We were intrigued by the new Geocommons applications Finder! and Maker! and having posted earlier about them, we thought we would take them for a spin.
Since all the data at Geocommons is made available under a Creative Commons license, we decided to use the publically available data from Framework Archaeology's excavations at Perry Oaks which is itself under a Creative Commons licence (albeit of a more limited kind).
So how did we get on? You can find our map here.
Well, the first reaction was:
My! It's just as well the excavation was so large, or we wouldn't be able to see it
Just so you know, the distance between the eastern and western edges of the excavation is approximately one kilometre and it is just part of one the largest excavations in the UK. Hopefully with time, GeoCommons will allow us to zoom in to the same extent we can on Googlemaps and Virtual Earth.
The zoom limits stymied the initial plan which was to display the raw data as a series of points. Since it was clear that the plan was never going to work, we had to process the source data so that we could use a chloropleth to tell the story.
More processing (we decided on a manual assignment to five categories for the ratio values of Bronze Age pottery to Middle Iron Age pottery ) was required to take advantage of the exceptional filtering capability that is available in the Maker! application. For our map, moving the filter slider from the right to the left limits the display to the Bronze Age pottery distribution while moving in the opposite direction highlights the Middle Iron Age distribution. This is very handy as it gives a sense of the time dimension to the data. Finally, a certain amount of simplification had to be carried out.
Besides the maps, the metadata tools are strong and I particularly liked the opportunity to link to the Framework Archaeology metadata entries on GIGateway and the download location for the source data.
All the processing sounds like a right pain, but I think it highlights one of the main strengths behind the Maker! application and the design choices its authors have made. Forcing us to focus on producing a more cartographic representation may just have helped us see something new in our data - a possible insight that has nothing to do with settlement nucleation.