On March 2, the Digital Data Interest Group (DDIG) released its annual report to the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). The report summarizes advances in digital data curation, including the new NSF requirement for data management plans and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy call for comment on a possible requirement that publicly funded research results be publicly accessible.

The report also highlights tDAR and Open Context as digital data resources, the former as a repository and the latter as a publication venue. To view the full context of the report, check it out on Digging Digitally, the official DDIG blog.

Since 2004, a national team of faunal analysts has worked together to use and improve the data integration tools of the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). The North American Faunal Working Group (FWG), led by Kate Spielmann, met in at the School of  Human Evolution and Social Change, ASU in Tempe this October to discuss their ongoing work. The FWG is divided provisionally into two parts: the Eastern and Southwestern regional groups. Each group currently is involved in separate pilot studies integrating faunal data sets in tDAR.  The Eastern group suggested several improvements to the tDAR integration tool itself, while the Southwestern group raised a range of challenges to be overcome regarding the coding of faunal data and the importance of their archaeological contexts. The workshop members also are drafting a new National Science Foundation funding proposal to move ahead with synthetic research—integrating faunal data sets from the Eastern and Southwestern regions—using tDAR.

See Kate Spielmann’s profile.

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.

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.