DINAA and Bootstrapping Archaeology’s Information Ecosystem

Summary

Data management is fundamental to the practice of archaeology in the 21st century. As such, archaeological data management requires wide engagement and capacity building across our discipline. Archaeological data management increasingly involves the choreography of diverse data, software, Web-based services, and communications channels deployed and curated by a host of actors, ranging from individual researchers, to open source projects, libraries and archives, publishers, and commercial ventures. A major challenge centers on cultivating collaborative and synergistic approaches to working with digital data given the wide array of interests, players, and institutions involved. This poster presents the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), a project that can help catalyze Web-scale collaboration in using data to understand the prehistory of North America. The project emphasizes Linked Open Data (LOD) strategies to publish governmentally-produced site file data without revealing site coordinates and other sensitive information. DINAA is an Internet index for archaeological concepts of culture histories, site types, diagnostic materials, investigation strategies, and important attributes. The poster illustrates how DINAA is starting to be used as an investigative tool and a tool to help cross-reference relevant data curated by researchers and institutions across the Web.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Afterlife of Archaeological Information: Use and Reuse of Digital Archaeological Data   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage