ieldran: The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Mapping Project
Creators
Overview
The goal of ieldran: The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Mapping Project is to display all burials in England that date from the mid-5th to early 7th centuries CE with relevant information about each location. While there are numerous studies that have covered this period, there are no open access or shared databases of sites. With this in mind ieldran, meaning ‘ancestors’ in Old English, was created to provide an online geospatial database of all excavated cemeteries from Early Anglo-Saxon England.
About Katy and Matt’s entry
Ieldran aspires to be a digital ‘sum of all knowledge’ of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. While these sites have long been subjects of archaeological investigation, the majority remain inaccessible and isolated, particularly for researches without access to UK-based resources and collections. Meyers and Austin’s work is a gift to the research community, collating all published research on every cemetery site (under creative commons license, no-less). For the first time these important sites can be directly compared, cross-referenced and queried – by anyone. Their work opens up this ‘buried’ subject to unexpected and excited scholarship and creative work.
The Visualisation
Paradata
Judges’ Comments
The judges were absolutely in awe of how innovative Stu’s project was. They revelled in the opportunity to engage with the past through new media-forms, distribution platforms and senses and commented that this was a project that truly embodied the spirit of the Heritage Jam by providing a thoroughly impressive, novel and engaging way to interact with museums and collections. In addition to this the judges felt that the paradata provided was of an exemplary standard – indeed the only complaint that could be levelled at either the project or the paradata was that the judges wanted to know even more about how it works and to try it out for themselves! Due to the truly innovative nature of the project, the high technical capacity demonstrated in creation and implementation and the thorough nature of the paradata the judges decided to award this project the highly-commended individual award.