Big Data (Other Keyword)
1-18 (18 Records)
Archaeologists today engage with digital records of primary data, derivative interpretive information, and ontological descriptors used to represent intellectual models of individual research, and instantiations of theoretical constructs from the local to the landscape. Prior to and into the digital age, the archaeological record writ large as a testable and defensible set of hypotheses and factual statements is constructed from a melange of meaningful information expected to correlate with...
Archaeological Geographies - A Reflexive Consideration of the Impact of Archaeology across Racial and Socioeconomic Regions Using DINAA (2018)
This paper uses "big data" about archaeological sites from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) to reflexively assess and interpret how archaeology has affected minority communities. DINAA’s data set represents an almost complete record of the current extent of archaeological site definitions, within the project’s area of effect. Therefore, collectively, these data can reveal information about archaeologists and archaeology as a discipline, as well as the past. As public...
Beyond Sharks and Laser Beams: Lessons on Informatics Needs, Open Behaviors, and Analytics Practices to Achieve Archaeological Big Data, as Learned from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (2015)
Demands for archaeological "big data" must move strategically beyond buzzwords. Sciences and humanities that are successfully augmenting their workflows with ubiquitous computing are necessarily dealing with issues of accessibility, interoperability, and fundamental questions about the intended utility of core collection strategies at massive scales. Fortunately for archaeology, solutions to these issues are achievable through emphases on existing research networks and readily "open" solutions....
"Big Data" in the Nation’s Capital: Statistics and Storytelling with Washington, DC’s Archaeological Collections (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Known as the “Federal City,” Washington, DC has undergone extensive archaeological excavation and analysis, in part due to American law that requires pre-construction testing for federal government-related construction projects. However, this wealth of data is understudied and rarely revisited after...
Caprines in the Cattle Zone: Reconciling Faunal Data at Two Scales during the Early Neolithic in the Sofia Basin, Bulgaria (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal husbandry was a major adaptive mechanism facilitating the spread of farming communities throughout southeastern Europe. Recent big-data syntheses have contributed greatly to our understanding of the environmental and social processes of neolithization in the region. While faunal reports often form an integral component of these studies, issues of...
The Challenges and Prospects of Developing Radiocarbon "Big Data" for the Study of Prehistoric Demography (2017)
The use of large radiocarbon datasets has the potential to transform archaeology and its place in the social and natural sciences in the coming decades. Radiocarbon ‘big data’ enhances the unique contribution of archaeology to reconstruct human demography over vast spans of time. This move towards big data is confronted by some central challenges in archaeological method and theory, such as the use of legacy data of disparate quality and working over broad spatial and temporal scales. For some,...
The Current State of the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (2017)
The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is expanding from its initial proof-of-concept phase, scaling to a truly continental effort. As a linked open data hub for information related to archaeological sites, DINAA interoperates governmental, research, and archival information sets about hundreds of thousands of archaeological sites. Although DINAA links archaeological information at a scale that was not feasible even a decade ago, its greater strengths come from a commitment to...
Data Integration in the Service of Synthetic Research - SAA Vancouver Annual Meeting (2017)
Addressing archaeology’s most compelling substantive challenges requires synthetic research that exploits the large and rapidly expanding corpus of systematically collected archaeological data. That, in turn, demands an integration procedure that preserves the semantics of the data when combining datasets collected by multiple investigators who employ different systematics in their recording. To that end, we have developed a general procedure that we call query-directed, on-the-fly data...
Examining Archaeology, Society, and the Promise of Integrating ‘Big’ Data from Archaeological and non-Archaeological Sources. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In order for digitally published data to be useful it has to be useable, and in the case of big-data, interoperable with other data sources. This paper explores one way in which this can be accomplished through an examination of how archaeological site densities across the eastern and midwestern United States relate to social factors such as...
