Hello everyone and welcome to the Beacons of the Past Citizen Science LiDAR Portal! Here you will find our 1400 km2 high resolution archaeological LiDAR dataset, embedded in a web map which allows you to view the data along with Aerial Photography and Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 mapping, as well as the 1st Revision Historic Ordnance Survey 6 inch mapping, dating to between the 1860s and 1880s.
The website is still young and evolving, so please do bear with us whilst we iron out any teething issues, and let us know in the Help and Support forum if you come across anything not working properly, or if you have any suggestions for things that can be changed.
Upcoming Changes
We have plenty of plans for things being added in the next few weeks, so to let you know what's coming:
- More LiDAR Visualisations - you currently have the Local Relief Model visualisation. We want more! These take a fair bit of time to process and add on to the server, but "Multi-Directional hillshade" should be with you in the next week or two, and then there will be more to follow.
- Measurement tools - we want you to be able to measure the features you're finding, so we will be adding a little rule tool in the near future.
- Continuing additions to the tutorials, and in particular the "Monument Directory" - I will be continuing to tweak the tutorials a little, add more illustrations, and in particular develop the Monument Directory with lots more images, to help you work out what you're looking at.
- Scheduled Monuments - we will be adding a layer into the portal of Historic England's Scheduled Monuments, so you can have a look at archaeological sites already known, and see what some different archaeological sites look like "in the flesh."
- Enhanced user profiles - currently your user profile doesn't really say anything... we'll be adding in some statistical tracking, so you can see how many things you've found, and there might even be some badges coming your way...
- We will be increasing the amount of zoom you can have on the LiDAR - again this takes a bit of time to generate and upload the imagery, so bare with us, it's coming.
- Ongoing tidying up and minor tweaking of site front end and citizen portal functionality.
- The Review Portal - the next really major step for the website is the opening of the Review Portal - in the next month or two we will start taking applications to join our Reviewer Team - to help us filter through the Citizen Records coming in, and to help us develop records into our high quality Master Database... get practising in the Citizen Portal, and make sure you do the tutorials, because we will want people with a good bit of experience in working with the LiDAR data, the other data sources, and in identifying features.
A quick update for the end of this week:
- The scheduled Monuments layer is now available, so you can go check out how some of the protected sites across the Chilterns look in LiDAR.
- The "delete last point" button should now be working.
- You can now only digitise one polygon per submission.
- The OS layer should no longer be timing out and disappearing.
- A few other minor fixes and tweaks....
Multi-directional hillshade should be coming next week. And we've now hit 200 registered users! Not too shabby. Have a good weekend everyone!
Some really lovely features that our developer Steve Smith has added for you guys this week!
Measuring tool: you'll notice that there is now a ruler symbol beneath the layers list - click this, and then click points, to measure the distance of a line in metres. Hopefully really handy for you to now have a better idea of the scale you are looking at.
Delete polygon: as you are drawing your polygon around a feature, you can always stop drawing by clicking the "abandon polygon" button, or by pressing the escape key. However, before, once you had finished a polygon (by clicking "complete polygon" or double clicking), you were then stuck with it. Now, you can click the pointer icon, then select your polygon by clicking on it, and you can then click "delete polygon," so you can start again afresh. I will add these instructions to the "Quick Start" tutorial today.
Let us know if you have any problems, down in the "Help & Support" forum.
Multi-directional hillshade
A quick note - there is now a "test" layer for the multi-directional hillshade on the portal. Full layer coming later this week, now that we've got that one working!
This will have 20 "pyramids" of zoom, in comparison to the 18 that you currently have on the Local Relief Model, so you'll be able to get in even closer. In time we will also add these further two levels of zoom to the LRM as well.
A brief new blog post can be found here:
https://chilternsbeacons.org/wp/2019/09/04/3-weeks-in/
Plenty more coming!
Multi-directional hillshade is now live! After 8 days of tile-building.....! You can zoom in to your heart's content as well.
You now have a grid ref read-out tool!
The X/Y/compass-y icon next to the ruler: click it, click on what you're looking at, and you can then copy and paste out of the box to the forum, so other people can find that feature you're confused about too.
You can also now pan the map (including whilst drawing a polygon!) using the arrow keys. Hurrah!
New blog post up! Some early details on the "Review Phase" of the project. Plenty more news to come about it soon.
https://chilternsbeacons.org/wp/2019/10/30/the-grand-plan/
For those of you resident in the vicinity of the Chilterns, there is still time to sign up to come in person to some "Reviewer" training, being held on Friday 29th November, 10.00 – 15.00 in Chinnor. The sign up form can be found here: https://share.hsforms.com/12PunJVoPSzq6QPWWvkJizQ2orgq
Deadline for sign ups is 20th Nov, after which all who are successful with getting places will be informed.
A new blog post on the question of "how young can archaeology be?" and what we want to record. A question I've been asked a few times!
https://chilternsbeacons.org/wp/2019/11/22/archaeology-within-memory/
(Warning - may leave you none-the-wiser...)
Some news on progress with the site:
- User statistics - we have been working hard on bringing you some statistics, so you can see just how much time you're
wastinginvesting in finding archaeology! (We will leave it up to you whether you want to share this figure with your significant others.) Very soon you will have your own user profile page where you can see this. In part this is just for fun, with "badges" to be earned for different milestones on the website. In part however this ties in with our plans to start the "Review Phase" of the project - all of your Citizen Science records will start to be reviewed very soon, giving you feedback on your findings, whether you have spotted a real thing or not, and what it might be. Your user profile page will have a summary of all of your records. - The second part of this, and the thing dominating our development time right now, is the creation of the Review Portal. We hope to start testing of this next week, with our first training session in how to use it being held next Friday. So hopefully very soon you will be getting some feedback on your records, and we will be starting to build our detailed Master Database!
A fun little change that you can now access: you now have a "My Account" page, if you hover over the "Hi %Username%" button.
Click this, and you'll get to see some lovely (horrifying?) statistics about time and work you've done on the portal. You'll see that you now have badges for achieving certain things (can you get them all?). And you can see a list of all of your "Citizen Records" and their status in the Review process! As you might know, Reviewing is ongoing, so hopefully over the next few months your list will start to get lots of information added.
Let me know if you have any problems, suggestions, or if you have ideas for new badges I can add!
The first new blog post in far too long!
https://chilternsbeacons.org/wp/2020/04/17/an-update-at-last/
Let me know if there are particular things you'd like me to write about... will try and do these more regularly, I promise!
Just a quick note that the issues we were having with the website's Mailhost, refusing to send emails for registrations and password resets, is now sorted. In theory, we have normality. (Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.)
Couple of small updates to the Citizen Portal: on your My Account Page (accessed by hovering over the "Hi [your username]" in the top right) your list of citizen records now scrolls, so those of you with lots can now see them all.
In addition, the individual Citizen Record pages (opened by clicking on the 8 character "Record ID" hyperlink, e.g. 1s7o49jt) now have grid references, so you can find them again. (Appreciate this still isn't the easiest - we're looking at whether we can jump straight to them on the map.)
