Re: Hill-fort Survey | Forum — The Modern Antiquarian

Rhiannon Jul 9, 2013 07:16:10

Replying to ocifant

Hmm yes well quite.

Also, there doesn't seem to be any way of knowing who's done what already, or who would like to do what. So that's quite off-putting. Why would you want to put in all that work when there's the offchance you may be duplicating something someone's already done.

With that amount of money they could pay for a lot of research assistants to do it themselves, each person could do a couple of hundred a year if they totally ran round. Not quite sure what all that money would be spent on otherwise, it's not like it's science research where lots of things have to be bought? Maybe I've not got the imagination to work it out.

ocifant Jul 9, 2013 07:59:49

Replying to Rhiannon

Let's try to work it out (being generous):

IT equipment: Servers, Web Dev etc 200k
Design and Publishing the Atlas: 100k
Team of 7 academics: 350k?

That still leaves 300k for incidentals, like hire of Geofizz, travelling expenses etc. With 5k sites, that's approx 60k each!

But I'm sure someone with more experience of these things could correct my figures.

And yes, duplication of effort would be a big worry "Why am I doing this? The info is already out there in the HER/NMR, Local Archy Soc reports, Grey Literature etc. Hel, even TMA and the Portal have a lot of info on many of these sites."

nigelswift Jul 9, 2013 08:10:22

Replying to Rhiannon

"With that amount of money they could pay for a lot of research assistants to do it themselves"

It does seem a huge amount, someone has put in a brilliant funding request. To put it in perspective, it's an eightieth of the kiss-off payment the Govt. has given to EH to look after 400 key places without future funding.