Photo by Justin Shen on Unsplash

The 88th Annual Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting will be starting this week and Digital Antiquity staff will be in attendance, participating in a variety of forums and poster sessions in rainy Portland!

Digital Antiquity staff will also be on hand at Exhibit Hall booth #900 throughout the week, so be sure to stop by with any tDAR or digital curation related questions, or just stop by to say hi!

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @DigArcRec and Instagram at @digitalantiquity for up-to-the-minute tDAR news throughout the conference!

Thursday, March 30, 2023

  • Digital Antiquity Booth
    • Room: Exhibit Hall
    • Booth #: 900
    • Time: 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
  • Symposium: [19] Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision Part 1: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay
    • Room: C124
    • Time: 8:15 AM – 11:45 AM
      • 10:15 – Rebecca Bria and Brian McCray—Scale, Interaction, and Society: Constituting Social Boundaries in the Northern Peruvian Andes
  • Poster: [75] GIS and Spatial Analysis Part 1
    • Room: Exhibit Hall A
    • Post Slot #: 75-d
    • Time: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Friday, March 31, 2023

  • Digital Antiquity Booth
    • Room: Exhibit Hall
    • Booth #: 900
    • Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
  • Poster: [124] The Importance of Ethical Archaeology
    • Room: Poster Hall
    • Poster Slot #: 124-m
    • Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
  • Annual Business Meeting and Awards Presentation
    • Room: Ballroom 204 (OCC)
    • Time: 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
    • Join in celebrating receiving the “Award in Excellence in Curations and Collections Management”

Saturday, April 1, 2023

  • Digital Antiquity Booth
    • Room: Exhibit Hall
    • Booth #: 900
    • Time: 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM
  • Symposium: [170] A Tribute to the Contributions of Lawrence C. Todd to World Prehistory
    • Room: C124
    • Time: 8:45 AM – 12:00 PM
      • 10:15 – Charles England, Ryan Byerly and Chris Nicholson – “Have You Ever Seen a Walrus in Nebraska?” Reflections on the Career and Contributions of Larry Todd

Digital Antiquity conference image for SAA

The 87th Annual Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting will be starting this week and Digital Antiquity staff will be in attendance, participating in a variety of forums and poster sessions other events in rainy Chicago!

Digital Antiquity staff will also be on hand at Exhibit Hall booth #103 throughout the week, so be sure to stop by with any tDAR or digital curation related questions, learn more about the SAA/Center for Digital Antiquity Good Digital Curation Agreement, enroll in our raffles to win some great prizes, or just stop by to say hi!

Follow us on Twitter @DigArcRec and Instagram at @digitalantiquity for up-to-the-minute tDAR news throughout the conference!

Thursday, March 31, 2022

  • Digital Antiquity Booth
    • Room: Exhibit Hall
    • Booth #: 103
    • Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
  • Forum: [36] Exploring Data Stewardship with tDAR, Open Context and DINAA
    • Room: Continental C
    • Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Friday, April 1, 2022

  • Digital Antiquity Booth
    • Room: Exhibit Hall
    • Booth #: 103
    • Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
  • Poster: [113] Digital Archaeology Across North America

Saturday, April 2, 2022

  • Digital Antiquity Booth
    • Room: Exhibit Hall
    • Booth #: 103
    • Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

The 84th Annual Society for American Archaeology meeting is just around the corner, and Digital Antiquity staff look forward to participating in a variety of symposiums, forums, and other events throughout the week of April 10-14, 2019 in Albuquerque, New Mexico! Digital Antiquity highlights will include a symposium honoring the illustrious career of Keith Kintigh (4/12), a workshop geared towards helping SAA members utilize tDAR’s digital data curation services (4/13), and many other exciting happenings listed below.  

Digital Antiquity staff will also be on hand at Exhibit Hall booth #505 throughout the week, so be sure to stop by with any tDAR or digital curation related questions, learn more about the SAA/Center for Digital Antiquity Good Digital Curation Agreement, enroll in our raffles to win some great prizes, or just stop by to say hi!

Follow us on Twitter @DigArcRec  and Instagram at digitalantiquity for up-to-the-minute tDAR news throughout the conference!

