Year: 2018

2018 SAA Abstract Project

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

For the fourth year in a row, Digital Antiquity has partnered with The Society for American Archaeology to preserve the meeting abstracts and make the presentations and data used to support them available in tDAR. As a presenter you can access your record in tDAR, edit the metadata, and upload a PDF copy of your paper, presentation, poster, or other supplementary data (up to 3 files/30MB). The project is now live in tDAR. Here’s how to get started:

Find your Abstract


Enter your last name, or the title of your SAA Poster or Paper
  1. Search for your abstract.
  2. Request access (will require a free registration).
  3. Once completed, we will send you a message within one business day with a link to edit the abstract and upload the record.
  4. Scroll down and edit or enhance any of the metdata.  Click on the green "add files" button under "Attach Document Files" and follow the prompt to upload a copy of your paper, poster, or associated data .  If you are adding multiple files (e.g. your paper, a copy of your presentation, and a dataset) you will probably want to create a project.
  5. You may save your work at any point along the way, but when your edits are complete, make sure to change your resource's status from "draft" to "active".
  6. Click save and you are done!
  7. As always, please call or email Leigh Anne at (480) 965-1593 or laellison@digitalantiquity.org with any questions along the way!

Were you a presenter in 2017 (Vancouver), 2016 (Orlando), or 2015 (San Francisco) SAA Annual Meeting but haven’t uploaded your presentation yet? Not to worry–those abstracts are also in tDAR and can be found in the search bar at the top of this page too. Help other researchers find and cite your SAA presentations by making them available today!

Additionally, the tDAR SAA Member Benefit allows retired members, student members, members from countries with discounted rates, and members from Tribal Historic Preservation Offices to upload ten files (up to 100MB) annually to tDAR. Contact membership@saa.org to request your voucher.

Society for Historical Archaeology Abstract Project 2018

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

The Center for Digital Antiquity is incredibly excited to announce that for the first time, we have partnered with The Society for Historical Archaeology to preserve the meeting abstracts and make the presentations and data used to support them available in tDAR.  As a presenter you can access your record in tDAR, edit the metadata, and upload a PDF copy of your paper, presentation, poster, or other supplementary data (up to 3 files/30MB).  The project is now live in tDAR.  Here’s how to get started:

Find your Abstract

  1. Search for your abstract.
  2. Request access (will require a free registration) by clicking on the “submit correction, comment (requires login)" on the right-hand side of the page.
  3. Once completed, we will send you a message within one business day with a link to edit the abstract and upload the record.
  4. Scroll down and edit or enhance any of the metdata.  Click on the green "add files" button under "Attach Document Files" and follow the prompt to upload a copy of your paper, poster, or associated data .  If you are adding multiple files (e.g. your paper, a copy of your presentation, and a dataset) you will probably want to create a project.
  5. Click save and you are done!
  6. As always, please call or email Leigh Anne at (480) 965-1593 or laellison@digitalantiquity.org with any questions along the way!

Transitions at the Center for Digital Antiquity

Posted on by Francis McManamon


Digital Antiquity Staff from Left to Right: Leigh Anne Ellison, Tyler Sutton, Adam Brin, Frank McManamon, Brian Castellanos, Cole Von Roeder (ERG), Chris Frady (ERG), Lani Harrison, and Rachel Fernandez

 

Just last month we celebrated a decade since the first record was created in tDAR. In this post, we report on more recent events and express our thanks to people important to Digital Antiquity and tDAR. At our meeting of the Board of Directors earlier this year, Dr. Tim Kohler (Regent’s Professor at Washington State University) and Dr. Dean Snow (Emeritus Professor at the Pennsylvania State University) announced that they would not seek reappointment. Kohler and Snow are among the founding members of the Digital Antiquity Board. Before that, they were members of Archaeo Informatics, which was established to preserve meaningful archaeological data in its many forms and the metadata necessary to keep these data useful and to provide scholars and the general public with broad and easy access to these data.

Tim and Dean were among the co-PIs for the first development grant provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that enabled the establishment of Digital Antiquity and provided funding for the development and early growth of tDAR content. They have been active Board members providing advice and perspective aiding in the growth of both Digital Antiquity and tDAR. We greatly appreciate the time and expertise they have shared with us and hope we can tap them for more advice, if less frequently, in the future.

Turning to staff changes that occurred earlier this year, we are delighted to welcome three new members of the Digital Antiquity staff. Tyler Sutton began as our newest digital curator in late March. No stranger to Digital Antiquity or tDAR, Tyler joined in August 2016, as a member of our initial “class” of student veterans hired to work on the Digital Veterans Curation Program, which is part of the US Army Corps of Engineers VCP that focuses on rehabilitating archaeological physical collections so they are available for modern archaeological investigations.

