Profile
Biography
Katie is the Collections Development Manager for the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), her main role is to develop and promote ADS digital preservation services across the UK archaeology community.
katie is responsible for a team of eight digital archivists and the ADS User Support Assistant and coordinates all collections development and archive activities for the ADS. Katie is also responsible for the ADS charging policy and negotiating contracts for larger projects, such as large infrastructure projects including HS2. Katies role also includes the project management of internal and external IT development projects and she is certified in Agile Project Management.
Prior to her role as Collections Development Manager of the ADS Katie was the Communications and Access Manager for the ADS where she was responsbale for promoting the ADS across the archaeological community; this included undertaking overall responsibility for ADS’ user services and outreach activities.
Katie is interested in enhancing the awareness, access and sustainability of archaeological knowledge through digital media.
Prior to joining the ADS Katie completed a BA in Archaeology and Ancient History at Newcastle University followed by a MA in Landscape Archaeology and GIS. Katie then undertook an AHRC funded PhD at Newcastle University entitled ‘Rural Byzantine landscapes and societies: new approaches to characterisation and analysis’. This thesis applied a unique combination of archaeological theory and original methodological approaches to existing and newly created data, to analyse space as an expression of social identity with the aim of improving understanding of the interplay between Byzantine rural society and eastern Mediterranean landscapes.
Katie also has a wide range of archaeological experience built over the last ten years supervising and managing archaeological excavations on multi-period sites ranging from Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall to Kilise Tepe in Turkey. Katie’s most recent field work was project managing a surface survey for the Pisidia Survey Project in Turkey.
Research
Projects
Past Projects
ArchAIDE
(ARCHaelogical Automatic Interpretation and Documentation of cEramics) is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and aims to create a new system for the automatic recognition of archaeological pottery from excavations around the world. ArchAIDE will develop a new app meant to serve the global practice of archaeology, using the latest automatic image recognition technology to aid in the identification of ceramics. Currently, the characterisation and classification of ceramics is carried out manually, through the expertise of specialists and the use of analogue catalogues held in archives and libraries. The goal of ArchAIDE is to optimise and economise this process, making knowledge accessible wherever archaeologists are working.
NEARCH
NEARCH (New scenarios for a community-involved archaeology) is a new project funded under the European Union (EU) culture programme. The project will run for 5 years from autumn 2013 and follows on from the EU-supported ACE project, which identified a cultural crisis and a crisis of values and ideas that outlined the agenda of European Modernity and made it a reference for the rest of the world. NEARCH aims to assess the crisis implications in the fields of Archaeology and Heritage, and to propose new ways of working and interacting. The project also explores the different dimensions of public participation as well as the multi-scalar significance of archaeological heritage intertwined with different processes underway in today's Europe.
DADAISM
The DADAISM (Digging into Archaeological Data and Image Search Metadata) project brought together researchers from the diverse fields of archaeology, human computer interaction, image processing, image search and retrieval, and text mining to create a rich interactive system to address the problems of researchers finding images relevant to their research. DADAISM worked to transform the way in which archaeologists interact with online image collections. It deployed user-centred design methodologies to create an interactive system that went beyond current systems for working with images, to support archaeologists’ tasks of finding, organising, relating and labelling images, as well as other relevant sources of information, such as grey literature documents.
PhD Research
Rural Byzantine Landscapes and Societies: New Approaches to Characterisation and Analysis
This research analysed space as an expression of social identity, with the aim of improving understanding of the interplay between Byzantine rural society and eastern Mediterranean landscapes. This research pursues the concept that space can be used to express cultural identity and explores Byzantine cosmology and social dynamics by analysing the spatial composition of the landscape. To achieve this a unique combination of archaeological theory and original methodological approaches were applied to existing and newly created data. The heart of this research was a detailed historic analysis of the spatial composition of the settlements and landscapes of two contrasting case studies in the eastern Mediterranean (Pisidia, Turkey and Troodos, Cyprus). This analysis combined retrogressive landscape analysis, settlement mapping and Historic Landscape Characterisation with the results of archaeological surface survey. This was an innovative approach that has not been attempted before in historic landscape analysis.
