Archaeology Data Service (ADS) in the UK and Digital Antiquity in the US are collaborating to revise and improve the current Guides to Good Practice, which contain recommended measures for the preservation and curation of digital data. Although only certain sections of the six Guides are currently publicly available, ADS and Digital Antiquity invite revision and comments by archaeologists and other data professionals.
The new Guides are expected to be released later in 2011.
In August the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social and Behavioral Sciences Issued a call for white papers on future research directions as a part of its SBE 2020 Project. Keith Kintigh, Francis P. McManamon and Katherine Spielmann responded to this call with their submission entitled, “Synthesis and Cyberinfrastructure for SBE Research.” Their essay argues for the vital need to invest in social science data digital infrastructure by the NSF. The authors cite vast improvements in synthetic natural science research as the result of massive NSF investment in its infrastructure and synthesis. They note that social sciences have not yet made a similar investment and cannot simply adopt extant natural and physical science infrastructures. Due to the nature of the data, research is needed on appropriate forms of metadata, data integration and synthesis for different types of social, behavioral and economic science data sets.
Get specific! See Kintigh, McManamon and Spielmann’s recommendations here.
On December 10, 2009 the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a call for comment on how to improve access to the results of federally funded research projects. Digital Antiquity’s Francis McManamon (Executive Director) and Sander van der Leeuw (Chair, Digital Antiquity Board of Directors) responded, stating the importance of increased access to archaeological data collected in the United States—a process reliant on a majority of federal funding. The comment suggested the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) as a tool for increasing knowledge of extant data, for integrating new data, for preserving at-risk data, and for increasing the cost efficiency of federally funded research.
Read the full comment here. Also see the OSTP Call for Comment here.
In 2007, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Archaeology Data Services at the University of York, Arizona State University, the University of Arkansas, the Pennsylvania State University, SRI Foundation, and Washington State University was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant to develop a long-term plan for the organization and operation of integrated digital archaeological data repository. This activity led to the creation of an organization, archaeoinformatics.org. Utilizing their planning grant, the members of archaeoinformatics.org developed detailed plan.
The plan called for development of a user-friendly and attractive but technologically and financially feasible archaeological repository to provide for much wider accessibility to archaeological data and its long-term preservation. The plan led to the development of a more detailed proposal to the Mellon Foundation for funds to create Digital Antiquity.
Click here for a copy of the 2008 report on the results of the planning grant.
In July, 2006, Keith Kintigh published an article in American Antiquity entitled, “The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration,” reporting on the 2004 the workshop of the same name. Archaeologists, computer scientists and other informatics researchers met at the 2004 workshop to develop a shared vision of archaeological cyberinfrastructure based on new technologies in information integration. The workshop members concluded that a well-planned infrastructure would enable research at greater scales than currently possible by providing more effective access to data. The workshop conclusions also noted that such an infrastructure would protect fragile data while improving documentation.
For more information, check out the full article linked here.
Dean Snow and colleagues Mark Gahegan, Lee Giles, Kenneth Hirth, George Milner, Prasenjit Mitra and James Wang recently published an article in Science about creating an appropriate architecture for entering and managing archaeological data. Their proposed system would integrate image and text searches, GIS analysis, as well as visualization and content management tools. Additionally, their planned use of open-source versions of the toolkit would allow more accessibility by different users, facilitating the addition and use of data.
Read the article online here.