Frison Institute Symposium: The Future of "Big Data" in Archaeology

Archaeology is currently experiencing a new ‘revolution’ toward the use of ‘big data’. Various research teams worldwide have started to integrate the enormous masses of archaeological data generated since the 1960s into online databases that are openly accessible to the entire profession and public. This enhancement of data accessibility promises to transform multiple facets of the discipline, from the leveraging of CRM grey-literature, to the kinds of scientific questions researchers are able to ask, to the greater involvement of archaeology in inter-disciplinary research and public engagement. The nascent turn toward big data approaches means that many of the theoretical and methodological problems/prospects involved with this kind of research must still be critically assessed at project-comparative, international scales. This symposium brings together different big data projects worldwide in order to address many of the outstanding theoretical and methodological problems/prospects and provide a framework for the future.