The construction of a metro line below Amsterdam’s IJ waterway in the early 2000s offered archeologists a rare opportunity to delve into the material history of this trading city founded on geologically volatile waterways. The Amstel river turned out to be a remarkable repository for objects discarded by people living in the area over four millennia.
Working with construction engineers as the line was built, the Dutch team retrieved and catalogued 700,000 objects. Around 11,000 are presented in an illustrated catalogue, called Stuff, and 20,000 can be browsed on the Below the Surface website.
The site is just a list of images and descriptions of objects, but it puts most major museums’ online catalogues to shame. With the most recently dated finds presented first, scrolling down takes you into the past, bottoming out with fossils, bits of bone and sharpened flints. Clicking on an object brings up a clear image, with details of the find’s function and context.
Adding order to this mammoth list for experts and amateurs alike, sub-categories allow you to filter and browse chronologically through tobacco pipes, toy kitchen equipment and the pathos of centuries worth of keys dropped in the water; games and recreation presents a 21st-century Pokémon Flippo and a 13th-century bone from a pig that was used as a whirligig.
It brings together functionally similar objects from across centuries and has echoes of the artist Mark Dion’s 1999 work, Tate Thames Dig, in which he performed an archeological dig outside Tate Britain in London and displayed the items found in a cabinet. Users can create their own galleries of finds and arrange them in attractive patterns, rather than boring grids.
For data geeks, the information is downloadable as a CSV file – another practice that major museums would do well to follow. The sheer volume of finds and simplicity of the presentation has generated international press coverage. It feels like a small but significant contribution to the world of public archaeology.
London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) launched its redesigned website over the summer, sparking a small chorus of bemusement at its outlandish fonts, blinking text and usability problems. It is certainly not pretty, and the constantly spinning
primary-coloured circles advertising membership are beyond irritating.
But there is also something joyful in its exuberant flakiness. We have become used to museum websites that strive for a bland kind of efficiency in their simple text, clear navigation and pictures of happy punters. Perhaps the internet still has room for a website as quirky as the ICA itself.
“Will your science skills save the day?” asks Total Darkness, a new online game from the Science Museum. It is evening and the lights have gone out, leaving your small town in pitch darkness. Armed only with a torch and a rapidly depleting battery, you must go out and explore, talking to fellow residents, gathering clues and testing theories about the source of the power cut.
As you play, you will acquire points for key science skills: communication, curiosity and creativity. And when you solve the mystery, you will discover your personal “science style” in the mix of techniques you used to get at the truth. The graphics are top-notch and the dialogue is sharp, but there is no real gameplay here: clicking through options until you have exhausted them all feels more like an interactive animation than a challenge. And once you have completed the quest, you have little impetus to play again.
Around a decade ago, the Science Museum helped initiate a new wave of gaming for museums, exploring physics, climate change and genetics through games such as Launchball, Rizk and Thingdom. These were aimed at children, but were also fun for adults to play. Total Darkness continues the museum’s laudable commitment to making science playful, but lacks the same spark.