  • Thursday, April 11, 2019
    • Digital Antiquity Booth
      • Room: Exhibit Hall in Hall 4 (ACC)
      • Booth #: 505
      • Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
    • Symposium: [34] Zooarchaeology and Technology: Case Studies and Applications
      • Room: 140 Aztec
      • Time: 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM
      • Highlight: 8:15 AM “Mapping Faunal Data to tDAR Ontologies to Address Data Comparability and Archaic Period Use of Animals in the Interior Eastern United States” —Bonnie Styles, Mona Colburn and Sarah Neusius
    • Electronic Symposium: [134] Towards a Standardization of Photogrammetric Methods in Archaeology: A Conversation About ‘Best Practices’ in an Emerging Methodology
      • Room: 10 Anasazi
      • Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
      • Highlight: Digital Curation of Photogrammetric Data —Rachel Fernandez

  • Friday, April 12, 2019
    • Digital Antiquity Booth
      • Room: Exhibit Hall in Hall 4 (ACC)
      • Booth #: 505
      • Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
    • Symposium: [188] Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers In Honor of Keith Kintigh
      • Room: 275 Ballroom B
      • Time: 8:00 AM – 11:00 AM
      • Highlight: 10:15 AM “Promoting an Archaeological Perspective in Repatriation, Consultation, National Monuments, and Data Science —Francis McManamon
    • Forum: [225] From “Saving the Past for the Future” to “Saving the Future with the Past”: Building Arguments for Contemporary Relevance
      • Room: 220 Ruidoso
      • Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
      • Highlight: Keith Kintigh and Jeffrey Altschul, Moderators
    • Symposium: [237] Beyond Collections: Federal Archaeology and “New Discoveries” Under NAGPRA
      • Room: 130 Cimarron
      • Time: 1:00 PM – 3:30 PM
      • Highlight: 3:00 PM Discussant —Francis McManamon
    • Symposium: [256] I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman
      • Room: 280 Ballroom A
      • Time: 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
      • Highlight: 2:15 PM “Lessons That Can’t Be Taught: Applying Anthropology in Honduras and Beyond” —Claire Novotny, Anna Novotny and Leigh Anne Ellison

  • Saturday, April 13, 2019
    • Digital Antiquity Booth
      • Room: Exhibit Hall in Hall 4 (ACC)
      • Booth #: 505
      • Time: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
    • Workshop: Using tDAR: A Workshop for SAA Members Benefiting from the SAA–Center for Digital Antiquity Good Digital Curation Agreement
      • Room: Enchantment C-D, Foyer
      • Time: 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM
      • Workshop Leaders: Leigh Anne Ellison and Rachel Fernandez

We hope to see you all there!

Happy Centennial, Grand Canyon National Park from Digital Antiquity and tDAR

The Grand Canyon is an astonishing natural resource that has enchanted humankind for thousands of years. As evidence, this national treasure is filled with ancient and historical archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, and historic structures. 

In honor of Grand Canyon National Park’s Centennial, we invite you to dig into the Grand Canyon’s near and distant past by accessing maps, photos, research, and other resources available in tDAR!

As always, tDAR’s wealth of archaeological resources are free to access and share! Register for free to learn more about the incredible cultural landscape of the Grand Canyon!




Parashant tDAR webpage

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.

 

 

Digital Antiquity is pleased to announce Prehistoric, tDAR’s 16th major release.   This software release showcases: a unified search interface, significant improvements to features related to rights and permission, a redesign of the dashboard, as well as many smaller updates and general improvements.

Unified Search:

The simple and advanced searches in tDAR continue to search active resources, but now also search collections and data integration.   This means that no matter what you’re looking for, you can now search in one place.  We’ve also added a separate “limiting” section on the left to allow you to drill down to a specific type (if needed).

Rights and Permissions:

tDAR has always supported Open Access for materials, but we recognize that not all materials should be publically shared.  In this release of tDAR we’ve added a number of features to assist in the management of rights and permissions.

Rights and Permissions Page:

We’ve moved the rights and permissions section from the collections and resource edit pages into their own dedicated pages.  This allows for faster and easier access to these functions. It also allows us to add a few new features such as timed access and invite a user.

Timed Access:

You can now grant access to a collection of resources or to an individual resource for a limited period of time.  Simply select a person, assign rights, and choose a date after which the permissions will be revoked.  tDAR will email both you and the user to let them know when access has expired.

