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News & Highlights from 2017

December 5, 2017

Posted in: News

Open Context Supports New Research into Impacts of Climate Change on US Archaeological Sites

November 29, 2017

Today, the open access journal PLOS ONE published “Sea-level rise and archaeological site destruction: An example from the southeastern United States using DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology)” (Anderson et al. 2017), a peer-reviewed article that projects how climate change driven sea-level rise will endanger over 13,000 recorded archaeological sites on the eastern seaboard of the United States, including over 1,000 listed on the National Register of Historic Places as important cultural properties.

This paper reports on the analysis of multiple data sets integrated by the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), a collaborative project involving researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Anderson, Bissett, and Yerka), Indiana University South Bend (Wells, Myers, and DeMuth), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (White), Open Context (E. Kansa and S. Kansa), and partners in many government agencies and tribal nations across the United States. DINAA aggregates data sets developed over decades from several state and federal government sources. These data sets document archaeological and historical sites protected by federal law. In bringing these data together DINAA, provides the public and research communities with a uniquely comprehensive window on several thousand years of human settlement in the North American continent.

Each archaeological site is like a book, providing a unique window into the struggles and achievements of people in the past. Viewed this way, projected sea-level rise in the coming decades will destroy entire libraries– thousands of sites that record millennia of human occupation in coastal settings. Secondary impacts, especially the relocation of million of people displaced from inundated coastal regions, will further threaten our archaeological heritage, even far from current shorelines. Without planning and redoubling of our efforts to study sites across entire regions, flooding and population movements will erase the history of cultures in large parts of eastern North America.

Analysis of DINAA data shows the surprising scale of climate impacts on North America’s historical and archaeological record. Such research is critical to making well-informed forecasts and public policy decisions about the consequences of rapid climate change, extreme weather events, and displaced populations. These are factors that will shape our civilization profoundly in the years to come. This research also highlights the value of open government data as a means to help broaden partnerships between government agencies and the researcher community. In making these data available, government agencies can stimulate new research and public understanding on how to better protect our nation’s rich historical heritage. This paper highlights the value of sharing scientific data to better inform public policy.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation as a collaborative project in 2012 (Awards 1217240 [UT] and 1216810 [IUSB]). In 2016, NSF funded a second collaborative project to expand the effort (Awards 1623621[UT] and 1623644 [IUSB]). Funding was also obtained in 2016 by the Alexandria Archive Institute (Open Context) from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-70-16-0056-16).

Posted in: News, Publications

Conference: Digital Publication in Mediterranean Archaeology

October 10, 2017

Next week, Open Context’s Program Director, Eric Kansa, will participate in a one-day conference exploring digital publication of archaeological data. The Digital Publication in Mediterranean Archaeology: Current Practice and Common Goals conference is hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, in partnership with the Archaeological Institute of America. From the conference web page:

“This conference brings together archaeologists and experts in the creation of digital resources to share and discuss current practices and future opportunities in the digital publication of archaeological data and results. The event is timely because the volume of archaeological resources available via the public internet is growing rapidly. There is much to be learned by assessing what has been accomplished and by considering what steps and which existing or new standards and practices can make digital publications more useful. The conference will promote ongoing discussion by bringing together archaeologists, librarians, archivists, and digital publishers for individual presentations and a closing panel.”

Visit the conference page for a list of speakers and topics.

Posted in: Events

Shedding Light on Endangered Data

April 19, 2017

This is a cross-posting from an April 17, 2017 post on Heritage Bytes, the Open Context blog:

For the week of April 17-21, we’re joining a large community-wide effort to raise greater awareness of “endangered data”. In light of all of the other crises in the world, highlighting endangered data may seem silly. After all, given the daily news onslaught of increasing authoritarianism, kleptocracy, war, bigotry, poverty and environmental problems, the fate of abstract electronic databases seems low on the priority list.

However, we argue that safeguarding data represents a need to safeguard our civil liberties, civil society, future environment, and broader understanding of our world. This last point is key. Data are often integral to how we try to understand the world.

As authoritarianism takes hold, data become increasingly politicized and precarious. Authoritarians attempt to dictate what is and is not true. Truth must conform to the needs of vested interests or ideologies or it will be suppressed. The current administration’s assault on climate science represents a stunning assault on an “Inconvenient Truth” (so aptly named by Al Gore). Beyond climate science, researchers create data key to understanding social, historical, and governance issues. Like climate science, better understanding in these other domains can threaten powerful and entrenched interests, which is why authoritarians may seek to suppress or corrupt data documenting such topics.

