The Alexandria
Archive Institute

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

AAI Wins EOL Computable Data Challenge

September 25, 2012

This month, with funding from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), the AAI launched a new project using Linked Open Data to enhance archaeological data sets. A collaborative undertaking by the AAI, Prof. Benjamin Arbuckle (Baylor University), and a team of international zooarchaeologists, the project was one of two winners of the EOL’s Computable Data Challenge. The project brings together a group of international scholars to collaboratively analyze datasets and address questions about human exploitation of early domestic animals in Anatolia. Taxonomic data published in archaeological datasets in Open Context will be related to EOL taxa using a Linked Open Data approach. This will demonstrate the power of Linked Open Data to disambiguate and enhance data published on the Web. See more about the competition and the winning projects.

Posted in: Grants, News, Projects

Tags: data integration, data publishing, domestication, linked open data, Neolithic, origins of agriculture

Publication on Data Reuse, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory

April 16, 2012

We’re delighted to announce the publication of “Other People’s Data: A Demonstration of the Imperative of Publishing Primary Data” in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. The lead author is Prof. Levent Atici (UNLV), a member of the Open Context Editorial Board. The “online first” version of the paper can be accessed here. The authors will also share an Open Access pre-print (allowed by Springer) of the final version of the paper in the coming week.

This paper is an outcome of an AAI project funded by an NEH/IMLS Advancing Knowledge grant exploring user needs in archaeological data sharing. This paper’s co-authors (Levent Atici, Justin Lev-Tov, Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa) all participated in the NEH/IMLS study. They recognized that “data reuse” in archaeology is an area that is in critical need of more exploration. This paper reflects the co-authors’ attempts to grapple with this topic by documenting their reuse of data collected by another researcher. The results of their collaborative study highlight implications for data sharing, archiving and publishing programs.

Abstract: This study explores issues in using data generated by other analysts. Three researchers independently analyzed an orphaned, decades-old zooarchaeological dataset and then compared their analytical approaches and results. Although they took a similar initial approach to determine the dataset’s suitability for analysis, the three researchers generated markedly different interpretive conclusions. In examining how researchers use legacy data, this paper highlights interpretive issues, data integrity concerns, and data documentation needs. In order to meet these needs, we propose greater professional recognition for data dissemination, favoring models of “data publication” over “data sharing” or “data archiving.”

Posted in: News, Publications

Tags: archaeology, blind analysis, Chogha Mish, data publishing, data sharing, faunal analysis, orphaned dataset, publication, zooarchaeology

Eric Kansa receives ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship

March 22, 2012

This week the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced winners of the 2012 Digital Innovation Fellowship competition. Open Context’s Technology Director Eric Kansa is one of nine grantees who will “spend a year dedicated to a major scholarly project intended to advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating such works.” Eric’s project Establishing a Data Journal for Archaeology and Related Fields aims to increase researcher participation in data dissemination while improving the quality and usability of published data. ACLS has awarded Digital Innovation Fellowships for the past seven years (see past winners). The program is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Posted in: Grants, News

Tags: awards, citation, data journal, data publishing, data quality, data reuse, grants

Open Context and CDL “Data Journals”

September 20, 2011

We’ve been working to develop a model of “data sharing as publication” in our work with Open Context. In our view, publication helps communicate some of the need for quality and standards alignment that makes effective data dissemination something more formal than implied by the term “sharing.”

We’re definitely not alone in this assessment, and other groups are also experimenting with various models of data publication. One group is the California Digital Library (CDL), a unit that runs many of the University of California’s leading scholarly communications and data preservation efforts. (more…)

Posted in: News, Projects

Tags: data journals, data publishing, data sharing, digital libraries, Scholarly Communications