Designing a Collaborative Website for Inter-Site Research: The Colonial Encounters Project
Author(s): Gregory Brown; Mary Kate Mansius
Year: 2016
Summary
The Colonial Encounters project is a multi-institution collaboration intended to provide on-line and downloadable access to some 35 important archaeological assemblages from sites in the Potomac River valley dated between 1500 and 1720. Part of a larger project intended to provoke inter-site studies by standardizing and organizing previous archaeological projects, the website described in this paper was designed to deliver site summary documents, historical data, images, and a database containing over 142,000 artifact inventory records and 7300 context or feature records. This paper describes how catalogs from 10 institutions, entered at various levels of complexity using different cataloguing staff and vastly different lexicons, were combined and integrated to allow relatively efficient online searching and summarization. It also describes the challenges of balancing providing this data through easy online searches with the twin goal of allowing users to download and independently analyze the data for their own studies.
Cite this Record
Designing a Collaborative Website for Inter-Site Research: The Colonial Encounters Project. Gregory Brown, Mary Kate Mansius. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434417)
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Keywords
General
Collaborative
•
inter-site
•
Standardization
Geographic Keywords
North America
•
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1500-1720
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 482