never previously thought about it in relation to myself or to archaeology.So what is Web 2.0?

Well, its difficult to say and I'm not going into the details, that's what wikipedia is for, but basically its a way of describing a theoretical 'new version' of the internet. To me at least, its talking about an internet that isn't just consumed by everybody but can be easily created and changed without esoteric knowledge about Java, C++, html or any number of other scary abbreviations that are almost meaningless to the majority of the non Star Trek loving population of the planet (not that I have any problem with Star Trek).  

Essentially it's sites like YouTube, Facebook and and Flickr which allow you to interact with the web, create your own space and interact with other people online. Sites like Weebly (the service I use to publish this blog) and Google Apps allow web publication without ANY programming knowledge. Basically if you can use a word processor you can now have a presence on the net. 

So what has Web 2.0 got to do with archaeology? Well, so much and at the same time so little. Its all about potential and a few sites (including Eachtra's with its excellent online journal , nominated for an Irish Web Award in 2009 btw) have begun to embrace it and change the way people interact with archaeological information, data and research.

Web 2.0 has huge potential to change the way archaeology is viewed in Ireland. Dissemination has been one of the buzzwords in the discipline for the last five years but I have heard little talk about how the internet can transform how we disseminate to the public. The potential to reach out to the public, to inform and, excitingly, to interact is gigantic.

Irish archaeology's response to the internet has been mixed. Some interesting and useful steps have been taken with online bibliographies, databases and mapping (e.g. Archaeology.ie, Excavations.ie, EMAP) but these are generally aimed at those already interested and they aren't exactly user friendly. Many commercial sites provide summaries of excavations, some make reports available and one even has a blog (not that it is much used). However there are plenty of very basic commercial sites out there and some of the archaeology pages on the internet I most use (Thadeus Breen's and Conor McDermott's sites)  are still decidedly web 1.0.. Academia has done little more and the University webpages are nothing if not boring. Where are the academic blogs? The rich video and audio content or the electronic publications?

In reality it has been left to enthusiast sites such as Megalithomania and Mythical Ireland to 'give the people what they want'; including detailed maps of sites, basic information (sometimes not as accurate or up to date as it could be but where are the professionals providing info?), videos, photos and lots of other content.

Hopefully I'm not coming over too preachy and I am aware that this site and its subdomains (smelt.seandalaiocht.com and charcoal.seandalaiocht.com) are by no means perfect but they do show some of what is possible with no programming knowledge, practically no money and a bit of time. Future plans for the site include a database of Irish iron sites based on my PhD research, an interactive map of the same and more articles, presentations, videos and photos. There is nothing stopping any other archaeologist starting a site and sharing a little of what they know and are interested in with the public who ultimately pay their wages (or, more likely these days, their dole!). 

The move to better websites in Irish archaeology is already noticeable with the trend for almost every INSTAR project to have a website (for a list see here) and the recently updated Discovery Programme pages.  However we can do more. Sites like Scribd and Issuu make it free to publish online; Google and Bing's mapping services offer the potential to create accessible geospatial data at no cost; and Youtube and Vimeo do the same for the distribution of video and audio.

Lectures and books are not the only way to tell people about archaeology. We don't need to make it more interesting, we all know its already fascinating, but it would do no harm to make it all a little bit easier for the man on the street. Call it benevolent self-interest: the more people get interested in archaeology and value it, the more chance they'll be happy to fund it.

I found out about a newly discovered Viking house located behind the Four Courts in Dublin (Hammond Lane/Church Street) at the weekend through a friend working on the site but it has now trickled through to the national news. It was featured on Morning Ireland yesterday morning through a five minute interview with Margaret Gowen, complete with obligatory northside/southside comment at the end. You can listen to it on their podcast of the whole programme or just the interview below:

As a bonus, you can also see the report broadcast on the six-one news by clicking here or watch the whole programme on the RTE Player (skip to about 37 minutes in for the juicy bit). Also an Irish Times article here.

I just received a press release about a recent exhibition of archaeological material in the Dundalk County Museum. I haven't seen it myself unfortunately but if the very professional (and potentially copyright infringing) poster is anything to go by then a lot of creativity, thought and a bit of fun have gone into the exhibition.

I love seeing archaeology presented in interesting ways like this, the public likes to be entertained and there is nothing wrong with giving them what they want, as long as the substance is there under the pleasant gloss of shiny graphics!

Down with woolly jumper archaeology (but up with woolly jumpers in general, its bleedin' cold out!) and up with sexy, slick, and hopefully popular archaeology. Forget disseminating (snore), lets entertain!