Invite a User:

Have you ever wanted to share access to a resource or a collection, but the person you wanted to share with wasn’t currently a tDAR user?  In Prehistoric you can add unregistered users to the access page.  You will be prompted by tDAR to customize an invitation email to the unregistered user, and when the new user registers, he or she will be granted access to the item automatically.

New Dashboard:

We’ve separated out the user dashboard into a series of pages, each dedicated to a specific task: “resources”, “collections”, “bookmarks”, “billing accounts”, “my profile”, and “export.”  Each of these pages integrates features from the existing dashboard but provides easier access.

As a final note, we would be remiss without recognizing the significant contributions of Jim DeVos to this and all other releases over the previous six years.  We wish him the best in his new role with the ASU Libraries. We are also glad to have Brian Castellanos join us and look forward to work with him to make tDAR better.

 

 

Welcome to Obsidian: The Center for Digital Antiquity’s 15th major release of tDAR.  In this overview of Obsidian you will find information detailing both the major and minor improvements made to the tDAR system.  The pertinent modifications of Obsidian include improvements to Collection and Keyword Pages, Maps, Data Integration, and a new export feature.

Improved Collection Pages:

We have enhanced collection pages (example) to include more summary information about the collections’ contents. This includes a map showing where the resources in the collection are located geographically (aggregated from the bounding boxes) and clusters of common keywords related to the resources in each collection.  Additionally, when viewed in the “map view”, collections now dynamically load all of the items in the collection onto the map.

collection

Coding Sheet Mapping & Dataset Changes:

Coding sheets now have an error report displaying values that may be missing from them, but are present in the datasets they’re mapped to.  They also include “special” mappings for values that are unknown, or missing.

codingerror

 

Data Table Descriptions:

One of the missing features for data tables was a user’s inability to add a description to a dataset; we have corrected this issue.

Simplifying Associating Images with Datasets

With datasets like the Mimbres collection, we’ve added a new column type “filename” that simplifies the mapping between a row in a dataset and an image file.

Searching within maps:

With tDAR’s coverage being worldwide, one challenge is allowing a user to identify a specific area on the map to either search or draw their bounding box.  We’ve added a search box in the top right of most maps to allow users to specify a town, city, state, or country to navigate on the map to the approximate location.

Improved World Map

We’ve expanded the world map on the homepage to allow users to filter down to specific states within the US. Users can now see how many resources are associated with each US State as well as country. This has also been implemented in an extensible form that will allow us to implement similar maps on collection pages.

Faster searching:

We’ve removed some of the debugging associated with the initial SOLR implementation as well as improved how we display and manage information in SOLR to significantly impact the search performance (In some cases, up-to 10x faster). Of note here, we were extremely conservative in our initial implementation of SOLR, and this release, along with the next few will start to make more aggressive changes that take advantage of all of SOLR’s features as well as improvements.

Data Export:

It’s important for users to feel confident about contributing their data to tDAR. Part of fulfilling our promise of being an archive is allowing users retrieve their materials again. We’ve added the ability to export all of the files associated with a billing account or collection. Users can make a request and the system will create a ZIP file with all of the files they uploaded, any archival versions, and copies of the XML metadata records, providing a description of all records.

Linked Open Data:

We’ve added the ability to associate keywords with external vocabularies such as Open Context, Pelagios, and other authorities. Those keywords and relationships are exposed as JSON-LD and embedded in each tDAR page.

keyword

Improved API Documentation:

We’ve updated tDAR’s API documentation to include more info on what APIs are available, and how to access and/or use them.  We’d love your feedback  on their functionality  and are more than happy to assist with any questions you have.  We are always open to suggestions on what you think would assist in the continuous improvement of tDAR. 

GeoJSON search endpoint:

Along with our existing search endpoints (HTML, and RSS / GeoRSS), we’ve added a GeoJSON endpoint for tDAR allowing easier display of tDAR results on ESRI, Google, and Leaflet maps.

 

We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements available in our Obsidian release.  As always, we encourage you to be in touch with questions or feedback.  If you would like to learn more about tDAR for your personal or professional research and data management needs contact us.

Digital Antiquity is pleased to announce the 14th major release of tDAR named Neolithic. This release focuses on three major areas of the repository: (1) visualization, (2) maps and spatial data, and (3) modularization and infrastructure work. In addition, the development team has improved performance and reliability as well as making a series of smaller enhancements.

