Before we start forgetting our auld acquaintances and gearing up for the new year, we’d love to take a chance to shine some lights (camera! action!) on the lessons we learned this past fall.
The Fall 2023 NADAC-NEH Institute curriculum consisted of three workshops that focused on Data for Professional Communication. Open Context team members Eric Kansa and Meghan Dennis produced and starred in the pilot program of this semester’s series. They presented on the all-important topic of The Ethics of Data. This workshop challenged NADAC Scholars to engage with a range of issues and frameworks with the goal of identifying their projects’ ethical positions and to evaluate current or potential pitfalls. The session also encouraged Scholars to define their projects’ ethics policies within existing guidelines for archaeological practice, with exercises designed to pose critical questions about their data collection methods, structures, analyses, interpretations, and dissemination. Discussion in targeted focus groups (aka breakout rooms) frequently concentrated on both the identified and the unanticipated, unidentified, or future communities who may be impacted by Scholars’ projects. Scholars expressed particular interest in how to change the balance of power in the data editing booth (i.e., databases), such as how to protect data access and how to control data sharing by, and for the benefit of, stakeholding communities.
Following the September NADAC workshop premiere on ethics, NADAC Faculty members Sarah Herr and Bill Carraher thickened the plot. Their mid-season arc focused on Publishers and Publishing Data, spotlighting key issues that we face in academic publishing. These included discussions around publication as an integral part of the research process; ethical citation practices; and open access priorities. By the time we’d called the session a wrap, Scholars had an opportunity to begin to brainstorm digital methods and open access venues for the publication of their own research projects.
December’s workshop on Authors and Publishing Data, written by and starring Angela Trentacoste and Kevin Garstki, impressed the audience with a range of new platforms and digital formats for publishing archaeological data. Yet these special effects are more than bells-and-whistles: technologies like photogrammetry, scripts and code for analysis of data in R, and other multimedia serve research purposes and can be utilized as tools to pose and answer new questions. Novel analytical methods are enabled, for instance, by batch processing of large data sets for statistical analysis, as presented in a case-study on aggregated zooarchaeological data. It’s the Netflix algorithm of zooarch, serving up data you didn’t even know you wanted to use!
A word of credit and thanks to NADAC Director Leigh Lieberman for putting together this prime time program and whose name belongs at the top of the NADAC marquee. Leigh helmed a team of Faculty and production staff who brought this new format of prestige viewing to fruition. Armchair critics counted its successes not in ratings but in quality. It found a willing (if captive) audience of NADAC Scholars eager not only to consume this semester’s information but to co-produce it through sharing their data, project methods, and insights.
