Artifacts, belongings, contrivances, debris, effects, finds, garbage, habiliments, implements, junk, kit, luggage, materiel, necessities, objects, possessions, quarries, relics, stuff, things, utensils, vestiges, whatchamacallits, xeniums, you-name-its, and, sometimes, zilch. What do archaeologists even look at?
Perspectives
Whose Heritage? Using material culture to celebrate AANHPI heritage month
In celebration of Asian and Pacific American (AAPI) Heritage month (AAPIHM) or Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month (AANHPIHM), I’ll be using one of Open Context’s projects to consider the complexity of celebrating this month. Specifically, I’ll use data from the Asian stoneware jars project, contributed by Dr. Peter Grave.
AAI Reads – Weapons of Math Destruction
Welcome to our first The Alexandria Archives Reads! (AAI Reads!). The book that we’re highlighting is Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy. Written by Cathy O’Neil in 2016, it’s a great introduction to the way that algorithms impact humanity. Specifically, it redefines the “m” in WMD from “mass” to […]
Making CAREfully FAIR Archaeological Data
Last month, Open Context participated in a forum at the annual Society for American Archaeology conference in Chicago. The forum was called “Completing the data lifecycle: Using DINAA’s, Open Context’s, and tDAR’s online data management tools” but the real focus of the session turned out to be FAIR and CARE data practices. Forum participants, which […]
Highlights from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and Society for Classical Studies (SCS) Joint Annual Meeting
Starting the year off with a conference, from 5-8 January 2022 the members of the Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context (AAI/OC) team virtually attended the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and Society for Classical Studies (SCS) Joint Annual Meeting. The team ran our “Let’s make a data story” workshop and there were a lot […]
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 […]
