| The staff of the Alexandria Archive Institute works to communicate and build collaborations with the professional community and public. Please check here to learn of AAI participation in events, speaking engadgements, and meetings, or use our RSS-feed by subscribing to it with a service like Bloglines. |
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| February 27, 2008 |
Eric Kansa, co-founder and former Executive Director of the
Alexandria Archive Institute, is one of seven winners of the
2008-2009 Digital
Humanities
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Humanities
(NEH). NEH Digital Humanities Fellowships support
individuals pursuing advanced research or other projects in
the humanities that employ digital technology. Eric, who is
now Executive Director of the Information and
Service Design Program at UC Berkeley's School of
Information will use
this grant for the project "Accessing and Presenting
Open Source Cultural Heritage Collections." The grant will
support students from the School of Information to develop
technologies around the Open Context data publication
system. |
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| November 30, 2007 | Scholars from UC Berkeley swept the Open Archaeology
Prize competition, held at the 2007 meeting of the American Schools of Oriental
Research (ASOR). One of a series of award competitions
around “open
archaeology” led by the Alexandria Archive
Institute and funded primarily by the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, this particular Open Archaeology Prize
targeted members of ASOR, a long-standing organization of
archaeologists conducting research in the Near East. The
winners, who were selected based on their project’s
scholarly merit, potential for reuse in research or teaching
and availability on the web in a free and reusable format,
were announced last week at ASOR’s annual meeting in San
Diego. First prize for a Senior Scholar was awarded to the
team led by Ruth
Tringham
(Professor, Department of Anthropology) and Noah
Wittman (Program Manager, ) for their website “Remixing
Çatalhöyük”
. First prize for a Junior Scholar was awarded to Catherine
Foster (PhD student, Department of Near Eastern Studies) for
her project “Household
Archaeology and the Uruk Phenomenon: A Case Study from Kenan
Tepe, Turkey”. A
second prize of $200 in books, co-sponsored by the David
Brown Book Company, was awarded to Justin Lev-Tov
(Statistical Research, Inc.) for his project
“Hazor: Zooarchaeology”.
CLICK HERE
FOR FULL DETAILS.
| | | | November 1, 2007 | The Nov-Dec 2007 issue of Educational Technology magazine is
an entire special issue dedicated to "Opening Educational
Resources". A series of articles in this issue highlight
open educational models, including OpenCourseWare,
Connexions and a piece on Open Context called "Open Content
in Open Context", co-authored by Sarah Whitcher Kansa and
Eric Kansa. Click here to download the article. | | | | October 16, 2007 | An article in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette entitled
"Internet Fuels Global Learning Community" highlights the
benefit of open educational technologies to global learning.
It discusses numerous initiatives aimed at facilitating
access to educational material and interaction between
individuals. The article states "In field after field, the
Internet is breaking down classroom walls and giving
students and researchers unparalleled access to data and one
another." Open Context is mentioned along with the major
information
sharing initiatives arXiv.org and PubMed Central. See the
article at the following link:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07289/825636-298.stm | | | | October 9, 2007 | The AAI announced today the launch of the Open Archaeology
Prize, to be awarded to a member of the American Schools of
Oriental Research (ASOR) at the upcoming meeting in San
Diego (Nov 2007). The Open Archaeology Prize is awarded for
the best online, free resource on archaeology developed by
an ASOR member. Projects can be data, photos, video, slides,
etc. The only stipulation is that they be freely available
online for creative reuse. The competition is sponsored by
the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David Brown
Book Company.
Follow this
link to the competition announcement and guidelines. | | | | April 2007 | The Society for Historical Archaeology's new open access "Technical Briefs" series just published a short peer-reviewed article about Open Context. The article
discusses recent moves toward open access in scholarly
communication, and looks at Open Context and its role in
working toward "open data" in archaeology. Click here for the same article in printer-friendly
.PDF format. | | | | April 2007 | ArchaeoInformatics.org,
a consortium of five institutions working toward a
cyberinfrastructure for archaeology has just made an in
depth presentation about Open Context available. The
presentation introduces Open Context and why it is a
significant advance for data sharing in archaeology, and how
it may illustrate a valuable approach for data sharing in
many other 'small science' disciplines.
