January 21, 2023
10:30am - 1:10pm / 1:45pm - 3:30pm Eastern
Online Workshop

Faculty
Melissa Cradic (Facilitator)
Leigh Anne Lieberman
Paulina F. Przystupa

Pre-Workshop Assignment 
Read: Kansa, S. W., L. Atici, E. C. Kansa, and R. H. Meadow (2020) “Archaeological Analysis in the Information Age: Guidelines for Maximizing the Reach, Comprehensiveness, and Longevity of Data.” Advances in Archaeological Practice, 8 (1), 40-52. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2019.36.

Download & Install: Open Refine

Watch: Open Refine for Archaeology: Open Source Data Cleaning

Additional Resources
Dennis, L. Meghan and Paulina F. Przystupa. Cow-culating your Data with Spreadsheets and R. Data Story Tutorial. The Alexandria Archive Institute. 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M73N21HR.

Lincoln, Matthew D. "Tidy Data for the Humanities." Matthew Lincoln, PhD(blog), 26 May 2020, https://matthewlincoln.net/2020/05/26/tidy-data-for-humanities.html.

OpenRefine User Manual

Rawson, Katie, and Trevor Muñoz. “Against Cleaning.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, 279–92. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Rivard, Courtney, Taylor Arnold, and Lauren Tilton. “Building Pedagogy into Project Development: Making Data Construction Visible in Digital Projects.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 13, no. 2 (August 1, 2019). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/2/000419/000419.html.

Rosenberg, Daniel. “Data before the Fact.” In “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 15–40. Infrastructures Series. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.

van Hooland, Seth, Ruben Verborgh, and Max De Wilde, "Cleaning Data with OpenRefine," Programming Historian 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.46430/phen0023.

Participant Outcomes
Familiarity with attributes of data quality, including unique identifiers, controlled vocabulary, appropriate documentation, etc.

Experience finding and evaluating open archaeological data in online repositories.

Experience cleaning messy data with a program like OpenRefine.

Collective Outcomes
Annotated samples of clean archaeological data sets.

Next Steps
Practice cleaning messy data using the tool of your choice.

Continue to define (and refine) your project-specific needs and standards. 

February 11, 2023
10:30am - 1:10pm / 1:45pm - 3:30pm Eastern
Online Workshop

Faculty
Anne Austin
Sarah Whitcher Kansa
Leigh Anne Lieberman (Facilitator)

Pre-Workshop Assignment
Read: Faniel, Ixchel, Anne Austin, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Jennifer Jacobs, and Phoebe France (2021). “Identifying Opportunities for Collective Curation During Archaeological Excavations.” International Journal of Digital Curation 15, no. 1: 13. https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v15i1.699.

Consider: Kansa, Sarah Whitcher, Austin, Anne, Faniel, Ixchel M, & Kansa, Eric C. (2020). Specialist Agreement Template. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4346486.

As you consider the Specialist Agreement Template, how would you modify it for your own project? What’s missing? What would you cut? We’ll spend some time in our session reflection on these questions, so jot down some ideas and begin to adapt the template for your own context.

Prepare: If you have a current paper or digital data collection form for some aspect of archaeological field work, come ready to share that with the group, and be prepared to share an annotated version of that for our Data Literacy for Archaeologists Practice Guide.

Additional Resources
Ross, Shawn, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, Steve Cassidy, Penny Crook, Jens Klump, and Adela Sobotkova. “FAIRer Data through Digital Recording: The FAIMS Mobile Experience.” Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2022): 271–85. https://doi.org/10.5334/jcaa.96.

White, Roger (2009) “Data Collection by Excavation.” The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, eds. Chris Gosden, B. Cunliffe, and R. A. Joyce. New York City, NY: Oxford University Press.

Participant Outcomes
Understanding of the ways that paper or digital data collection forms guide the types of data that are collected.

Create paper and/or digital data collection forms for individual research projects that incorporate attributes of data quality.

Collective Outcomes
Annotated samples that demonstrate how the Specialist Agreement Template can be adapted to fit a given project.

Annotated samples of paper and digital data collection forms for multiple aspects of archaeological field work (e.g.: excavation, survey, flotation, materials analysis, etc.)

Next Steps
Revise a specialist agreement to suit your project(s).

Revise the ways you collect data to make your data structures more resusable.

Produce or revise written guidelines for data collection for your project(s). 

March 18, 2023
10:30am - 1:10pm / 1:45pm - 3:30pm Eastern
Online Workshop

Faculty
Anne Hunnell Chen
Sarah Whitcher Kansa (Facilitator)
Leigh Anne Lieberman

Pre-Workshop Assignment
Watch: this short video with reflections from NADAC faculty and friends. (Link to mp4 file here; Link to YouTube video with auto captions here; 25 minutes).

