ENGLAND: THE OTHER WITHIN

Creating the web pages for the Other Within project

A personal view

Alison Petch,
Researcher 'The Other Within' project

Introduction

In retrospect, the Relational Museum research team wished that the website for that project had been created early on in the project and continually enhanced so that new information could be made available to other researchers as it was prepared. Instead, it was created quite hurriedly towards the end of the project (because additional funding and personnel became available from external sources), from data which had not been specifically produced for the web. Despite the relatively short development period, the members of the team were very pleased with the design and with the amount of data that it was possible to make publically available via the site. David Harris was the designer for that site and both of the researchers worked on material for the site (Frances Larson (née Knight) and Alison Petch, the author of this article). One of the aspects of the project which was not shown well by the website was the work on network analysis which the researchers carried out with David Zeitlyn, then at the University of Kent. [3] Given time (and a lot of hard work on the part of the web designer), it would have been possible to do greater justice to this and other aspects of the research carried out during the project. The team for example prepared some specimen networks which, if they could have been animated for the web would have proved a very interesting resource.

If a project website can be established early in a research project and enhanced as new material is unearthed it allows the website to be a resource used by the creators as well as other scholars. When an application was made by Chris Gosden to the ESRC for funding for a second project to look into the English collections at the Museum in more detail, it was agreed that a website should be an integral part of the project, and one of its major outcomes. This author was charged with leading this part of the project, whilst the second researcher (originally slated to be Fran Larson, until she left to live in Sweden: later replaced by Chris Wingfield) concentrated on other final outcomes with Chris Gosden. Both workers carried out detailed research across the breadth of the project, coordinating and coalescing their findings as appropriate as the project went on, both researchers have contributed many pages towards the website as have many museum staff and other colleagues, students and visiting researchers.

During the lifetime of the project the website has constantly evolved, growing a great deal after the departure of the first project web designer who set up a fool-proof way to allow the researchers to upload new webpages and images without needing to change the overall design of each page. Such a resource would be invaluable for all researchers as it allows data which is not used in the final synthesised outcomes of the project, but which is interesting, to be made publicly available. The way it has been set up frees the researchers from technical involvement but maximises the ability to put data onto the web in an efficient and quick manner. For more information about the technical aspects of the site please contact the Museum's webmaster.

The first web-designer was David Harris (who left in June 2008 for another job), who also created the Relational Museum site. This time he was able to influence the development of the website much more, and even possibly the direction of some of the research. David designed the project logo and the overall look of the site and did the first mapping for the object data. The design was always implemented after discussion with the whole team. The team also agreed to the overall basic structure of the site, with five main areas:

• Data about the object and photographic collections from England in the Pitt Rivers Museum, also detailed information about all the individuals connected with the collections
• Mapping the object collections
• Statistical analysis
• Object biographies
• Themed articles

Three months before the project ended a new designer, Dan Burt, started working on the site, tidying up some loose ends and making sure that the site worked fully. He had to spend a long time cleaning data and software to ensure David's mapping method worked as well as possible and he also prepared some other innovative maps for the collections. Both alternative mapping systems were made available to users. The team is considering writing in more detail about the problems experienced when trying to compile maps for the collections.

Structure of the Other Within website

1. Detailed data about the collections
The databases are (or rather, by the time of reading, hopefully will be) available in two formats, one which allows specific elements of the databases to be interrogated (this was available at the time of writing) and another which allows free text searches of all the database entries (which is more like the way the museum's collections management data is also handled). These two formats allow the data to be accessed and used in slightly different ways. All the data on the various databases was either prepared by members of the Other Within team, or prepared by all the museum staff, but 'cleaned' by the author, to ensure accuracy and consistency. All the geographical provenancing was checked by the author and Chris Wingfield to ensure that mapping [q.v.] worked properly.

