Digging Digitally

Dear DDIG Members

I’m preparing a draft report to the SAA Board about developments related to DDIG (the Digital Data Interest Group). If there is anything missing, needs clarification, or is wrong, please let me know. Below is a draft report.

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A brief note. I’ve recently joined the UC Berkeley School of Information and now run the Information and Service Design Program (warning: web-site is a draft!). It is an exciting place and tremendously challenging, but offers some wonderful opportunities to learn much and expand efforts toward better data sharing and communication in archaeology. I’ll be blogging more as I learn more about good “service” design and technologies and organizational.

I also recently wrote a short article for iCommons, an international access to knowledge organization affiliated with Creative Commons. The article is about traditional knowledge and the Access to Knowledge movement. It looks at the clash of viewpoints between some indigenous peoples intellectual property rights advocates and advocates of the Digital Commons. But it also looks at how these interests can find some common ground on issues of education, development, and activism, especially when it comes to free and open source software and community building tools.

Now that I have all these new “I” organizations in my life (I School, iCommons), I feel that maybe it’s time for an iPhone, to start exploring mobile and location based services (see discussion by my colleague, Erik Wilde) and to put another “I” in my life. Unfortunately the iPhone comes with i-crappy contract restrictions and costs lots of i-money.

So, I’m looking eagerly forward to this new gizmo, Open Moko, as a very capable alternative. It’s a wholly open mobile communications platform. Seems like it could be incredibly useful for archaeologists in the field, sending up observations in real time.

I’m very happy to report that several individuals involved in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) archaeology have agreed to post to this blog. There are very few constraints on topics and ideas (as is appropriate for this medium). I’m only providing logistical support and some minimal editorial and thematic oversight.

So, let the CRM archaeology blogging begin!

DDIG members, please provide some suggestions about an agenda for our groups meeting at the Austin SAA conference on Thursday, April 26: 6-7 PM.

Some emailed suggested agenda items include:

(1) Forming a Taskforce to work with granting agencies to encourage data publication.

(2) Forming a Taskforce to explore ways to encourage online dissemination of some CRM related “grey literature”.

(3) It is often hard to know who is doing what. We can develop a list of professional digital resources for archaeology, as well as organizations and people involved in such efforts. We can circulate this list among these different resources (including Archnet and others) to encourage better linking and coordination between different groups.

Comments on this blog are moderated, so it may take a few days for them to appear online. If you don’t feel comfortable posting suggestions to this public blog. Please email me!

I’ve composed a short report for the SAA leadership about DDIG and its activities. It would be wonderful to get some feedback from people involved in Digital Archaeology. If you see errors, omissions, or other editorial changes, please contact me and I’ll make the needed revisions.

Thanks!

Click here to download the 2007 DDIG report (pdf. document).

Hi All,

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. We’re in the process of restoring the blog database from an earlier backup. All DDIG blog content will be up shortly.

Thanks for your patience!