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 […]
Ethical Governance and Artificial Intelligence
Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) together with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a Request for Information to inform the development of federal government infrastructure to support research with AI (see here). What does this request have to do with archaeology in general, and AAI/Open Context programs in particular? For the […]
Improving Ways Open Context Publishes Archaeological Data
Our last blog post about Open Context discussed how we were rebuilding many aspects of how we organized the data we publish. This post gets into some of the details. For background, Open Context is a bit different from many research data repositories like the Archaeology Data Service or tDAR. Open Context’s core purpose is […]
Rebuilding Open Context – Again!
Open Context is undergoing its fourth major rebuild. Why on earth would we do this? This post explores (hopefully without too much jargon or technobabble) why rebuilds are important and what the 2021 rebuild involves. Why are rebuilds (“refactoring”) needed? Since its launch in 2006, Open Context has seen four major waves of development. These […]
