Keith Kintigh forwarded me an important announcement for the DDIG community:

As a member of SAA’s Digital Data Interest Group, we’d like to invite you to participate in a virtual lecture series that we hope can help set the direction for the development of a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure for archaeology. This series is organized by archaeoinformatics.org, a new consortium of five institutions that have joined together to advance the cause of building such a cyberinfrastructure. Briefly, our vision is for a disciplinary effort to build an open, Internet-based information infrastructure that will provide integrated, concept-oriented access to a distributed network of archaeological data sources–including databases, textual sources (such as gray literature reports and articles), and images. The objective would be to advance our ability to do synthetic and comparative research in archaeology and, at the same time, to promote the long-term preservation of irreplaceable archaeological data, along with the metadata that make them meaningful.

The idea behind the lecture series is to host, over the Internet, live presentations on both existing archaeological initiatives in cyberinfrastructure and also successful cyberinfrastructure initiatives in other scientific disciplines. We expect that it will be possible to learn a great deal from the accomplishments of a number of these efforts both in the US and world-wide. At the same time, we hope to foster interactions among these efforts and to promote a greater engagement in these efforts by interested archaeologists.

The lecture series will begin at noon EDT (16:00 GMT) on March 26, 2007 with a introduction to the activities of archaeoinformatics.org. This will be followed at the same time, two weeks later, on April 9, with a lecture by Eric Kansa on the Alexandria Archive Institute‘s archaeological project, OpenContext. On April 23rd, Chaitan Baru, Director of Science Research and Development at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, will speak on GEON, geology’s successful analog to some of what we believe archaeology needs to accomplish. The series will resume in the fall, with lectures every other week. Generally, the presentations are expected to be about 45 minutes with a maximum of 45 additional minutes reserved for discussion. Up to date schedule information can be found at http://archaeoinformatics.org/lecture_series.html.

It will be possible to take advantage of this lecture series in several ways. First, using conferencing facilities provided by Access Grid or InSORS (one or the other is available at most University campuses) you can be networked into the virtual meeting with two-way audio and video. Alternately, you can receive an outgoing audio or audio-video feed of the lecture and, if you wish, email questions to a moderator. Finally, with the permission of the presenters we will make archived versions of the presentations available through the archaeoinformatics.org web site. The lecturer’s PowerPoint presentations will be posted on the web so that you can download them and follow along on your own machine, or you can receive a live feed via Breeze (Acrobat Connect). More technical details are available at http://archaeoinformatics.org/lecture_series/ag_instructions.html. If you plan to participate please review the instructions for each alternative way to connect and then send a message to rsvp@archaeoinformatics.org so that we can anticipate the network requirements. You may also contact Debbie Harmon (debbie@cast.uark.edu) at the University of Arkansas with any questions. On March 19th we have set aside an hour, also starting at noon EDT so that you can test your connectivity–but there will be no formal presentation.

We hope that you may find this useful and we encourage you to join us.