Large Fields - Big Data. Browsing the meadows of Seip Earthworks, Ohio, using multiple gradiometer arrays (2016)
Surveyed and first published in 1848 by Squier and Davis, the mounds being excavated in early 20th century, Seip Earthworks today forms part of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park near Chillicothe, Ohio. While the restored burial mounds are among the largest from the so-called Hopewell culture, the earthworks comprise further two miles of embankment walls forming big circles and a precise square with astronomical alignments, a typical geometric figure at a number of places, which...
More than Just Another Number: Use of the Smithsonian Trinomial System and the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) to Link Open Information about Archaeological Sites Across the Web (2017)
Archaeological sites in the United States are often associated with alphanumerical identifiers known as Smithsonian trinomial numbers (STNs). Developed in the mid-Twentieth Century, STNs consist of patterned alphanumeric sequences, potentially recognizable in spreadsheets, archival records, and research literature. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), a linked open data hub for archaeological site information, is attempting "named entity recognition" (a form of text mining)...
Networking: digital archaeology repositories in Argentina (2017)
The digitization of primary data in social sciences and humanities, including archeology, has been a central issue in the management of science in Argentina by federal agencies, public universities and private foundations. About this topic, Argentina´s National Research Council (CONICET) created the Interactive Platform for Social Science Research, an interdisciplinary space, that over six years has generated protocols related to digitization and ways to share these results under the concept of...
Postindustrial Places and "Big Data": Exploiting the Potential of Historical Spatial Data Infrastructures for Archaeology (2018)
This paper discusses the ways in which emerging "Big Data" approaches to historical research, in the form of GIS-based Historical Spatial Data Infrastructures (HSDIs), represent a powerful way urban and industrial archaeologists may better exploit historical source material. GIS-based research remains an underutilized asset within historical archaeology and its subfields. Drawing examples from HSDIs covering two postindustrial places (the city of London, Ontario and the Keweenaw Peninsula, in...
Potential for Spatial "Big Data" in Historical Archaeology: A Demonstration of Methods and Results (2017)
Historical Archaeology has seen a steadily increasing embrace of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the purposes of site recording, preservation and management, but has seen little to no use of the plethora of spatial datasets already publicly available. Such datasets include census, tax, and immigration records, property and housing maps, and archived aerial and satellite imagery, which when properly integrated in a GIS, have great potential for further contextualizing historical...
Principles of Open Government Archaeology: Lessons from the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (2018)
American archaeology is conducted under cultural resources protection laws, but how does archaeology meet the challenge of openness? The past decade saw development of the "open government" digital information paradigm for public availability of information that underpins the functions of governance. Open government data provide a base for the interested public to offer expertise in aspects of necessary analyses, and to derive further public value from reuse of government data in novel ways. The...
Size isn't everything: are our data good enough to be big? (2017)
Archaeological data may not yet meet the criteria for Big Data, but the growth of archaeological cyber-infrastructures is providing the foundations for ‘big data’ research. Using digital repositories such as the ADS in the UK and tDAR in the USA, we have access to millions of records, from multiple resources. Data and text mining tools allow us to extract information from published and unpublished fieldwork reports, whilst the ability to create Linked Open Data or to integrate metadata via...
US Archaeology Data Science Workshop: Report from Workshop Track D National Science Foundation US-Serbia & West Balkan Data Science Workshop (2018)
This report summarizes the substance of the US Archaeology panel presentations and provide general comments on data science issues as they relate to archaeology and the other disciplines represented at the National Science Foundation-funded US Serbia & West Balkans Data Science Workshop. We also present suggestions regarding potential collaborative research involving US and Serbian & West Balkan archaeologists. These comments and the assessment are based on our experiences during the formal...
Waist Deep in the Big Data: How the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) Implements Ontological and Loosely Coupled Organization around the Construct of the Archaeological Site (2017)
Archaeology’s disciplinary engagement with big data is confounded by the variety of information types recorded, variability of data due to differential preservation of materials and theoretical orientations of observers, and complexity of archaeological concepts daring to be caged in explicit digital expressions. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) is a linked open data hub, centered around the theoretically, practically, and interpretively fraught definition of...