In mid-April, Lani Harrison joined Digital Antiquity as Administrative Specialist. Lani is making quick progress through the administrative backlog figuratively piled up since the departure of her predecessor. Our newest staff arrival is Cole Von Roeder, a rising senior in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change interested in a career in archaeology. Cole is also a student-veteran and is working on adding digital files from the VCP laboratories to tDAR where they will be accessible and useable for education and research.

We send our thanks and best wishes for success to two staff members. Herminio Meneses, another of our first group of student-veterans who worked on Digital VCP. Herminio, a senior with only a few courses left to graduate, is a member of the National Guard and was deployed a week ago to the Arizona border on orders of the governor. We hope for his safety and that the wifi service he can access down south is strong enough to enable him to take the ASU online courses he needs to complete his degree.

Lastly, we offer congratulations, as well as thanks and best wishes, to Alexa Rose, one of our student workers who graduated this week with a major in Classics and Anthropology. Alexa helped with drafting metadata records and curation of report files for the Digital Archive of Huhugam Archaeology, one of our NEH-funded projects. Alexa will be continuing her education in Classical Archaeology, starting a Master’s degree at Brandeis this fall. We wish her the best of luck.

tDAR Turns Ten!

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

Thursday, April 19th marks the 10-year anniversary of the first record appearing in tDAR so this week we are celebrating here in the office, and we want to bring our users and contributors along to celebrate with us.  We are pleased to introduce the new Digital Antiquity Instagram account (@digitalantiquity), and will have multiple opportunities for our followers on Twitter, Facebook, and now Instagram to participate and win prizes.

Many tDAR users may not know that the repository was born as a side project to a major data synthesis challenge.  Specifically, once someone had gone through the effort to track down and digitize data from across a region, how can these data be made more easily available to the next researcher?   Led by Keith Kintigh, Kate Spielmann, and K. Selçuk Candan, a group of 31 researchers met to develop recommendations for the discipline’s need for digital infrastructure to support synthetic research.  tDAR was born out of these recommendations.  Read more about the early history of Digital Antiquity and tDAR over on the tDAR website.

It seems appropriate then, that one of Kintigh’s other endeavors, the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis just awarded its first awards last week during the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Washington DC.  Synthesis remains a challenge in archaeology, but tools like tDAR (and ADS, Open Context, and others) are providing the infrastructure to support this important work.  Congratulations to the team at Digital Antiquity and happy birthday tDAR!

Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

We are gearing up for a busy week in DC at the 83rd Annual Society for American Archaeology meetings, and we hope to see you there!  We’ll be in the exhibit hall all week ready to discuss digital preservation, access and all things tDAR.  Please stop by and bring us your questions, or just say hi.  We also will have a full schedule of workshops, presentations, posters and forums and we encourage you to attend.  You may also schedule time to sit down with one of us to go over your digital archiving questions and explore tDAR.  Please email laellison@digitalantiquity.org to schedule an appointment today!

Monday April  9th, 2018

Digital Antiquity staff arrive in Washington DC.  If you would like to set up a meeting to discuss your digital archiving needs we are available to meet with you.

 

Tuesday April 10th, 2018

Available for meetings

 

Wednesday April 11th, 2018

Workshop: “Best Practices for Digital Data Management and Curation” 

Room: Madison B

Time:  1:00PM – 5:00PM

Leigh Anne Ellison and Francis P. McManamon, workshop leaders

 

Thursday April 12th, 2018

Digital Antiquity Booth

Room: Exhibit Hall A, #800

Time: 10:00AM – 5:00PM

Forum: “Bears Ears, the Antiquities Act, and the Status of our National Monument”

Room: Marriott Salon 2

Time: 3:00PM – 5:00PM

Francis P. McManamon, discussant

 

Friday April 13th, 2018

Digital Antiquity Booth

Room: Exhibit Hall A, #800

Time: 9:00AM – 5:00PM

Symposium: “At-Risk World Heritage and the Digital Humanities”

Paper: The Digital Archaeology Record (tDAR): An Archive for 21st Century Digital Curation

Room: Thurgood Marshall Ballroom East

Time: 8:00AM – 11:30PM (9:15)

Francis P. McManamon and Leigh Anne Ellison

Veterans Curation Program Lab Open House

Location: 816 N St Asaph St, Alexandria, VA 22314

Time: 10:00AM – 2:00PM

 

Saturday April 14th, 2018

Digital Antiquity Booth

Room: Exhibit Hall A, #800

Time: 9:00AM – 5:00PM

Poster Session: “Digital Archaeology: Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing, and Drones”

Room: Exhibit Hall B South, 238-i

Time: 8:00AM – 10:00AM

Rachel Fernandez and Leigh Anne Ellison

Electronic Symposium: “Futures and Challenges in Government Digital Archaeology”

Paper: “Sharing Curation Expertise and Space for Digital Archaeological Data”

Room: Delaware B

Time: 8:00AM – 10:00AM

Leigh Anne Ellison and Francis P. McManamon

Workshop: “Using tDAR: A workshop for SAA Members Benefiting from the SAA-Center for Digital Antiquity Good Digital Curation Agreement,” [Workshop Full]

Room: Madison A

Time: 9:00AM – 10:30AM

Leigh Anne Ellison, workshop leader

Forum: “In the Eyes of the Law: Contextualizing Archaeological Legislation Through Time and Space”

Room: Washington Room 5

Time: 1:00PM – 3:00PM

Francis P. McManamon, Discussant

 

Safe travels, and we look forward to seeing you in Washington, D.C. soon!

tDAR Software Release (Quartz)

Posted on by Adam Brin

Digital Antiquity is pleased to announce Quartz, tDAR’s 18th major release.   This release focuses on enhancing collections, email, and other smaller enhancements.