Create: a Wikipedia account so that you’ll be ready for our Wikidata exercise. If you’ve ever worked on Wikipedia, you can use that same account.

Complete: Wikidata Professional Development Training Modules. All of these modules should take about an hour and twenty minutes to complete, and are broken into 15-20 minute sections. If you need to prioritize, please be sure you have covered Introduction to Wikidata, Databases and Linked Data, Adding to Wikidata, and Querying Wikidata - SPARQL.

Think about your project and the legacy data you would like to integrate into it. In what format does the information currently reside? Are there traditional publications (i.e.: excavation reports) or other text-based resources that you have access to (i.e.: field notebooks)? Do you have old spreadsheets of data collected by previous projects? Do you have material like maps/photographs/drawings/plans that need to be digitized? If you can, bring a report, field notebook, spreadsheet, or static database to work with during our Saturday session. Don’t worry if nothing comes to mind or if you don’t feel comfortable working with your data yet. We’ll provide material drawn from our own projects such that all participants will be able to engage in the exercises, but we welcome you to experiment with data that are relevant to the specifics of your own project.

Additional Resources
Aspöck, Edeltraud. “Old Excavation Data. What Can We Do? An Introduction.” Edited by Edeltraud Aspöck, Seta Štuhec, Karin Kopetzky, and Matthias Kucera. Vol. 16. Old Excavation Data. What Can We Do? Wien, Austria: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2020. doi:10.1553/0x003bca0e. PDF.

Linked Open Data Management Systems Comparison Tool, cited in Nasarek, Robert, & Rossenova, Lozana. (2023). Linked Open Data Management Services: A Comparison (1.0.0) [Data set]. DHd2023 Open Humanities Open Culture (DHd2023), Trier and Luxembourg. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7738424.

Schmidt, Sophie C., Florian Thiery, and Martina Trognitz. “Practices of Linked Open Data in Archaeology and Their Realisation in Wikidata.” Digital 2, no. 3 (2022): 333–64. https://doi.org/10.3390/digital2030019. PDF.

Participant Outcomes 
Understanding of the challenges of working with legacy data, especially with respect to data curation and data management.

Experience working through text-based, tabular, and visual resources in Wikidata.

Collective Outcomes
Reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of using a tool like Wikidata to process and publish legacy data.

Next Steps
Identify the kinds of legacy resources that you have to contend with (handwritten notebooks, photographs, reports, etc.) and brainstorm how you want to consistently process each type.

Continue to explore Wikidata (and other open vocabularies, gazetteers, etc.) to find resources that work for your project. Using SQID or querying, see if Wikidata would be appropriate for the kind of work you’re doing.

Play around with Wikidata in a very low stakes way by adding references to records about something you know.

April 15, 2023
10:30am - 1:10pm / 1:45pm - 3:30pm Eastern
Online Workshop

Faculty
Ixchel M. Faniel
Eric Kansa
Leigh Anne Lieberman (Facilitator)

Pre-Workshop Assignment
Read: Faniel, I.M., A. Austin, E. C. Kansa, S. W. Kansa, P. France, J. Jacobs, R. Boytner, and E. Yakel (2018) “Beyond the archive: bridging data creation and reuse in archaeology.” Advances in Archaeological Practice, 6(2), 105-116. doi:10.1017/aap.2018.2. PDF.

Read: Nicholson, C., Kansa, S., Gupta, N., & Fernandez, R. (2023). “Will It Ever Be FAIR?: Making Archaeological Data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.” Advances in Archaeological Practice, 11(1), 63-75. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2022.40. PDF.

Additional Resources

Data Sharing, Part 1 of 3 - Request (Data management gone wrong!

Kansa, E. C., and Sarah Whitcher Kansa. “Promoting Data Quality and Reuse in Archaeology through Collaborative Identifier Practices.” PNAS 119 (2022): 43. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109313118. PDF.

Online services available to build a data management plan (DMP) - DMPTool and DMPonline. 

SAA Guidance Regarding National Science Foundation Archaeological Data Management Plans (n.d.)

PARTHENOS DMP Research Template for Archaeological Datasets (n.d.)

Digital Curation Centre v1 (2011)

Digital Curation Centre v2 (2021) (NB: Found by searching under Funder Requirements on the DMPTool website) 

Practical Guide to the International Alignment of Research Data Management - Extended Edition (2021) 

Research Data Management Organizer

Participant Outcomes 
Familiarity with the attributes of a good data management plan (DMP).

Identification of a model for individual research projects’ DMP.

Collective Outcomes
Annotated samples of data management plans for archaeological research projects.

Next Steps
Using the DMP guidance documents shared above, start outlining a draft of your DMP. Keep a running list of your questions and concerns. Continue to identify and meet people you need to go to for help (e.g., librarians, stakeholders, collaborators, colleagues).