Unfortunately, we don’t really understand the full scope and magnitude of what data may be under threat. We also don’t have a good understanding of what threats may be more immediate and where to prioritize our “data rescue” efforts. But here are some (incomplete) thoughts about what threatens data:

• Outright Suppression: Some datasets may be suppressed and destroyed overtly. This is a digital equivalent of burning books or even whole libraries.
• Lack of Funding: Creating, maintaining, curating and preserving data all require effort, often by dedicated professionals and institutions. Cutting off funding to these professionals and organizations will quickly endanger data.
• Lack of Time: People need time to dedicate their attention to work on data. Badly structured rewards, incentive systems, and other bureaucratic pressures in academic research, force many researchers to neglect data. Researchers need intellectual freedom to devote their time toward data, where the rewards are still uneven and uncertain.
• Lack of Access: Hiding data away from wider scrutiny makes it easier to delete, alter or corrupt. It also makes it easier to make spurious claims (and harder to refute them).
• Collection Biases: Political and ideological agendas shape how we collect data and what data we collect. We’ve already seen Republican attempts to cease collecting data about housing discrimination, no doubt with a motivation to make the problem “disappear”.
• Analytical Biases: Data need analysis to be interpreted and used. People apply different models and analytic methods that may (or may not) explicitly or implicitly bias understanding of data.
• Filter Biases: The past several months have provided a hard education on the problem of “fake news” (propaganda) in the contemporary news media. Even if we manage to preserve some integrity in our data and analyses, we face the steep challenge of communicating our understandings in an overtly hostile and ideologically-charged media environment.

In arguing for the importance of data, we’re not suggesting that data are wholly objective or empirical. Data are never complete, perfect, or objective. As brilliantly discussed by Cathy O’Neal, data reflect our incomplete and often biased views of the world. Because data, like other forms of knowledge, are imperfect, they need to be a part of open conversations and debates in civil society. If we do a better job at making data more open to critique and evaluation from people with a wider variety of perspectives, we can improve both the data themselves and our understandings derived from them.

Over the past several months, we have taken part in “data rescue” events organized across the nation. There is a strong focus on climate data, but our participation involved endangered data from National Park Service websites. Working with Max Ogden and colleagues at the California Digital Library, we safeguarded more than a terabyte of data from a National Park Service database, as well as some 20,000 web pages, especially those that bring US national parks to underrepresented communities (African American, Asian American, Native American, LGBTQ).

As we move forward with Endangered Data Week, we will post more about the needs to protect public data, some of the importance of public data for a healthy civil society, and some of our broader collaborations to make public data better protected and understood.

Posted in: Events, News

Conference: Critical Perspectives on the Practice of Digital Archaeology

January 23, 2017

Early next month, the AAI will participate in a conference at Harvard University on Critical Perspectives on the Practice of Digital Archaeology. Hosted by Harvard University’s Standing Committee on Archaeology, the February 3-4 event will cover topics related to digital technologies and how they are transforming archaeological practice.

Conference co-organizers Eric Kansa (Program Director for Open Context at the AAI) and Rowan Flad (Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Standing Committee on Archaeology, Harvard University) ask participants to consider how current research data management and curation practices can better support new scholarship, instruction and engagement in archaeology. Speakers herald from the Harvard community and from institutions across North America and include partners from the DINAA project and the Secret Life of Data (SLO-data) project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, respectively.

An overarching theme of the conference is the need for new skills, professional roles, and professional incentives to make data more meaningful to scholarship. Attendees will hear presentations and panel discussions on the first day discussing the impact of digital technologies on the entire life-cycle of archaeological data, from the process of data capture and creation to the challenges of data curation and reuse.

The second morning of discussions in a workshop format, led by Anne Austin (Stanford University) and Eric Kansa, will introduce archaeologists to the fundamentals of good data practices, open source software tools for data cleanup, and practice to better share and preserve research data.

Kansa, who for more than a decade has led programs to preserve and share archaeology’s digital record through AAI’s Open Context data publishing service, explains that the industry is at a crossroads with most archaeologists, historians, and other social scientists uninformed about how to make their research accessible. “There is an urgent need for this conference to improve the application and integrity of stored research data,” Kansa said. “We have a tremendous responsibility to the public to share our understanding about what’s factual, what’s uncertain, and do so in a way that builds more trust and confidence in research. That’s why data skills are so critical in the 21st century.”

Visit the conference webpage to view the full program and panelist bios: http://archaeology.harvard.edu/critical-perspectives-practice-digital-archaeology. The conference is free and open to all, but attendees are requested to register on the website by January 25.

Posted in: Events, News

Tags: archaeology, data integration, data management plan, data publishing, data quality, data reuse, open data, recommendations, workflows