 Felly, ydych yn ymdweud y cyfnodol a y gallwn ymdweud i ddweud hwnnw? Yn da wedi'u clywed y cwestiynau, ymddech chi'n bwynt i'r teimlo cyfnodol fel y bydd y cyfnodol ac yn ymdweud y bydd ymdweud ymdweud, yma y tro cyfnodol yn cyfyrdd ar gyfer ar celfoedd. Ymdweud ei wneud y celfoedd yn ddechrau o'u cyfrifio'r sgwm. Cfnodol A i gwybod yw'r cyfrifio allwch i'r cyfrifio'r sgwm ar gyfer y pabell i Llyfrarch. company B is typing theirs up on Word and Excel, company C's archaeological findings are all put into read-only PDFs and their surveying data is saved as SVG files and company D of course prefers CAD files. Now all four of these companies are doing the exact same job with completely the same purpose but when they're sharing their results these different data formats mean it's a little bit like they're speaking different languages. And this is where we're at without data standardisation. It's difficult to do anything with one another's results unless we translate them all into the same output format and standardise the data. And when this data is standardised it brings a lot of significant advantages to each company. The first and most obvious of these is collaboration. With large infrastructure projects like HS2 collaboration is important. You need a lot of archaeologists and sometimes one company can't provide all of them. And if you've got data standardisation between the two companies working together then they can easily share the data as they're recording it and also easily share it with the clients and other interested third parties. Standardisation also benefits communication between all of us. Everyone here will have been working in a company where you've been doing an open area site and you've inherited that from a different company who was doing the trenching evaluation. And if that trenching evaluation, if all the data from that was put in the same format that you use in your own company it would make everything that much easier to get started quicker and to make sure you're not digging in the wrong place. And I know that last bit sounds a bit silly, but a friend of mine who's a supervisor once spent several weeks on an open area site and it was a Roman site not really finding many finds until they got a really significant small find at the bottom of a Roman pit which was a 2008 prescription bottle. And that point was when they realised that actually there had been archaeologically excavated in exactly the same area before by a different company. Now if there was standardised data and it was easily accessible these kind of time vampires just wouldn't happen to us. So it can really benefit communication. And lastly reinterpretation, we've talked a lot about archiving and really the whole point of archiving is so that future archaeologists and researchers can continue the work we've done and build upon it or add future insights to it to learn more from it. But in reality it's quite difficult for that to happen. If a lot of our data is on paper and it's in Leararch files well you think about how many context sheets there are on a site for example that's a lot of raw data and a lot of paper that no one realistically is going to flick through. If this data is saved digitally it's better but if it's not standardised it's still difficult to import into your own working practices and get going again. But if we can have data standardisation and I'm going to be saying those two words a lot today if I haven't already if we had data standardisation it would allow us to more seamlessly progress the work of others and push our research further. There's also the issue of our unity as an industry. Now without data standardisation we're all speaking in different languages and each one of us has our own small voice and we're talking over each other. Trying to lobby the government on key issues that affect everybody or getting the public to sit up and take notice is pretty difficult but if we standardise our data then boom! Our findings gain greater significance and we can speak together with one loud voice on issues that affect all of us. This gets people to listen and this is how change happens. By the way standardising data doesn't just create a big speech bubble it creates big data. Now what is big data essentially is when quantities of data are lumped together into groups that are so big that normal human beings, we can't really make sense of it, it's just too much but if all this data is standardised as big data then we can use software to spot the trends that are revealed throughout these trends and patterns, all kinds of things we can't see if we're trying to flick through context sheets. So big data is extremely important for our understanding of archaeology and it's also the evidence we use to justify our industry-wide needs and discoveries. Speaking of discoveries, big data can help us better identify and track large-scale archaeological phenomena and also trends such as changing environmental circumstances, population migrations, the growth and flow of trade and the evolution of technologies and fashions. In fact there's so much more that we have yet to learn or even know we need to learn because we haven't got the big data there available and it's not standardised. So there are loads of reasons why we'd all benefit from data standardisation but if the benefits are really that obvious, why hasn't it happened yet for archaeology? Well actually there have been plenty of moments where we have been standardising our outputs but it tends to look like this. We continue recording using the systems that we always have done and then we will export our stuff in our preferred formats and then once a job's finished a client or interested parties come back and say right can you standardise that please so we go back and we spend time and we standardise it and then it happens again and again and again. It's complicated, it's laborious, it's repetitive and basically it's by retroactively standardising our output it's like we're playing a giant game of whack-a-mole right except every whack takes several weeks and can cost up to a few thousand pounds. Understandably that is a game nobody wants to play. There is a better alternative and an easier alternative to standardising the output every time. And that's standardising the input. If everybody was to be using a unified standardised digital recording system then the output just takes care of itself every single time. Seems simple but as we learnt it really really isn't. There are lots of complex reasons why archaeology hasn't had one of these yet and that's a whole other presentation. So we're really just going to look at a couple of the main ones and the first is that the kind of software companies that could develop something really powerful for us they're just not interested. And you actually, it sounds harsh but you can't blame them right archaeology is seen as a comparatively small and heavily fragmented industry. Also our needs are incredibly subject specific and complex and they're almost impenetrable to an outsider unless you have to speak for a long time and even then they'll say okay how long will it take us, what's a market cost, what's a benefit. This is why big companies aren't really going to make something for us. But we all kind of know that which is why we've been seeing something pretty exciting over the last five years and that's that some of the bigger archaeological units have been developing solutions. Now as someone who loves archaeology and is a massive nerd and loves tech this has been so cool to see. I've been looking at all the different sea for presentations every time someone shares about their recording system we're glued to it, we plug it into the TV, watch on a big screen and it's fantastic what these companies have been doing and they've really been pioneering and leading the way for everyone else. I really believe that a rising tide lifts all boats or something to that effect and basically by these companies pushing digital recording it's got everybody to turn and look at the benefits of it because it really is the future of our industry so that should absolutely be applauded. But there are issues with some of the things that we've been developing. Now big sweeping statements here so don't worry but some of the software that we're using to make these solutions that wasn't designed for archaeology at all in fact most of it is office based software and this comes with intrinsic limitations. It has challenges in terms of complexity, connectivity and compatibility and again that's another presentation but the limitation of this software is one of the problems with it becoming ubiquitous one hurdle there. Another issue is commercial archaeology itself commercialisation allows companies as individuals to experiment and innovate but if an individual company was to develop a digital recording system that gives a significant competitive advantage for example if it makes our workflow a lot faster and saves a lot of time and make no mistake a good digital recording system absolutely does that. Well there's no incentive to share that because as companies in archaeology everybody survives by the work that they win tenders for so sharing this kind of innovation with competitors doesn't make any business sense again there are cases where this is happening anyway and it's brilliant. So these are two of the bigger problems as well. So what's the solution to each of these? Well in terms of office software being reappropriated and its limitations the solution to that is to code something from the ground up specifically for archaeology and with regards to the competition issues it needs to be done by someone independently. Well the perfect people to do that are big tech companies and unfortunately they're not interested in archaeology and this cycle perpetuates and this is something that I think is responsible for why archaeology as an industry isn't as technologically specific as others we use lots of great technology you know drones, SFM but we don't have any of our own stuff and I think that loop is part of the reason why.