Open Context has grown into one of the world’s largest open access databases of archaeological data. It now houses nearly 2.4 million records from over 200 data publications, including 215,000 images, maps, documents, 3D models, and GIS layers. This growth has required us to make important performance improvements so that the user interface has acceptable […]
Open Context – Highlights from 2024
Since Open Context launched in 2006, it has published over 2.2 million records from nearly 200 projects and sub-projects, representing the work of more than 1,600 scholars working in 100 countries in all inhabited continents, as well as data from “off world” sites like the International Space Station! As of December 2024, these 2.2 million […]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Open Context
Open Context launched in late 2006, roughly 17 years ago. Since then we’ve worked on some 180 project datasets now in various stages of completion. Currently, we have 134 projects complete enough to include in our main project index. Each of these publication projects required dedicated and sustained commitments of effort. This work includes: data […]
Open Context Roadmap
While many steps in archaeological data publishing can be automated to speed up the publishing process, the complexity and diversity and messiness of archaeological data makes it really difficult to develop tools that in other systems might be simple…
Identifiers are Keys to Understanding (pun* intended)
We have some news about recent publications and talks relating to our work in archaeological data publishing. These all share common themes about how to make archaeological data more useful and easier to reuse. Article in PNAS The first publication, an article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) by Eric Kansa […]
Data in Archaeological Field School Instruction
Archaeologists routinely create and use data, but they rarely talk about how they work with data. As a profession, we need to be more open and share our experiences and frustrations in working with data. A field school is an excellent place to start these conversations. Through active participation in the practice of archaeology, many […]