2. Mapping the collections

The major problem with mapping the collections turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be geographical provenancing of the artefacts. Some artefacts do not have detailed geographical provenance, and as far as detailed mapping is concerned these artefacts could be discounted. For all other objects Chris and Alison had to review the geographical provenance of each artefact to ensure that it matched the gazeteer that lay behind the mapping. Dan Burt would later also have to clean data to ensure that this would work. The team agreed that the most appropriate measure to use for each artefact was not the contemporary local authority system (which is now too diffuse and confusing, with single unitary authorities, large cities and large rural counties all mixing together) but the ceremonial counties which accorded, the team believes, much more to how most English residents think about the place they live. In addition the gazeteer would only map those villages it recognized and names had to be completely consistent for it to map them successfully. When data is added to the museum's collections management system (from which the data used on the website was derived) the geographical provenance is not currently checked to this degree so that a great deal of work has had to be carried out throughout the project. This has meant that the mapping has not been able to be used by the team as a research resource quite as much as would have been liked. The team believes, however, that this is an innovative presentation of data about a collection and that this research project was one of the first to do this for a museum collection of this magnitude. The mapping is a supreme visualisation tool, allowing the collections to be explored in a way that was never before possible. It is also a very user-friendly way of presenting data, particularly for museum visitors / people interested in artefacts from their own home town which is an added benefit.One of the principal areas that interested the team was to map the English collections, so that the geographical provenances of all the English collections in the Museum could be examined much more closely. At the date of writing there are still some bugs in the mapping system but David, before he left, had devised an intriguing and useful way of performing this tricky but useful method of examining the data. Dan Burt is currently working on fixing the final solution for the mapping [January - March 2009] and also producing an alternative mapping system. Another aspect which the team was interested in mapping was the time profile of the English collections. Each artefact was given a time period for example 1500-1599 or Neolithic, these were then put onto a map of England and animated with Flash to make a number of different visual presentations.

3. Statistical analysis

As with the Relational Museum website statistical analysis of the collections were prepared. All statistical information was then made accessible via the website. The statistics were created at the beginning of the project in order that the highlights of the collections could be identified, and also so that the research topics could be identified. However, they profile the collections very well and are offered via the website for other scholars to review and examine.

4. Object biographies
'Object biographies' are a series of web pages about particular English artefacts in the collections. All objects in the museum have a life (or series of different lives): they are made, used and then come into the museum. Members of the wider Other Within project team and other members of the museum staff, students (and ex-students) in the department and other interested parties were asked to write articles about an English object that interested them. There was no set format but everyone was asked to identify the object by accession number, whether it was on display, and outline data from the museum's documentation before discussing the aspects of the object that appealled most to them.

5. Themed articles
One of the things that was not possible during the preparation of the Relational Museum website was for the two researchers to write material for the web (because of a limited amount of time left on the project). A major innovation on the Other Within site was to produce a series of themed articles specifically for the web on a number of key topics for the project. A wide range of topics are covered and enormous amounts of raw research data found, or prepared by the researchers is given on the site.

These articles involved varying degrees of data and information. The Oxfordshire webpages examined not only the Pitt Rivers Museum's collections from Oxfordshire in detail but also those of the Oxfordshire County Museums Service social history collections and the Ashmolean Museum's social history collections. [4] These are likely to be the largest collections of social history artefacts from the county in the UK. Work on this section of the website is still on-going at the time of writing. It is also hoped to include data about the Museum's archaeological collections from the county, though time will unfortunately not allow a similar joint exercise with the OXCMS and the Ashmolean Museum. [5]

I also wrote an article, or rather a series of pages, on Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers' excavations in various parts of England and the archaeological artefacts from these excavations that were donated to Oxford, this enabled me to make publicly available a great deal of data which had been produced over a number of research projects to date.

One of the interesting things about the English collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum is the number of women who donated material, particularly in the 1940s. Two of these women were examined in detail: Ellen Ettlinger (1902-1994) who donated a series of photographs / catalogue cards (written by the author) and Estella Canziani (1887-1964), who donated a large collection including many English artefacts, written by Chris Wingfield. A large sub-section of the site is devoted to the study of technologies and materials at the Pitt Rivers Museum from 1884 until today. The study of these subjects is probably one of the central roles of the Museum and many staff and volunteers have engaged in varying degrees of in-depth research. This is the first time that this subject has been reviewed in detail by the Museum.

The themed articles are therefore a mixture of raw data and more worked, nuanced research material.

Acknowledgements
Writing this webpage (and doing the web research and creation) would not have been possible without a large number of other people: I could not possibly name check them all but here are some (in alphabetical order) Elin Bornemann, Jeremy Coote, Sandra Dudley, Maria Economou, Anthony Ettlinger, Haas Ezzet, Chris Gosden, David Harris, David Herman, Jason Baird Jackson, Fran Larson, Jacqueline Simpson, Roger Street, Chris Wingfield, David Zeitlyn.

Further Reading

Alison Petch, with David Zeitlyn, Frances Larson 2007. 'Social networks in the Relational Museum: the case of the Pitt Rivers Museum' Journal of Material Culture vol. 12 (3) November 2007 pp. 211-239
Jacqueline Simpson 'Ellen Ettlinger, 1902-1994' Folklore, Vol. 106, (1995): 86

This webpage was written in December 2008, enhanced and updated in January / February 2009 and put on-line on 3 February 2009, and shortened considerably on 16 November 2009.