Visualizations:

We have redesigned many of tDAR’s graphs and visualizations to be more interactive and appealing. Of note, in the world map which can now be explored and shows break-downs of the different resource-types by country. The graphs on the “explore” page have also be enhanced. Finally, the ontology browser has been updated to better display larger ontologies.

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 5.37.27 PM

Mapping:

We’ve improved the underlying mapping libraries used in tDAR. These enhancements allow us to cluster mapped search results, improving the interface. We’ve also updated the maps on the resource pages and improved the creation and management of bounding boxes on the resource edit screen.
Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 5.43.43 PM

We’re proud to announce the latest release of tDAR (Munsell).  This release was focused on modernizing and re-designing tDAR’s Data Integration tool to make it easier to use and faster, but also has a number of major feature updates across the application.

Completely re-designed data integration tool:
For those unfamiliar with tDAR’s integration tool, it provides a means by which users who have uploaded data sets to tDAR can combine multiple data sets with different schema and coding conventions into a unified, shared data set. 

We’ve redesigned it to simplify the user-interface.

main integration screen
Adding data sets is simpler.
Users can search for data sets that are bookmarked or integrate-able (that is, having one column mapped to an ontology), as well as  by keyword.

selecting tables

It is easier to add integration columns via a drop-down menu.

selecting an integration column

Once data sets have been added, if they share a mapping to an ontology, users can add an “Integration Column.” Integration columns allow users to further filter the resulting data set by selecting terms.

Once an integration column has been created, users can then "filter" results by selecting values from the ontology. tDAR display's a checkmark where each data set has actual values.

Once an integration column has been created, users can then “filter” results by selecting values from the ontology. tDAR display’s a checkmark where each data set has actual values.


A new “count” column type that represents count data in data sets.

adding a count column

A screenshot of a count column being added to an integration.


It’s easier to add a display column.

adding a display column

A display column being added to the integration. Each data set can supply one column to be included in a display column.


We’ve added better documentation of the integration in the excel output.

Viewing results

The Integration Results preview screen which includes a summary table, a preview of the results, and a link to download the full results.

Additional Features:

  • Integrations can now be saved and restored.
  • We’ve improved support for larger integrations 10+ data sets
  • The results of integrations are now sorted by the selected integration columns.

Other Major Features of the release:

  • Embargoed files can now be restricted for different periods of time — 6 months, 1 year, two years, and five years.
  • Institutions can now have email addresses and be used as contacts.
  • The material keywords section now includes free-form material keywords as well as the existing controlled vocabulary.
  • Contributors now have access to their view and download statistics for the resources, billing accounts, and collections they own or have administrative rights to. These statistics show the number of views and downloads for resources over time.
  • Dedicated web pages have been introduced for keywords for improved browsing.
  • Updated “user profile” pages in tDAR.
Backend and Technical Features:
  • tDAR’s OAI-PMH endpoint now supports “sets” which represent each of tDAR’s user-generated collections.
  • The tDAR Import APIs now support replacing files and setting the same access restrictions on files as other materials.
  • A new Authentication API.
  • A number of backend changes to improve long-term sustainability.

We’re proud to announce tDAR’s twelfth production release: Lithic.  This release contains numerous bug fixes, performance enhancements, and security related improvements.  Some specific highlights include:  

  • Simplified sign-up, purchase, and download experiences
  • A new dashboard where non-contributing users can search and use tDAR more easily
  • Various performance and security improvements 
  • New “Contact” functionality allows users to request access to a confidential file, suggest a correction, or connect with the record owner for any tDAR record
  • Redesigned  Collection edit page to make it simpler to use
  • Improved loading speed for image galleries with lots of images
  • Improved searching:
    • Better relevancy ranking and results for resources in tDAR for a number of cases including Site Codes, pluralization, and multi-word terms
    • Collections that may be related to your search are now displayed along with search results
    • When viewing search results on a map, hovering your mouse over a result will reveal that resource’s geographic area (for  public resources only)
    • Better relevancy ranking when displaying map results
  • User Notifications on the dashboard are more personalized and dismissible
  • The ability to copy or duplicate existing resources in tDAR 
  • Improvements in data integration:
    • Simplified filter page for data integration that does not permit filtering of values that do not exist in the selected data
    • Users can now auto-select specific columns when integrating resultsUsers can now associate external DOIs with any resource type except projects