DINAA Means "Everybody Can Be a Digital Curator": Community-Powered Disciplinary Curational Behaviors with the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA)

Summary

This is a pdf copy of the PPT slides used for this presentation at the SAA symposium. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) has a massive compilation of archaeological site data. This paper presents recent findings from development of DINAA’s site database, efforts to link DINAA with mined references from digital literature, and efforts to prepare DINAA for future crowd-sourced professional data citations. The continental United States spans eight million square kilometers, with a multicultural past of over 15,000 years. Archaeologists have been practically and theoretically frustrated in search of curatorial practices, digital or otherwise, to make comprehensible the reporting and interpretation of such a vast spatiotemporal set. The federal organization of State and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and similar entities under the National Historic Preservation Act guarantees local systems of information management will maintain records of archaeological sites within territorial jurisdictions. DINAA has successfully interoperated and made completely public the non-sensitive, scientific information from many of these systems. Linkage of these data with other datasets at large scales, crosscutting political borders, facilitates archaeological and interdisciplinary studies of human adaptation. In cultivating an open source community, DINAA hopes to add value to site and collections data (digital and otherwise), make these accessible to researchers and stakeholders, and highlight ethical approaches toward distributed data curation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• What Do We Mean by "Digital Curation?"

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

File Information