The Alexandria
Archive Institute

AAI Wins EOL Computable Data Challenge

September 25, 2012

This month, with funding from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the AAI launched a new project using Linked Open Data to enhance archaeological data sets. A collaborative undertaking by the AAI, Prof. Benjamin Arbuckle (Baylor University), and a team of international zooarchaeologists, the project was one of two winners of the EOL’s Computable Data Challenge. The project brings together a group of international scholars to collaboratively analyze datasets and address questions about human exploitation of early domestic animals in Anatolia. Taxonomic data published in archaeological datasets in Open Context will be related to EOL taxa using a Linked Open Data approach. This will demonstrate the power of Linked Open Data to disambiguate and enhance data published on the Web. See more about the competition and the winning projects.

Posted in: Grants, News, Projects

Tags: data integration, data publishing, domestication, linked open data, Neolithic, origins of agriculture

AAI Receives NEH Digital Humanities Implementation Grant

August 13, 2012

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a Digital Humanities Implementation grant to the AAI to support data publishing services with Open Context. The 2-year, $261,056 project supports collaborative research and development to enable scholars to relate datasets with other data published on the Web (i.e. Linked (Open) Data methods).

Digital Humanities Implementation grants aim to fund innovative projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and are “well positioned to have a major impact.” The AAI recently completed research, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to develop Data Refine, a system for evaluating, annotating, and linking online datasets. Previously, the AAI received funding from the NEH to explore researcher needs around data sharing, a major outcome of which was the “data sharing as publication” model advanced by the current project.

Current funding will demonstrate how publication processes can help improve the discoverability, reuse, and longevity of primary scholarly materials. The AAI team will collaborate with archaeologists working in the Mediterranean region to further develop workflows to publish archaeological datasets as Linked Open Data. Though demonstrated with a theme of ancient trade and exchange, the project’s tools and workflows are applicable in any field needing better data dissemination. A major project outcome is a generalized model for publishing well-documented and reusable scholarly data. The success of this model lies in its outward orientation. Rather than working toward monolithic centralization, this approach enables researchers to participate in a growing and widely distributed humanities information ecosystem.

Posted in: Grants, News, Projects

Publication on Data Reuse, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

April 16, 2012

We’re delighted to announce the publication of “Other People’s Data: A Demonstration of the Imperative of Publishing Primary Data” in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. The lead author is Prof. Levent Atici (UNLV), a member of the Open Context Editorial Board. The “online first” version of the paper can be accessed here. The authors will also share an Open Access pre-print (allowed by Springer) of the final version of the paper in the coming week.

This paper is an outcome of an AAI project funded by an NEH/IMLS Advancing Knowledge grant exploring user needs in archaeological data sharing. This paper’s co-authors (Levent Atici, Justin Lev-Tov, Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa) all participated in the NEH/IMLS study. They recognized that “data reuse” in archaeology is an area that is in critical need of more exploration. This paper reflects the co-authors’ attempts to grapple with this topic by documenting their reuse of data collected by another researcher. The results of their collaborative study highlight implications for data sharing, archiving and publishing programs.

Abstract: This study explores issues in using data generated by other analysts. Three researchers independently analyzed an orphaned, decades-old zooarchaeological dataset and then compared their analytical approaches and results. Although they took a similar initial approach to determine the dataset’s suitability for analysis, the three researchers generated markedly different interpretive conclusions. In examining how researchers use legacy data, this paper highlights interpretive issues, data integrity concerns, and data documentation needs. In order to meet these needs, we propose greater professional recognition for data dissemination, favoring models of “data publication” over “data sharing” or “data archiving.”

Posted in: News, Publications

Tags: archaeology, blind analysis, Chogha Mish, data publishing, data sharing, faunal analysis, orphaned dataset, publication, zooarchaeology

Eric Kansa receives ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship

March 22, 2012

This week the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced winners of the 2012 Digital Innovation Fellowship competition. Open Context’s Technology Director Eric Kansa is one of nine grantees who will “spend a year dedicated to a major scholarly project intended to advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating such works.” Eric’s project Establishing a Data Journal for Archaeology and Related Fields aims to increase researcher participation in data dissemination while improving the quality and usability of published data. ACLS has awarded Digital Innovation Fellowships for the past seven years (see past winners). The program is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Posted in: Grants, News

Tags: awards, citation, data journal, data publishing, data quality, data reuse, grants

Recommendations on the Dissemination and Stewardship of Data from Federally Funded Research

January 12, 2012

Today is the deadline for responses to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Request for Information (RFI) about long-term stewardship of, and broad public access to, digital data resulting from federally funded research. The Alexandria Archive Institute’s responses included the following five primary recommendations for encouraging public access to and preservation of digital data resulting from federally-funded research:

• Cultivate a distributed information ecosystem
• Cultivate a robust preservation infrastructure
• Encourage data professionalism
• Require non-proprietary data
• Address data ethics

Visit the blog post in Heritage Bytes for details on these recommendations and our responses to the specific questions posed in the RFI. You can also download the PDF version of the AAI’s response: AAI-Comments-FR2011-28621

Posted in: News

Tags: open data, policy, recommendations