Crowd- and Community-fuelled Archaeological Research

该项目不仅将使用“众包”方法，使学者和其他考古界能够共同制作创新的开放数据集，而且它还将开创一种共同设计和众筹后续研究的新方法。长期以来，考古学一直成功地激发了专业从业者、志愿者协会和更广泛的公众的兴趣。这些不同的考古爱好者有时会在考古田野工作中进行合作，通过博物馆展览进行互动，或者在其他参与活动中进行互动，但在挖掘沟或画廊案例的边缘之外，他们很少在发展考古知识或设计新的研究议程方面进行合作。该项目在三个有前景的领域探索了这一尚未开发的潜力：考古档案转录、低成本3D物体建模和后续研究。我们希望加深伦敦两大研究机构，大英博物馆(BM)和伦敦大学学院(UCL)与几个久负盛名的社区之间的现有联系，这些社区与(A)英国可移植文物计划(PAS)和(B)一些考古学最著名的档案和文物收藏品有关，这些藏品来自弗林德斯·皮特里、凯瑟琳·肯杨及其同事在地中海东部的早期发掘。这两个分支利用了伦敦本身相当多的专业知识、遗产资产和兴趣，但每一个都提供了更广泛的国内或国际影响，打开了探索如何最好地将先前存在的感兴趣的在线社区的各自研究投入与世界各地更多的潜在贡献者相结合的机会。我们将一起将硬拷贝档案的转录众包，并率先从普通照片中构建大量3D人工制品模型。通过这些努力聚集在一起的现有社区、新的贡献者和传统学者还将共同设计有吸引力的后续项目，从长远来看，这些项目可能会通过个别规模较小但共同重要的在线捐款来筹集资金。

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.