Hosted by Department of History at Royal Holloway.

Keynote:

Abira Hussein (Nomad Project)

The Archive and the Community

The Nomad Project (nomad-project.co.uk) is a Heritage Lottery and Nesta funded project. Since 2017 the project has explored ways to create, distribute, and engage a wider audience with community-centered cultural heritage objects and stories. This has included the creation of a HoloLens Mixed Reality experience, WebAR object cards, and the development of an open-source community archive. In this presentation, I will touch upon the themes of digital equality, education, and sustainability and invite discussion for, how as a community, we can create a more open and equitable space for sharing cultural heritage. I will explore the tensions between digitally driven outputs and audiences, the potential role digital technologies can have in pluralising curation, and the potential role of diaspora knowledge in informing museum practice

Speakers:

Alison Norton (University of Exeter)

Diversity in the Digital World: Championing the Research of Women in Castle Studies

Within the past thirty-years, archaeological usage of GIS and LiDAR has grown exponentially allowing scholars to examine more effectively the past and present. More specifically, computational approaches and digital methodologies, for castle scholars, have inherently been geared towards understanding ways in which castles engaged with concepts of visibility within the medieval landscape. However, scholarship promoting this research objective is almost wholly male-centric. To date, the ratio between male and female castellologists, who incorporate digitally based approaches, echoes the gendered stereotypes found within the medieval castle narrative. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the under-represented but vital research of women castellologists. By doing so, this paper seeks to demonstrate the innovative ways women have utilized computational methods to further our understanding of the medieval castle and promote diverse research within castle studies.

Li Sou, Lyn Wilson, Al Rawlinson, James Hepher, Vanesa Gonzalez, Gavin Glencorse, Brian Wilkinson, Val Turner, Andrew Wilson, Stephen Dockrill, Julie Bond (Historic Environment Scotland, University of Bradford and Shetland Amenity Trust)

Building an iBook for Brochs in Shetland

This presentation discusses the development of an iBook, a multimedia educational app, and the its effectiveness in making three Iron Age broch sites in Shetland; Mousa, Old Scatness and Jarlshof, and themes of their archaeological and cultural significance (see UNESCO 2019 for details) more accessible and engaging.

Rather than being a static e-book or single stand-alone VR/AR/MR experience, Apple iBooks are interactive, dynamic resources designed to enhance user experience and understanding. They offer a versatile and wide range of opportunities to engage with the broad range of archaeology that broch sites and their long-lived chronologies present.

The iBook to be presented contains a range of features including but not limited to; multiple panoramic virtual tours of the three archaeological sites interspersed with historic photographs and information points; interactive video interviews with archaeologists who worked on the excavations to provide users with personal insights into their work, findings and fond memories; reconstruction drawings and videos and high resolution laser scan imagery. The iBook also introduces messages about conservation, the impact of climate change on heritage sites and their local and ecological importance to the reader.

Significantly, it was designed to utilise these features to offer choices and different ways of engaging with the concept of these complex palimpsests of sites, as well as digital accessibility, with closed captioning of videos and read-aloud-text embedded throughout. With the sites being difficult to access for people with less mobility, the panoramic tours offer a means of digitally viewing all areas of these sites.

The paper will present each of the features of the iBook along with discussion about the choices behind which features were utilised, the process of integrating them and, using feedback gathered from users of the application, their effectiveness in meeting their aim.

UNESCO. 2019. “Mousa, Old Scatness and Jarlshof: the Zenith of Iron Age Shetland.” Accessed August 11, 2020. https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5677/

Callum Scott (University of York)

Hominin dispersal and the Emergence of Human Personality Variation"

Our species’ cognitive diversity is one of our most unique features. Differences in personality are just one example of the wide range of psychological differences between members of our species. The effects on life history caused by personality have been widely researched in psychology, and the evolutionary implications for the individual inferred. Nevertheless, personality is not preserved in the archaeological record, and while particular genes associated with personality traits may have novel global distributions (e.g. DRD4), this provides evidence of the outcomes of evolution and not the processes leading to these distributions. An Agent Based Model was therefore produced to assess how variation in extraversion may have impacted human dispersal out of Africa. This model showed spatiotemporal variation in selection for extraversion. In particular, agents at the forefront of the wave of expansion were more extraverted, while selection for introversion occurred in more densely populated areas.

Panel sessions:

Disrupting the airwaves

Radio broadcasting has a long and distinguished tradition of public history and archaeology programming and innovation. The development and release of Web 2.0 has allowed a new range of communication channels appear that Historians, Archaeologists and the Heritage Sector have quickly adapted for communicating the past. The rise of the podcast in recent years has widened the diversity of listenership and provided opportunity for different voices to be heard. This panel session will see some leaders in the field come together to discuss their approaches to podcasting, their communities and how a disruptive technology has provided a space for their voices.

Speakers:

Tristan Boyle

Alex Fitzpatrick (University of Bradford)

Derek Pitman (Bournemouth University)

Jenny Mathiasson (The C Word: The Conservators' Podcast)

Jan Lewis (Bournemouth University)

Kim Biddulph

Multisensory pasts towards accessible futures

Digital technologies have long been celebrated for allowing us to visualise past places and spaces but more recently there has been a move to embrace technologies which allow for wider sensory experience. With these comes the potential to provide experiences that allow for those with vision or hearing impediments to engage with our work in new and exciting ways. This panel session will discuss multisensory engagements and consider how they can be used to widen access to our understanding of the past.

Speakers:

Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway)

Hannah Platt (Royal Holloway)

Daniel Pett (Fitzwilliam Museum)

Jennifer Wexlar (British Museum)