Grand Challenges vs Actual Challenges: Text mining small and big data for quantitative insights

Summary

Kintigh et al (2014) recently published a survey of archaeologists that claimed to identify 'archaeology's most important scientific challenges'. Numerous commentators have critiqued the small sample size of this survey (181 respondents) and the subjective reading of the responses. We use quantitative methods to analyse the full text of the survey responses and discover different challenges to those highlighted by Kintigh et al. We also analyse over 6000 archaeology journal articles in JSTOR to investigate the importance of the 'grand challenges' over time. We show how quantitative analysis of text reveals the diversity and dynamism of archaeological topics.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Macroscopic approaches to archaeological histories: Insights into archaeological practice from digital methods

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