Awards Season
It’s the time of year when bloggers thoughts turn to annual awards. When they’re done badly they’re grating bouts of mutual backslapping but done well they offer an opportunity to highlight things you may have missed. Cliopatria has opened its annual awards nominations. I’ll be doing my usual annual posts on the subject, but they’ll be a bit thinner than usual as I haven’t really been following a lot of blogging for a lot of the year. For some topics I may hold back to see what’s been nominated.
Also open till the first of December is voting on the BAJR award. The award recognises “…websites showing excellence in Innovation, Education, Design and Content in Archaeology and Heritage.” and it’s another example of an award that might mean something. The Frameworks T5 website would be my first pick. There’s a huge amount of information from the dig which you can browse via a free GIS – though you need Windows which is a pain. However, without the nominations I wouldn’t have heard of Lockton and Levisham which is a very interesting website about a local community project in Yorkshire. It’s a great model for similar projects to follow.
I also like CLASP, which is another community project in Northamptonshire. I had heard of this one because they run the Whitehall Villa dig which I keep meaning to try and see each summer. If you want to see what you can do as an amateur in British archaeology, then CLASP is a good place to start. The fourth nomination is Reading University’s Silchester site. Simply saying that it’s good would seem like damning it with faint praise, but it’s still way ahead in terms of informing people what their field school is doing in comparison to many other universities.
Whichever of the four win, I think it will be good website to highlight as an example of what can be done with the web.
