Digging Digitally

Earlier this year, “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today,” a study by Ithaka was published. They analyzed “the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. Twelve detailed case studies present the steps project leaders have taken to achieve this, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation. These studies include financial data, and explore the decision-making process that project leaders undertake when experimenting with different strategies to find the best fit for their organization.” You can find a review in the Inside Higher Ed blog. The study is available online:

Full Document

Download full document, including the Final Report and all 12 case studies, 135 pages (high resolution, 4.5MB)
Download full document, including the Final Report and all 12 case studies, 135 pages (low resolution, 2.8MB)

Final Report

Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today
Nancy L. Maron, K. Kirby Smith, Matthew Loy
Foreword by Kevin Guthrie and Laura Brown

Case Studies

BOPCRIS Digitisation Centre: Experimentation with Sustainability and Partnerships for Library Digitisation Projects
Hartley Library, University of Southampton
Southampton, United Kingdom

Centre for Computing in the Humanities: Leveraging Shared Infrastructure and Expertise to Develop Digital Projects in an Academic Department
King’s College London
London, United Kingdom

DigiZeitschriften: Library Partnership and a Subscription Model for a Journal Database
Göttingen State and University Library, University of Göttingen
Göttingen, Germany

eBird: A Two-sided Market for Academic Researchers and Enthusiasts
Cornell University Lab of Ornithology (Information Science Department)
New York, United States

Electronic Enlightenment: Subscription-based Resource Sold Through a University Press
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom

Hindawi Publishing Corporation: The Open-Access Contributor-Pays Model
Cairo, Egypt

L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel: Free Content and Rights Licensing as Complementary Strategies
Bry-sur-Marne and Paris, France

The Middle School Portal 2: Math and Science Pathways, National Science Digital Library: Early Sustainability Planning for a Grant-Funded Digital Library
The Ohio State University
Ohio, United States

The National Archives: Digitisation with Commercial Partnerships via the Licensed Internet Associates Program
London, United Kingdom

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Building an Endowment with Community Support
Stanford University
California, United States

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae®: Specialised Historical Content for a Niche Audience
University of California, Irvine
California, United States

V&A Images: Image Licensing at a Cultural Heritage Institution
Victoria and Albert Museum
London, United Kingdom

A new publication from Microsoft Research is now available (open access) online: The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, Edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle. Although as usual not specifically aimed at archaeology, there’s some interesting stuff. You can download it whole or by paper:

Introductions

• Foreword Gordon Bell
• Jim Gray on eScience: a transformed scientific method
  Edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle

Part 1: Earth and Environment

• Introduction Dan Fay
• Gray’s laws: database-centric computing in science
  Alexander S. Szalay, José A. Blakeley
• The emerging science of environmental applications
  Jeff Dozier, William B. Gail
• Redefining ecological science using data
  James R. Hunt, Dennis D. Baldocchi, Catharine van Ingen
• A 2020 vision for ocean science
  John R. Delaney, Roger S. Barga
• Bringing the night sky closer: discoveries in the data deluge
  Alyssa A. Goodman, Curtis G. Wong
• Instrumenting the earth: next-generation sensor networks and environmental science
  Michael Lehning, Nicholas Dawes, Mathias Bavay, Marc Parlange, Suman Nath,
  Feng Zhao

Part 2: Health and Wellbeing

• Introduction Simon Mercer
• The healthcare singularity and the age of semantic medicine
  Michael Gillam, Craig Feied, Jonathan Handler, Eliza Moody, Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Mark Smith, John Dickason
• Healthcare delivery in developing countries: challenges and potential solutions
  Joel Robertson, Del DeHart, Kristin Tolle, David Heckerman
• Discovering the wiring diagram of the brain
  Jeff W. Lichtman, R. Clay Reid, Hanspeter Pfister, Michael F. Cohen
• Toward a computational microscope for neurobiology
  Eric Horvitz, William Kristan
• A unified modeling approach to data-intensive healthcare
  Iain Buchan, John Winn, Chris Bishop
• Visualization in process algebra models of biological systems
  Luca Cardelli, Corrado Priami

Part 3: Scientific Infrastructure

• Introduction Daron Green
• A new path for science? Mark R. Abbott
• Beyond the tsunami: developing the infrastructure to deal with life sciences data
  Christopher Southan, Graham Cameron
• Multicore computing and scientific discovery
  James Larus, Dennis Gannon
• Parallelism and the cloud
  Dennis Gannon, Dan Reed
• The impact of workflow tools on data-centric research
  Carole Goble, David De Roure
• Semantic escience: encoding meaning in next-generation digitally enhanced science
  Peter Fox, James Hendler
• Visualization for data-intensive science
  Charles Hansen, Chris R. Johnson, Valerio Pascucci, Claudio T. Silva
• A platform for all that we know: creating a knowledge-driven research infrastructure Savas Parastatidis

Part 4: Scholarly Communication

• Introduction Lee Dirks
• Jim Gray’s fourth paradigm and the construction of the scientific record Clifford Lynch
• Text in a data-centric world Paul Ginsparg
• All aboard: toward a machine-friendly scholarly communication system
  Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze
• The future of data policy
  Anne Fitzgerald, Brian Fitzgerald, Kylie Pappalardo
• I have seen the paradigm shift, and it is us John Wilbanks
• From web 2.0 to the global database Timo Hannay

Final Thoughts

• The way forward Craig Mundie
• Conclusions and Next Steps
  Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, Kristin Tolle

I’ve been distracted by the Recovery.gov work lately, and I almost missed a very interesting read that comes from Nisha Doshi, Publications Assistant for the Public Library of Science.