Streaming and downloadable audio (podcast) and video is
available thanks to ArchaeoInformatics at:
http://archaeoinformatics.org/lecture_series/video/eric_kansa/eric_kansa.html
| | | | April 2007 | Please join us for an event at the Society for American
Archaeology Conference in Austin, Texas on Friday, April
27 (7 - 8 PM, Room 410, Austin Hilton). We will be
celebrating “Open Archaeology” with free sushi, friendly
conversation, and a chance to network with other researchers
working to reform and enhance communications in our
discipline.

If you are working on an Open Access project in archaeology,
this is a great chance to let an interested community know
about your efforts. Please contact us
(contact@alexandriaarchive.org), and send a few (1-4)
PowerPoint slides about your efforts. We'll incorporate them
into a presentation that will be looping in the background
while we munch on some sushi!
| | | | March 2007 | Through our long-term collaboration with the UCLA /
University of Manchester Domuztepe Excavations, Open Context will
shortly be featured with other ground-breaking social
science and humanities research at UCLA. On Thursday, May
10th, UCLA's Institute for Digital Research and Education
will host an event, "Countries,
Cultures, Communication:Digital Innovation at UCLA"
celebrating innovative research using digital technologies.
Open Context will be among the projects to be showcased. | | | | February 2007 | Eric Kansa will travel to India to participate in a conference
organized by the Global Heritage Fund and Maharaja
Sayajirao University of Baroda. He will discuss open access and
open licensing solutions for communicating world cultural
heritage and introduce new web-based data publishing tools
for Open Context. | | | | February 2007 | The AAI is happy to announce the release of its winter
newsletter detailing recent developments and
accomplishments. Major highlights of this newsletter include:
- Development of Open Context
- New Publishing Projects
- Efforts to Promote Open Access
- Thanks to our Funders
Click
here to access the newsletter! | | | | 9 Jan 2007 | San Francisco, CA - The Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI),
a non-profit organization building tools for open access to
world cultural heritage via the Internet, is delighted to
announce a continued and expanded partnership with the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (http://www.hewlett.org)
. As one of the Hewlett Foundation Education Program’s
Open Educational Resources projects, the AAI has
developed Internet tools and addressed incentives for
scholars to openly share the primary research data. Past
awards from the Hewlett Foundation have supported the
AAI’s development and implementation of Open Context, an
online, integrated database for global cultural heritage
content
(http://www.opencontext.org).
With this most recent grant of $250,000 from the Hewlett
Foundation (in support of general operating activities) the
AAI will move into a new phase, that of promoting the
creation and use of Open Educational Resources. To this
end, the AAI will use Open Context as an open-sourced
platform to disseminate field research, museum collections,
and other cultural heritage media. Convenient Web-based
access to such resources will make significant contributions
for both instruction and research. The AAI will further
promote access to scholarship by organizing a series of
Open Archaeology Prize competitions at national
conferences over the next two years. The AAI looks
forward to collaborating with the Hewlett Foundation to
promote open access in the scholarly community.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation makes grants to
help solve social and environmental problems. For more
information, please visit http://www.hewlett.org.
For more information about the AAI, please visit http://www.alexan
driaarchive.org.
For questions about using or publishing with Open Context,
contact Sarah Kansa, Assistant Director, The Alexandria
Archive Institute, skansa@alexa
ndriaarchive.org.
| | | | Nov 2006 | Sarah Kansa leads a discussion on how scholarly
communication is in the midst of an important transition
toward increased openness, access, scope and diversity. The
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently called
upon university counsels, boards of trustees, and provosts
"to provide aggressive support for the principles of fair
use and open access, and to promote awareness and use of
Creative Commons licenses." The Junior Scholars Committee
with the help of the Alexandria Archive Institute will host
the Lunch. We will discuss these changes and how junior
researchers can best position themselves to profit from this
important shift toward open scholarship. We will also launch
the "Junior Scholar Open Archaeology Prize", a new
initiative to build awareness of open access research and
enhance the prestige and community recognition of open
scholarly communication. | | | | Nov 2006 | The International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ)
and the
AAI announced winners of the first
“Junior Researcher Open Zooarchaeology Prize”. Five
prominent zooarchaeologists reviewed all eleven entries and
have determined the following winners, based on the
conference papers' scholarly merits and their potential for
reuse in research or teaching.To encourage the widest
possible dissemination and reuse of this scholarship, all of
the entries are licensed under open Creative
Commons. copyright licenses.
