On the subject of the use of 'cultural' names as periods, we have just had a document (about a site in rural south Herts) submitted with a map using the term 'Imperial' as one of the periods represented. When asked what this meant, the answer came that it is '18th century'.

The culprit was not advised to mug up a bit on British history, but was told that if he means 18th century, he should say so.

 

Any other good ones people have come across?

Isobel

 

 

 

Just when you thought it was dying down, I get back from holiday. I was going to let it be (as it's a fairly insoluble problem  mapping vague periods/dates to database specificity) but as Somerset got mentioned, I thought I'd chip in.

 

We had a long think about this when setting up our HG link and took the view that we had to be inclusive and try to give users everything that they could want, even if it meant too much. As far as I remember, if you ask for Roman you get what we have tagged as Roman but if you enter dates, it tries to match these to our period terms. [We store all our period information in the same way as everything else, as a tree. In this system individual years are just periods as well].

 

So (I've not checked this) Crispin's searches find the 38 Late Neo sites, the 51 EBA sites but when he enters the date range he gets all 'Prehistoric' returned as any one of those could lie within his range.

 

The underlying 'problem' is, as someone mentioned, the use of 'cultural' names as periods. There will be Roman remains from before AD43 and in Devon they have 'prehistoric' round houses built over the ruins of a Roman fort. Some will say this is the reason for using absolute dates - but we just don't have them. What date do you put on a prehistoric-looking defended enclosure that has produced Roman pottery? It's probably early medieval ...

Chris Webster
Historic Environment Record
Somerset County Council
Somerset Heritage Centre
Brunel Way
Taunton
TA2 6SF

01823 347434

Online HER: www.somerset.gov.uk/her

 

From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Crispin Flower
Sent: 14 August 2013 17:43
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Period LUT

I’ve just done some testing on the Heritage Gateway, and unfortunately discovered that the Period searching is not consistently applied across all providers…

Resource	Late Neolithic (2900-2200BC)	Early BA (2600-1600BC)	2400-2300 BC
Pastscape	403	844	0
National Trust	5380	5683	5269
Viewfinder	608	610	610
Devon & Dartmoor	12212	12214	7907
Somerset	38	51	22394

Clearly the Pastscape search is returning only records entirely within the period, while NT, Devon and Viewfinder return ones that overlap the period. Hard to say what Somerset is doing – possibly only parsing the period text, which is not present on the last one.

Now that’s how to confuse users!

 

Also, the results for Pastscape from the HG are different from the results on Pastscape itself – cripes!

 

Back to the day job,

Crispin

 

 

I think that you should be aiming for something a bit wider than this.  If you only obtain feedback from Users you are largely going to be getting evidence from people who have managed to get their heads round the system.  I would have thought there should also be some sort of consultation of people who are interested in the historic environment but haven’t used Heritage Gateway.  I wouldn’t claim to be an expert but approaching people at Archaeology Days, Local History Fairs etc and going into Schools would seem to be the sort of thing.

 

Mike

 

 

 

 

Dear all

 

As part of our plans to redesign the Heritage Gateway, we are intending to obtain feedback from all users.

 

Best wishes

Mandy

Mandy Roberts

Heritage Gateway and Access to Designation Data Manager

Telephone: 01793 414939 / 07584 202509

 

From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Driscoll
Sent: 14 August 2013 16:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Period LUT

To all,

 

I have been following this with interest and I note in a number of emails reference to how users (with specific references to the public) will expect or want things to work.  Has anyone actually asked them about the heritage gateway, how they use it, the problems they have encountered etc?  I am thinking here not of a HER officer point of view but of the public. 

 

It seems to me that if we are arguing over the correct way of defining a lut on the heritage gateway we should not assume that a user will act in a particular way.  It may be that consultation with users has occurred and I am just unaware, but if not, perhaps it would enlighten us.      

 

Paul

 

 

Phil,

 

I still think that this is the wrong approach.  No one is saying that absolute dates can be put on periods but it still remains the fact that if you search for Roman sites you expect to get sites which may span the Roman period and not a lot of extraneous data about obviously prehistoric and early medieval sites. 

Hence I have just searched for Roman sites within 1km of Winchester on Heritage Gateway.  This brings up 231 sites.  When I searched on a narrower date range of AD44-AD409 I get 166 sites so presumably 65 sites (over 25%) are totally extraneous.  I have been a strong supporter of Heritage Gateway and although I don’t get a lot of time to do outreach work I do demonstrate it every year at the Wolverhampton Local History Fair and give out EH leaflets.  The feedback I get is that members of the public do not on the whole find it easy to use – indeed I did at one time go so far as to write a short ‘how to use’ leaflet.  I suspect that if I tried to explain to them that when they searched for Roman sites they would get non-Roman ones as well I would soon lose their interest.

 

Regards,

 

Mike

 

 

 

 

Hi Folks,

I fear DSU may have been slightly misrepresented on this issue. Our stance is that the date ranges should continue to overlap. This reflects reality and the uncertainty as to dating particularly for the prehistoric periods.

 

The issue is not one of dates as everybody agrees that the Romans didn't arrive en masse everywhere at once like some proto-cyberman invasion. It is more to do with how the search is constructed.

 

If you are searching for ROMAN sites then you enter a search for ROMAN. The search should then look for a period field which has the term ROMAN in it. This would only return ROMAN sites regardless of the date ranges the individual resources have associated with the label.

 

A search for a date range should bring back anything where the entire date range falls within the search, eg. a search on 43AD - 410AD should return a site indexed as 2nd Century AD (ie. 101-200) but not a site which was indexed as 5th Century (ie. 401-500).

 

5th Century Roman sites would be picked up with a search on ROMAN AND DATE RANGE not ROMAN OR DATE RANGE.

 

ROMAN OR DATE RANGE would pick up any site indexed as ROMAN or where the date range is 401-500 so would retrieve early medieval sites as well as every ROMAN site.

 

If the search mechanism is configured correctly it doesn't matter what dates are associated with the period, thus facilitating regionality and the inclusion of different periods as used by some HERs (Industrial Revolution and Empire have both been mentioned to me).

 

As to confusing the public I suggest we explain our search mechanisms better on the various websites.

 

The only alternative is to identify the exact day and time when the last Roman left these shores or the last stone tool was set aside in favour of a bronze one and be precise as possible.

 

Phil

 

 

 

From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Wardle
Sent: 14 August 2013 13:30
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Period LUT

Although I accept that the beginnings and endings of archaeological periods are (and always have been) fuzzy. I’m with Mike on this.

 

It’s always best to try to avoid confusion on the behalf of members of the public.

 

Chris

 

 

Sarah,

 

I don’t agree with this I’m afraid.  I’m sure we all recognise that one particular period did not end and a new one start at a particular date.  However the overlapping of periods on Heritage Gateway causes unnecessary problems which could be easily resolved without need for an awkward work around by searching on AD409 rather than AD410 etc.  Martin Newman’s e-mail seemed to suggest that DSU had accepted this so Heritage Gateway and DSU would seem to be out of step on this.  I think that this is an important point which should be discussed more widely than on HBSMR Users so I have copied in HER Forum also to give all HER Officers an opportunity to comment.

 

Regards,

 

Mike

 

 

 

 

 

 

From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dingwall, Lucie
Sent: 14 August 2013 10:27
To: 'List for users of the HBSMR software'
Subject: Re: [hbsmrusers] Period LUT

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