Changing Technologies, Changing Practices - The Transformation of the Çatalhöyük Research Database

Summary

Since its beginnings, the Çatalhöyük project has stood out as an early adopter of latest innovations in information technology and digital recording solutions. Consequently, a considerable effort went into keeping the technology infrastructure on site up to date, incorporating new developments, and ensuring compatibility of applications. A core component of the Çatalhöyük technology infrastructure is a central database which hosts textual and numeric records of the excavation. Excavation and Specialist teams enter data through highly customized desktop interfaces. As the teams' research goals, interpretations, and practices evolve, the database developer generates the code to implement changing requirements in the interfaces - usually during the excavation season in a very short turnaround time. Over the course of the project each of these digital humanist developers has left traces not only in the featureset and functionality of the system, but also in the source code of the application itself. In this paper we will analyze this code with qualitative and Natural Language Processing methods. We will try to unravel how technological advances and ever evolving archaeological research practices are mirrored in the history of the Çatalhöyük central database code.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Continuity and Change, Two Decades of Excavation and Research at Çatalhöyük

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16058