Digging Digitally

Yesterday was Archaeology Day organized by the AIA. (BTW. In case you didn’t notice, despite some prophetic warnings, the world apparently did not end to ruin Archaeology Day).

It’s also Archaeology Month here in California. “Archaeology Months” are sponsored by various state historical societies and various state and federal government agencies. They help spotlight local archaeology and archaeologists, and offer a focus for organizing, reaching out to a larger community and highlighting accomplishments and challenges. The Society for California Archaeology runs an annual great poster competition that helps encapsulate some of the activities of an Archaeology Month.

Which brings us to the last alignment of the calendar that I’ll note. Next week is Open Access Week! Which brings us to a fortuitous alignment in the calendar, especially with respect to the themes long explored by this blog, namely, archaeology and open access.

I see open access (and open data) as an important aspect of making archaeology broadly relevant and a more integral part of scientific, policy, and cultural debates. Open access is a necessary precondition to making archaeology part of larger conversations. It’s also an important issue when so many of our colleagues work outside of university settings and have to live, work, and make their research contributions without access to JSTOR or subscriptions to other publishers. While there’s been lots of discussion about how “grey literature” (that is, research content that’s hard to discover and sees very limited circulation) is bad for the discipline, few in archaeology have noted that many mainstream archaeological journals are “grey literature” to people outside the academy.

Of course, most people, including most archaeologists, are outside of the academy. If we want our publicly supported (through direct funding and grants, or through regulatory mandates) research to have any positive impact to our peers inside and outside of our discipline, we need to consider access issues. At the same time, we need to consider access issues when thinking about how archaeology relates to many different communities in the larger public. From the outset, it’s clear open access is not sufficient in itself to make archaeology intelligible to the public.  It often takes lots of work to help guide non-archaeologists through often very technical archaeological findings.  But at the very least, open access to archaeological literature can make it easier for outside communities to learn, even through simple Google searches, that archaeology has something (though probably very technical) to say on many different issues and many different places.

So, I’m glad these chance calendar alignments help put some focus on these issues.

BTW: In keeping with these themes, the e-journal Internet Archaeology (an essential resource for some of the best in digital archaeology) is going fully open access this week! So fire up Zotero and go get some great papers while you can!

DDIG member Ethan Watrall (Asst. Professor of Anthropology @ MSU) sends us the following information about his upcoming Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) field school, which is part of the CHI Initiative at Michigan State University.

Excerpts quoted. For full details, please see this PDF LINK.

Site Link:<http://chi.matrix.msu.edu/fieldschool> Email:watrall@msu.edu

We are extremely happy to officially announce the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool (ANP491: Methods in Cultural Heritage Informatics). Taking place from May 31st to July 1st (2011) on the campus of Michigan State University, the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool will introduce students to the tools and techniques required to creatively apply information and computing technologies to cultural heritage materials and questions.

To apply, please fill out the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool Application Form <http://chi.matrix.msu.edu/fieldschool/chi-fieldschool-application>. Applications are due no later than 5pm on March 14th. Students will be notified as to whether they have been accepted by March 25th.

There are many items of interest to DDIG members at the upcoming meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The following is a list of sessions from the preliminary program, and is not meant to be comprehensive. If you would like me to add another item to the list, please comment on the blog so everybody may see it immediately.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON:
[45] FORUM – MULTIPLE DATA AND ACCESS: EFFECTIVE MEANS OF INTEGRATING ARCHAEOBOTANICAL DATA IN BROADER ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROJECTS
[64] POSTER SESSION – ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF GIS, GPR, AND REMOTE SENSING

THURSDAY EVENING:
!!! 5-6PM, DIGITAL DATA INTEREST GROUP MEETING !!!