The competition winners are:
Christian Gates St-Pierre (1st Prize)
Ana Belen Marin Arroyo (2nd Prize)
Congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to the five
judges for their careful review and evaluation
of the entries. Finally, special thanks go to all those who
entered into the competition. All of the entries provide
valuable resources for the zooarchaeology community. They
provide examples to guide junior researchers on crafting
conference presentations, offer invaluable reference
material for research, and demonstrate important
contributions to zooarchaeological understandings of the past.
| | | | Oct 2006 | The AAI has been contracted to help a new NEH funded
initiative to publish UC Berkeley excavation results from
Nineveh in Open
Context, the AAI’s open access data sharing system. The
goal of this project, led by David Stronach and Eleanor
Wilkinson, is to create a comprehensive open-access resource
of all of the excavation results, including field data,
images, and relevant scholarly information about the history
and archaeology of Iron Age Nineveh. | | | | August 2006 | The AAI is supporting an open expert panel discussion for
the upcoming "Preserve
America Summit" that will be held in October of 2006.
The expert panel will discuss issues relating to national
historical preservation policy and how best to structure the
US role in international efforts at historical and cultural
heritage preservation. This discussion is open to all and is
available under the open terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution license. To
view the discussion, please click here. | | | | July 2007 | The AAI is pleased to join iCommons on a program to
explore how the global digital commons can shaped to best
meet the needs and concerns of indigenous peoples and
indigenous cultural heritage. The AAI will help bring
together multiple stakeholders who will shape indigenous
knowledge ethical, licensing, and other policy
recommendations. Please check back us for updates on the
status of this project. | | | | June 2006 | The AAI will be represented at the iCommons Summit in Rio de
Janeiro. Eric Kansa will participate in a panel discussion
that aims to explore more fair and equitable frameworks for
sharing cultural heritage and traditional knowledge. | | | | June 2006 | The International
Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) and the Alexandria Archive
Institute have teamed up to create BoneCommons,
an open
access internet-based forum for the archaeozoological
community. BoneCommons facilitates communication between
ICAZ members by providing a place for them to "meet" online.
ICAZ members can post questions, have discussions, and
upload photos, charts, papers, and references. | | | | May 2006 | The SAA Executive Staff has approved the blog "Digging
Digitally" as a tool to facilitate Digital Data
Interest Group (DDIG) discussions. DDIG members can use this
blog to share news and announcements about their programs
and activities. Hopefully, DDIG members will post
suggestions on developing data sharing standards,
intellectual property frameworks, policies, and other
issues. DDIG members are also invited to use this weblog as
a way to share links to individuals, projects, programs and
organizations. | | | | May 2006 | The founding organizers (Keith Kintigh and Dean Snow) of
the new Society for American Archaeology's Digital
Data Interest Group (DDIG) chose Eric Kansa to act as
the group's volunteer "convener". This role
includes: serving as a point of communication between DDIG
and the SAA leadership, as well as facilitating discussions
and fostering collaborations between DDIG members and other
researchers. | | | | May 2006 | Beta-launch of Open
Context, an integrated data sharing system with
museum reference collection and field archaeological
documentation. Thanks to several researchers, including the
Domuztepe team, Justin Lev-Tov, Denise Carruthers, and Paul
Goldberg, and Richard Meadow Open Context is now available
for general public use and evaluation. We look forward to
gaining feedback on usability, tools, and reporting of
bugs(!). | | | | April 2006 | Whose Bones are Those? Human and Animal Processing in
the "Death Pit" at Domuztepe, a Halaf Settlement in
South-Central Turkey A paper Sarah Kansa presented
with Suellen Gauld (Santa Monica Community College),
Elizabeth Carter (UCLA)
, and Stuart Campbell (University of Manchester) at the SAA
conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This paper
discusses a large and enigmatic deposit of heavily processed
human and animal bones recovered at Domuztepe, Tuekey (Late
Neolithic). Much of the primary data in this paper is
accessible in Open
Context | | | | April 2006 | Toward a Cyber-infrastructure for Archaeology: Tools and
Incentives Public forum held to discuss digital data
sharing challenges, including conceptual, technological, and
incentives. Society for American Archaeology Annual
Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico. | | | | April 2006 | ‘Some Rights Reserved’ and Bio/Cultural Heritage
Presentation given in the Traditional Knowledge panel
discussion at the Yale Law School- Information Society
Project's Access to
Knowledge Conference. New Haven, Connecticut. | | | | April 2006 | Data Integration with ArchaeoML and Tagging
Presentation (read by David Schloen) on combing
ArchaeoML and folksonomy systems for archaeological data
integration. Computer Applications in Archaeology
Conference, Fargo, North Dakota. | | | | Jan 2006 | Sarah Kansa went to Phoenix, Arizona as an invited
participant on a multi-university collaborative project,
headed by Keith Kintigh
(ASU) and funded by the National Science Foundation,
seeking to encourage better data sharing in archaeology.
