Welcome to The Sustainability Sandbox blog series! The Alexandria Archive Institute and Open Context (AAI/OC) advocate for data sharing, data literacy, open access, and community collaborations. In this series, we share the story of our journey to identify and develop digital data management, public engagement, and data literacy projects with potential partner institutions.
We want to use this month’s Sustainability Sandbox blog post to share some exciting news from one of our ASOR collaborators: Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, co-chair of the American Society of Overseas Research Early Career Scholars Committee (ASOR ECS), co-organizer of the Digging Up Data Workshop Series, and co-chair of the Digging Up Data: Turning an Idea into Digital Scholarship working group.
Tiffany, an Assistant Professor of Digital History at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and archaeologist of the ancient Near East, has just been awarded a Collaborative Heritage Management grant toward her work on Digging Up Data: Collaborative Approaches to an Open Archaeology from the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. Below, Tiffany shares a bit about the project she’s developing with the AAI/OC for the stakeholders that she works with in Armenia.
My new pilot project with co-PI Artur Petrosyan addresses inequity in field archaeology through collaborative problem-solving. While most archaeologists agree that the goals of the open archaeology movement are worthy ones, my Armenian collaborators do not typically have access to expensive, cutting edge field recording technologies. The challenge, then, becomes: how can we share the important findings of Armenian archaeology with global audiences given a realistic appraisal of the available resources?
In addition to teaching the skills needed to build open, linked datasets, a major goal of the project is to develop a workflow by which paper forms can be converted to open, linked databases. Geopolitical events permitting, we will host a series of workshops in Yerevan, Armenia in July 2022 that draw on the Digging Up Data curriculum to do just this. Building on these workshops, a team of heritage professionals in Armenia and graduate students from U.S. institutions will use what we learned to clean an open data set that will be published in Open Context.
We’re looking to build relationships with libraries, museums, educational organizations, and other cultural heritage groups. If you’d like to connect and discuss a potential collaboration, please email us at contact@alexandriaarchive.org. We look forward to hearing from you!