FRIDAY MORNING:
[115] GENERAL SESSION – ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS OF GIS, GPR, AND REMOTE SENSING
[118] FORUM – USING THE DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD (TDAR) FOR MANAGEMENT AND RESEARCH

FRIDAY AFTERNOON:
[143] SYMPOSIUM – MORTUARY PRACTICES IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST: META-DATA ISSUES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A REGIONAL DATABASE
[144] FORUM – PLANNING FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIGITAL DATA MANAGEMENT
[145] SYMPOSIUM – RESEARCH UTILIZING THE MAYA HIEROGLYPHIC DATABASE
[146] SYMPOSIUM – THREE-DIMENSIONAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL MODELING: THEORY, METHOD, PRACTICE

SATURDAY AFTERNOON:
[213] ELECTRONIC SYMPOSIUM – CONSTRUCTING A DATABASE OF LATE PLEISTOCENE/EARLY HOLOCENE ARCHAEOLOGICAL C14 DATES FOR SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA
[214] SYMPOSIUM – BLOGGING ARCHAEOLOGY
[216] ELECTRONIC SYMPOSIUM – FROM THE GROUND UP: BEST PRACTICES FOR BALANCING USABILITY WITH THEORETICAL UTILITY IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DATABASES

SUNDAY MORNING:
[250] FORUM – GIS MODELING AT THE SITE OF JOYA DE CERÉN

Sebastian Heath has an interesting discussion about museum identifiers. This is part of his ongoing project to document museum and online archaeological-collections identification schemes. Sebastian referenced a discussion circulated by Martin Doerr of the Center for Cultural Informatics on Crete (and of CIDOC fame) about aligning Web identifiers in museums toward some common design standards.

For instance, the Rosetta Stone has the PRN number: YCA62958, hence the “official” URI of the Rosetta stone is: http://collection.britishmuseum.org/object/YCA62958 . This URI should never become direct address of a document.

I absolutely agree with Sebastian on his points about getting human readable pages and avoiding divisions between the semantic and the “plain web” (contra the second sentence in the quote above).

Beyond those architecture issues however, I think the politics of naming and identifying cultural heritage will be a very interesting problem for semantic web approaches. Custody over the Rosetta Stone is in some dispute. The Elgin marbles are even more contested. I’m sure that some people in Greece would have a problem with “britishmuseum.org” in the internationally recognized / official / canonical  URI(s) for the Elgin marbles. In other words, naming and identifying things can be somewhat political and that will work against attempts to harmonize. I’m sure there will always be a need for third-parties to cross-reference identifiers.

I suspect issues like this will pose big problems to attempts to rationalize identifiers. That’s part of the reason why some digital library folks favor opaque identifiers. Of course, this digital library perspective is not universally shared.

It will be interesting to see how this discussion unfolds in cultural heritage applications.

Updated (Nov. 2):

1. Also I should note that the “Museums and the machine-processable web wiki” (a fantastic resource and community hub!!) has some excellent discussion of these issues.
2. Sebastian continued the discussion in this post.

SAA 2010 Update!

Please note: In order to allow for participants to attend all digital-related sessions, the DDIG meeting start time has been changed to 5pm on April 15.

A nice overview of the many digital preservation project that are going on can be found in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It focuses on often-crumbling manuscripts and texts but is still interesting for archaeologists too (thanks to Jack Sasson for the tip).

The Next Age of Discovery by A. Alter, in WSJ, May 8, 2009

A quick note to draw attention to an article in the latest issue of The Art Newspaper: “Facebook is more than a fad—and museums need to learn from it.”

A few quotes: “Social networks and blogs are the fastest growing online activities, according to a report published in March by research firm Nielsen Online. Almost 10% of all time spent on the internet …” “… a major factor in the success of social networks is that they allow people to select and share content. This has become a hobby, even considered by some to be a serious creative outlet, with web users spending time ‘curating’ their online space. Museums are well placed to appeal to this new generation of ‘curators’because they offer rich and interesting content that can be virtually ‘cut-up’ and stuck back together online in numerous different ways to reflect the individual tastes of each user. If remixing, reinterpreting and sharing interesting content is, as Nielsen suggests, the kind of engaging interaction that draws people to social networks, then museums should embrace the idea that ‘everyone is a curator’, both online and offline.” “For example, the Art Museum of Estonia has gone against convention by actively encouraging visitors to photograph its collection; the MoMA website helps users to co-create content and share these creations with friends.”