Sarah demonstrated Open
Context and represented the ICAZ
Database task-force in discussions centering on the
ASU’s project goals of developing a standard
“ontology” for zooarchaeology. | | | | Jan 2006 | Test launch of "Open Context" a web-browser
accessible portal to explore ArchaeoML structured content.
(Click here to
explore) | | | | Dec 2005 - Jan 2006 | Launch of ArchaeoCommons and support of the 2006 Society for
Historical Archaeology conference in Sacramento.
ArchaeoCommons, an AAI sponsored group, provided digital
services for the 2006 SHA Conference. (Click here to explore) | | | | Nov 2005 | Jeanne Lopiparo discussed AnthroCommons
in the plenary session, “The Health of Scholarly
Communication in the Discipline,” at the annual
meeting of the National
Communication Association. AnthroCommons was identified
by NCA conference organizers as an example of how innovative
digital technologies might be utilized to encourage faster,
better
and cheaper publication in academia. | | | | Nov 2005 | Launch of AAI's digital support services for the International
Council for Archaeozoology's conference in
Mexico City (2006). The AAI is providing online
conference registration, e-commerce, and web-development
services. In addition, the AAI will provide ICAZ members
with a service, BoneCommons
developed from AnthroCommons,
that will enhance the research and educational value of the
2006 conference by enabling open access to conference
presentations. | | | | Oct 2005 | Publication of "Protecting Traditional Knowledge and
Expanding Access to Scientific Data" in the International
Journal of Cultural Property, Vol. 12, Num. 3. (Click
here to download a self-archived version)This paper,
coauthored with Jason Schultz
(EFF) and Ahrash Bissell (Duke), discusses incentive
issues for sharing field research as well as potential
licensing strategies to better recognize the interests of
cultural heritage stakeholders. | | | | Sept 2005 | Publication of "A community approach to data
integration" (Geosphere
Vol. 1, Num. 2). This paper discusses the ArchaeoML
data structure, its application, and theoretical value. | | | | Sept 2005 | Presentation at the "Advancing
the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open
Education" conference in Logan Utah. Click
here to view the presentation. Click
here for the pod cast. | | | | June 2005 | Demonstration of ArchaeoML-based databases for the Microcosms Project, a system-wide survey of University of California of material collections. | | | | March 2005 | Turning Data Into Knowledge: Moving Primary Field Data
to an Open Knowledge Commons (Forum at the SAA Annual
Meeting), Salt Lake City, UT. | | | | Nov 2004 | Building a "Cultural Heritage Commons",
Incentives and Equity Discussions on the
applicability
of "some rights reserved" frameworks for
traditional knowledge and cultural heritage with
intellectual property experts, indigenous rights advocates,
scholars, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive.
Meeting hosted by the Alexandria Archive Institute, San
Francisco, CA. | | | | Sept 2004 | Hewlett Foundation Open Content. (Meeting), Menlo Park, CA. | | | | July 2004 | Digital Preservation and Access: Building a Future for the Past. Lecture presented to the Livermore Rotary Club, Livermore, CA. | | | | June 2004 | Goddesses, Ancestor Cults, and the Origins of Civilization Lecture presented to the Metropolitan Club, San Francisco, CA. | | | | May 2004 | Intellectual Property, Cultural Heritage and Open Dissemination Meeting hosted by the Alexandria Archive Institute, Conference room of Deloitte and | | | | May 2004 | A Cultural Commons and the Past: Intellectual Property and Archaeology. Lecture presented to the Congress of Cultural Atlases: The Human Record, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. | | | | May 2004 | A Future for the Past: Stewardship, Access, and Digital Archaeology. Lecture presented to the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. | | | | April 2004 | Digital Documentation in Context: ArchaeoML and Scalable Databases for Publication. Lecture presented at the Digital Documentation Workshop, Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference, Prato, Italy. | | | | April 2004 | Open Knowledge and Heritage: Moving the Past to the Cultural Commons. Lecture presented at the Reuters Digital Vision Program, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. | | | | Sept 2003 | The Silk Road Network of Ancient Bactria and Digital Networks of Today. Lecture presented to the Silk Road Foundation Lecture Series, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. ( | |
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