Digital Dig Team
Straight from the trenches and onto our website: we're developing a new, improved way of sharing our research in real time.
Digital Dig Team allows all of our on-site discoveries to go straight from the trenches and onto our website: everything that we find on our digs is uploaded immediately onto DDT, enabling us to share our research in real time for anyone to view. It holds our raw scientific data and breaks down barriers to further research and study by opening our work to a worldwide audience. Our people make our projects and this is at the core of DDT alongside the data.
DDT was launched in 2014 at our Leiston Abbey dig and has been at the heart of all of our field projects, instrumental in communicating what happens on site to the wider world. It builds audiences, enables public participation and improves research by introducing a born-digital archive that is instantly accessible via open-access on a dedicated website and published to social profiles of all project participants.
DigVentures’ community is at the core of everything we do and DDT is a cornerstone of our engagement with that community. That is why we decided to invest in a huge system upgrade to ensure that we build on that relationship and move it to the next level. We are embarking on a collaborative effort with a number of different project partners to develop new ideas and concepts that will change how we use DDT to digitally bring together the wider world and the archaeology we uncover.
The major conceptual changes we are bringing to the system include:
- Design Foundations – we are re-designing the user experience from the ground up. From field recording to crowd accessibility, user-friendly design consistency will be central to how anyone experiences DDT.
- Macro-Site Concept – we are moving away from the microsite concept to a centralised design where all of our projects; past, present and future, exist within a single integrated and searchable relational database.
- Interfaces – the new DDT will be developed with our own unique API, allowing us to make decisions and be adjustable in how we interface with our community. DDT will not only plug-in to our main website, but will ultimately also have the capability to become an offline mobile application.
With the inception of new concepts and designs that interface with our community more broadly than ever before, the upgraded DDT will boost the crowd’s digital experience of archaeology with DigVentures, making it more open, accessible and sustainable than ever before.
