Yesterday, Anwen, Vicky and myself all attended at EH’s 2013 NMP Projects conference in Swindon at the (excellent – you get to walk under a steam locomotive!) STEAM museum. It was a great day and it felt very useful to get some insight into how professional aerial photograph interpretation works and where the NMP is heading.
I gave a short talk on how we are planning on using NMP data and just had a few additional thoughts to add regarding questions asked afterwards (apologies for the irrelevance of this to anyone who wasn’t at the conference):
- You can find my blog posts on vectorising raster NMP here: (1)(2)(3)
- It occurred to me during the day that I should have put in a slide containing the map I produced regarding soil suitability for showing cropmarks: (4)
- Regarding the vectorised raster NMP layers, I don’t feel that these should be thought of as replacing the original scanned data. There is no reason why we cannot have both versions on our GIS map: the scans for study at large scales (1:10,000) and the vectorised data for study at broader landscape scales (>1:10,000) where they function better at showing the results.
- I am very happy with the vectorised results, but they would still require a lot of work to perfect: polygons for ridge and furrow need drawing (although this is equally true of the raw raster data); areas where removed grid marks covered drawn features need filling back in; I would also like to remove the small hand written notes that feature on some of the tiles (and the typed notes on the Dartmoor tiles), as these don’t feel “right” in the vectorised version. However, this is mostly just polishing and does not unduly effect their overall functionality as an interpretative tool.
All in all, it was a very productive way to spend a day and we would like to thank the organisers for letting us come along.
Chris Green
English Landscape and Identities 
Hi Chris, it was great to see the NMP data being brought together in this way, have always thought that its power lies in the big picture. I meant to check that for Northants NMP you have a version with attached data (period, type etc)?
Hi Alison,
Thanks! I’m hopeful something interesting will come out.
Actually, re. Northants, I don’t have a version with periods / types, it’s just the basic CAD info. I think it’s a project that the results have not been imported into AMIE from (as Simon sent me MORPH data for it), so I had assumed this wasn’t available. If you have a version with fuller attributes attached, that would be immensely useful!
Chris