In her March 17 post to the PLoS blog, Doshi provides an informative summary of the archaeology-related publications that have come out recently in PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed scientific journal for the speedy publication of research in science and medicine. The nine publications and one interview she highlights in her post are primarily in the field of archaeogenetics and will be of interest to many DDIG members. Peter Suber, over at Open Access News picked up the story here (and scooped me BTW).

Doshi sees these recent publications as indicating that “the open-access model has an important role to play in archaeology.” While this suite of high-caliber publications is encouraging, we still have a long way to go in promoting open access. PLoS ONE is not necessarily a suitable publication venue for many of the less science-heavy archaeological and anthropological studies. Access to archaeological research would be greatly improved with more open access venues dedicated to the field (such as Fornvännen <http://fornvannen.se>, the Swedish journal of archaeology and the Journal of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Archaeology<http://www.jiia.it/>), as well as a dedicated repository for self-archived copies of non-open-access publications in archaeology.

A subject repository would be wonderful. Does anyone know of ongoing efforts for this in archaeology?

Looking at the blog Ars Technica, I ran into a post reviewing an interesting report by the British Library and JISC. The report looks as Internet usage patterns of young people born after 1993 (Side note! 1993! I met my WIFE that year! I’m feeling old…). The aim of the report is to help guide development of digital library services.

The report details how young people, while comfortable with technology, are by no means always “expert users”. Relatively simple search forms most widely used, and “advanced search” functions see comparatively little use. According to the report:

Users make very little use of advanced search facilities, assuming that search engines
`understand’ their queries. They tend to move rapidly from page to page, spending little time reading or digesting information and they have difficulty making relevance judgements about the pages they retrieve.

That’s interesting. It suggests that most young people have big expectations for getting relevant information from a simple text box form. I suppose that’s even more motivation for more intelligent natural language search. Academic repositories may want to look at Powerset, if they come up with search tools (like Google) that you can install on your own sites.

Ars Technica also noted this report claims that “authority” is not dead for the Google Generation. This should give some comfort to professional scholars who worry that students will uncritically believe everything they see on the Web and won’t pay attention to traditional mechanisms for validating information (peer review, credentials, quality of sources, etc.).

Anyway, there’s much more to this report. Dig away!

         Fennelle makes a good point.  My impression is that agencies are often protective of their GIS data and may fear that wide disclosure will lead to people with nefarious purposes knowing where sites are located.  One of the frustrations (also an opportunity) is that through CRM investigations incredibly detailed GPS and GIS databases are often built-up about archaeological sites or regions, but there is no policy in place or architecture for capturing much of that data long-term.  For example, my firm often conducts GPS-based archaeological survey such that every artifact collected is associated with a GPS point (for example in a controlled surface collection).  But typically, agencies will only want one or a few GPS points for each site (or a shapefile with site boundaries).  A lot of these points are also, or could be tagged with information on stratigraphy, soils, slopes, groundcover, or prior distubance.  So aside from legacy data storage within your own firms’ archives there is no long-term organized effort to preserve the painstakingly collected data.  I am sure there are people in SHPO offices and elsewhere who would be interested in a broader-based archaeology GIS (currently state CR GISs work well but data collection/display is somewhat limited).                                                

          The possibility is that web-based and accessible formats could be used to store and make available archaeological data without compromising the need to secure certain kinds of data.  A collaborator of mine has written an XML data format that could be used to tag archaeological data in ways that could be read by various internet scripts.  It is pretty basic right now but it or something like it could make distributed GIS or GPS archaeology on the web more possible!  He and I also are collaborating on a webviewer that allows for analysis of spatial archaeological data within any webbrowser (he is the programmer not me!).   Both icon and  color-based intuitive analyses (Jacques Bertin’s visual variables) as well as results of quantitative analyses are available. I’ll post some more information on these ideas if anyone is interested in seeing it.

 

Kevin Schwarz

     

 

Something of an Open Access breakthrough is happening in the world of archaeology.

Open Access News reports that the APA/AIA have recently issued a report that takes into account open access recommendations made by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)(blogged about here).

The extended excerpt reported by Open Access News shows that the APA/AIA report makes some important moves toward recognizing the value of open access. The report also notes increased barriers to scholarship created by the recent expansion of copyright restrictions. While this is an important observation, the APA/AIA report should also have recommended Creative Commons licenses as a strategy for unlocking scholarly materials from overly restrictive copyright. Given that the ACLS report suggested use of Creative Commons licenses (page 45), I am a little bit puzzled about this omission in the APA/AIA report.