New tools for creating and managing collections:

Resources owners now have new and easier ways to manage their collections. We we have made a number of changes to ease the management and creation of collections.

First, from the resource page, you can now click the “add to collection” button and quickly add a resource to a collection from there.

Second, the collection edit page now makes it a bit easier to both see everything in a collection and add/remove items from it.

Other features:

  • New type of Document: We’ve added a long-requested type of document “Report.” This new document type allows contributors to identify archaeological reports in tDAR and to distinguish them from “books” or “other materials.” If you have contributed materials to tDAR in the past, this feature is now available to you.  If you have a large number of reports that should be converted, please contact us.
  • Pretty emails from tDAR: All of the emails from tDAR are now easier to read, and cleaner.
  • A ton of smaller bug fixes and performance enhancements.

 

 

Research Data on the Development of Wealth Inequality Deposited in tDAR

Posted on by Francis McManamon

Congratulations to our colleagues Tim Kohler (Washington State University), a member of the Center for Digital Antiquity Board of Directors and Mike Smith (School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University) for recent attention to the results of their research program on the roots of inequality published in Nature.

Figure 3 from “Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica,’’ by TA Kohler et al. Nature 551:619-622 (30 November 2017)
a, Coefficients by absolute date of sample (calibrated BC/AD 14C, tree-ring date or calendar date); n = 62; !Kung San was excluded. b, Coefficients by Δyears (date of sample − date of the local appearance of domesticated plants); n = 63. S Mesopotamia Early Dyn, Southern Mesopotamia Early Dynastic; CMV PII, Central Mesa Verde region Pueblo II.

 

Organized by Kohler and Smith, the research involves work by many scholars, e.g., there are 18 co-authors of the recent Nature article.  A symposium at the 2016 SAA Annual Meeting, “Inequality from the Bottom Up: Measuring and Explaining Household Inequality in Antiquity,” involved a similar number of presenters.    A book, Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences is being prepared for publication by the University of Arizona Press.

Data from the wealth inequalities research project are being deposited in tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record) for easy and broad accessibility and use. These data also supplement chapters in the forthcoming book.

The research results describe and interpret the long development of wealth inequality from ancient to historic to modern times in different parts of the world.  This topic, of course, is of wide interest and concern at present in many parts of the world, not least the United States and China.  The research results have been discussed in Science, for which Kohler and Smith were interviewed.  The research results were featured in a televised segment by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

Digital Curator Job Opening at Digital Antiquity

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

The Center for Digital Antiquity has a new Digital Curator position open and we invite qualified applicants to apply. The position of Digital Curator plays a vital role within our organization. Not limited to one specific function, we seek a well-organized, knowledgeable person who will provide curation services to clients, including drafting administrative and substantive metadata for digital files to be deposited in tDAR, recommending and carrying out redaction for confidential or sensitive data in files, assisting in the planning of digital collections within tDAR for clients, and other services.

This person will also assist in the Center for Digital Antiquity’s development, improvement and maintenance of tDAR digital repository. This will involve work on project documentation, cleaning up existing data and entering new data/documents. Digital curators are also involved in creating instructional text and web pages to improve information for tDAR users.

To learn more and to apply, visit the Arizona State University employment website. Applications will be accepted through January 24, 2018.

 

Looking Back at 2017, Part II: tDAR, Content, and Usage

Posted on by Adam Brin

We had a busy year in 2017, tDAR continued to grow with significant contributions from a number of organizations. tDAR had one major software release, Prehistoric, which unified search across collections, resources, and data integrations, and simplified rights and permissions.

Content added to tDAR in 2017

Resource Statistics

 

Repository Size

Usage Statistics

While we do not maintain detailed statistics on users or use to protect user and contributor privacy, we can share some interesting aggregate data. Below are the most frequently viewed and downloaded resources.

Popular Resources

These include the most viewed resources in tDAR.

Popular Downloads

These were the most downloaded files from tDAR.

Cultural Keywords (most used)

Geographic Keywords (most used)

Material Types (most used)

Other Keywords (most used)

Site Name Keywords (most used)

Site Type Keywords (most used)

Temporal Keywords (most used)

Investigation Types (most used)

People (most used)

Institutions (most used)