Prescot Dig

I wanted to write a little blog entry to just let everyone know what we have been doing behind the scenes and also to explain a bit about some of the concepts behind our digital work.

As hopefully everyone knows by now – one of our main aims with the Prescot Street site is to publish the raw data online alongside a growing site narrative. You may have already noticed in other peoples blogs that when they refer to a context or a sample there is hyperlink included that links off to the actual data record in ARK. Whilst useful, hyperlinks are all a bit 1995, so we are using this as an opportunity to play around and develop some different ideas.

You may also have noticed some other cool stuff that people are doing, not least including maps within their blog entries. Of course people are very used to seeing maps all over the internet nowadays, and applications like Google Maps have really shown that NeoGeography is alive and well and accessible to all.

However, what we are doing at Prescot when we include maps in our blog posts is not just presenting a static snapshot of the data – we are showing a link to the actual data itself. So if David updates the GIS whilst you are looking at a blog post then the map itself will change live and infront of your eyes. This is basically a form of Transclusion.

Here’s the map of a nice soakaway transcluded into this page (Context: 666):

This transclusion of the data is not limited to just maps, we can do it with other things as well – such as the matrix of this soakaway:

And also the latest interpretations of the soakaway:

As you can imagine – this is going to become pretty powerful once we start dealing with query results and lists of contexts in larger stratigraphic groups (such as buildings). It will also be an excellent way to organise phasing narrative for instance – the basic phasing narrative can be written as a report entry and then a list of the contexts assigned to that phase (within ARK) can be transcluded directly underneath the article – ensuring that the article is always up-to-date with the latest information.

I am excited to explore the further possibilities of this – particularly as we have developed the ARK code to allow any online resource that can include an HTML