Beyond licencing, the APA/AIA has some good language about interoperability (including a discussion of the OpenURL standard, related to the COinS standard discussed here). Additional discussion about the need for data sharing and longevity is also in the report (page 4).

The discussion about the “Digital Monograph Series” (pages 9-10) is also of interest to DDIG members. It noted that there is still a great deal of skepticism about publishing with digital media. Though, I wonder how quickly this may be changing given the growing amount of activity seen in the world of digital scholarship. Nevertheless, the report recognizes the need for dissemination mechanisms and calls for a new publication series “for works that would be improved through the digital medium”. Databases and the like would be included in this.

And there is much more, plus a discussion of this report (while it was in draft form) over at the Stoa Consortium. Don’t miss the comments by Greg Crane (Editor in Chief of the Perseus Digital Library), which (I believe) rightly emphasize how the “…center of gravity for intellectual life in academia and society as a whole has already shifted decisively to a digital environment.”

Nevertheless, the seriousness and interest in Open Access frameworks shown in this report is significant news, especially because it comes from a scholarly society. What a marked point of contrast from the very counter-productive approach taken by AAA! The APA/AIA report is well worth reading by archaeologists, including the leadership of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA).

A few recent open access developments circulated by Peter Suber highlight why we need to do more to raise awareness.

Regular readers of this blog may think I’m beating a dead-horse on this Open Access issue. However, some issues need continued attention. A recent report out of the UK illustrates cost increases in scholarly publishing very clearly. Social Science journal costs have risen some 39% between 2000-2006, which is more than twice the general rate of inflation (page IV, see link for the full report below).

• Sonya White and Claire Creaser, “Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices,” March 2007, http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/lisu/downloads/op37.pdf

Ultimately, this hurts faculty and students. If universities have to pay more and more to publishers, there is less money for new faculty hires, graduate student support, and undergraduate education. Bloated subscription fees therefore make life much more difficult for archaeologists in the university setting. And this impacts CRM archaeology too, since CRM organizations also depend on universities for training new people and for participation in professional publication. Archaeology aways seems to struggle financially, and we could certainly do without the financial squeeze that comes from escalating publication costs.

Still, much needs to be done to spread word of the many advantages of Open Access. However, Suber linked to a recent report by the Research Information Network showing that only 1 in 10 university faculty members are aware of the open access debate and issues. This is not too surprising given the many demands faculty face, and that library systems may still largely insulate faculty from directly facing dramatically escalating costs in subscriptions.

DDIG members! Open Access is an important issue for the future of our discipline. Please do what you can to get acquainted with the issues, and raise awareness with our colleagues. Here’s an excellent background primer to learn more. Please also come to the Open Archaeology Reception at the SAA conference in Austin. You’ll get to learn more about the issues, get a free t-shirt (while supplies last), and much on some sushi!

I’ve been traveling and coding so much that I haven’t had time to keep up with news in the Open Access world. It turns out that there are two important developments just in the past few data that I should alert to DDIG members.

Self-Interested Data-Sharing:
First off, Peter Suber recently noted a recently article published by Heather A. Piwowar, Roger S. Day, and Douglas B. Fridsma in PloS One that shows an impact advantage for people who publish primary data. The demonstrate a 69% increase in citation for articles associated with publicly available data. For those of us interested in encouraging comprehensive and open publication of archaeological research data, this is very good news. We no longer only have to make appeals to ethics, preservation, transparency, or the possibility for new modes of inquiry (through reanalysis and reuse of shared data). We can now appeal to enlightened self-interest. Publishing your data makes your research more cited and more influential. That’s a much more persuasive and personally meaningful case for data sharing.

NSF Cyberinfrastructure Report:
A second post noted by Peter Suber linked to a new NSF report “Cyberinfrastructure Vision For 21st Century Discovery“. Suber highlighted text in the report calling for open access to scientific data, an important and needed policy direction. Dan Atkins, head of the NSF Cyberinfrastructure office, spoke about this report at the recent Hewlett/Rice conference on Open Educational Resources. He discussed how the report makes clear recommendations for US cyberinfrastructure to not only support enhanced research and research communication, but also to meet increasing training and educational needs.

It seems clear that we should work toward open data sharing and accessibility so that content can be made to serve multiple needs, from “cutting-edge” research, to instruction, and also (but not often discussed) the needs of the greater public, both to stimulate life-long learning and creativity. These latter issues are important (and noted needs in the NSF report, see page 39), but easy to forget. We often overlook the important and growing place of life-long learning in our society, and too often think of education as something that solely takes place in established institutions.

Thus, we have our work cut out for us. There are many balls to juggle, ranging from IP practices, technical interoperability, ease of use, outreach, and following the dizzying array of developments taking place across the web, in education and in the commercial sector.