Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

Principal Investigator: Julian Richards, University of York

Co-Investigator:

Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield

Website: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/archaeotools

This two year project builds upon previous ADS work to develop tools (the Common Information Environment - Archaeobrowser project) and will allow archaeologists to discover, share and analyse datasets and legacy publications which have hitherto been very difficult to integrate into existing digital frameworks.

The project will use the techniques of facetted classification, derived from information science and demonstrated in the Archaeobrowser project, to allow users to easily and intuatively navigate the 'three-dimensional space' created by the classification scheme. A map-based interface will be developed to allow the spatial dimension to be best explored. Secondly the project will employ natural language processing (NLP) to allow automated tools to search within documents for terms which are part of known classification schemes, adding them to the facetted index, and providing much deeper and richer access to unpublished archaeological literature.

At the end of the project we intend to have created a major sustainable resource for archaeological research and made it available to all users via the ADS. It will also be possible to make recommendations for the future format and indexing of grey literature, and to draw lessons for the wider humanities e-Science community.

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