Cory Doctorow, an author and vocal advocate for digital civil liberties, recently reported on Boing-Boing that Reuters is suing George Mason University and Dan Cohen in relation to the popular Zotero citation management system. For those of you don’t know, Zotero is a free and open source pluggin for the Firefox browser. Zotero is a fantastic tool for scholars, since you can use it to automatically copy citation information from many important academic, library, and commercial collections (including JSTOR, Elsevier publications, Amazon, and many more) and build your own bibliographic database. You can also use Zotero to copy webpages and articles to maintain your own personal archive for later reference.

Obviously Zotero meets many of the same needs as the commercial Endnote system. Endnote is owned by Reuters (click here for the complaint specifics), the news wire service. According to the DLTJ blog, Reuters is suing the Zotero project for enabling users to convert from Endnote’s proprietary data style (see update) format to the non-proprietary data format preferred by Zotero. Essentially, Reuters would prefer to keep academics locked in their Endnote walled garden and are attempting to scuttle efforts at enhanced interoperability. 

If this lawsuit succeeds, this is really bad news for scholars, since it will limit their choice of tools and services. In effect, Reuters is claiming that you don’t really own the data you manage in Endnote, since they control everything that you can do with that data. I haven’t used Endnote in years (having shifted over to Zotero long ago), and I’m very glad I made that choice. Even Microsoft doesn’t make such strong claims about data in MS-Word, Excel, or Access file formats.

There may be improtant data preservation implications all of this as well. A researcher’s bibliographic database, which is often richly annotated, is an important resource. The Zotero project aims to help scholars share these databases in nonproprietary formats and this will make preservation of these important products of scholarship more likely. If such scholarship remains locked up, we run the risk of losing potentially valuable scholarly contributions.

At any rate, I want to point out that there is a silver-lining here. Obviously, nobody wants to get sued, but to my mind, the fact that Reuters is acting like this suggest that they see a threat here. To me, this means Dan Cohen and the whole Zotero team are doing an excellent job at giving the world of scholarly communication a much needed shake up. To have earned a lawsuit means that they are taken seriously, and that is a great sign of success!

UPDATE:

Thanks to Bruce for the clarification!

I’m putting up a brief note to see if “pingback” features in the Open Context website are working, and if so, if they are useful. Here’s an example:

An arrowhead from Petra.

Would blog links to “raw” archaeological data be useful? How many excavations maintain blogs, and if they do, would back and forth linking between a weblog and a archaeological data resource like Open Context help researchers interpret their observations?

This post is a little less “business like” and a little more thematic about the larger picture of “digital archaeology”.

I just finished attending a very interesting conference hosted by Rice University and the Hewlett Foundation. The conference brought together many invaluable projects developing high-quality Open Educational Resources (see the Hewlett Foundation’s link) and systems that not only deliver such content, but also help foster communities and collaborations between and among educators and learners. There is a now a fantastic array of infrastructure and open tools available to really enhance many of the public outreach and instructional responsibilities archaeologists have. Many of these tools can and should also be used to enhance communication between researchers. I’ll shortly post a list of links to some very exciting projects that many archaeologists may wish to join.

In addition to offering many practical discussions, Cathy Casserly (Hewlett Foundation) took the time to get us all to step back and take a look at the larger perspective. The conference started with this video (below), as a way of setting the stage and context for our discussions.

As is made so vivid by this video, the pace and dimensions of change are at once very sobering, exciting, and overwhelming. It’s this kind of context that we have to consider when we’re building a “cyberinfrastructure” for archaeology. If anything the video underscores the urgency of the need to understand and adapt to the rapidly changing social, economic, and technological context in which we work. It is a remarkable challenge communicating a meaningful and vital past in this age of exponential change.

Did You Know; Shift Happens – Globalization; Information Age

(Created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod, posted on YouTube by “vipeness”)