Grand Challenges, Big Data, Fuzzy Data, and Digital Archaeology

Summary

As our generation and collection of quantitative digital data increase, so do our ambitions for extracting new insights and knowledge from those data. In recent years, those ambitions have manifested themselves in so-called “Grand Challenge” projects coordinated by academic institutions. These projects are often broadly interdisciplinary and attempt to address to major issues facing the world in the present and the future through the collection and integration of diverse types of scientific data. In general, however, disciplines that focus on the past are underrepresented in this environment – in part because these grand challenges tend to look forward rather than back, and in part because historical disciplines tend to produce qualitative, incomplete data that are difficult to mesh with the more continuous quantitative data sets provided by scientific observation. Yet historical information is essential for our understanding of long-term processes, and should thus be incorporated into our efforts to solve present and future problems. Archaeology, an inherently interdisciplinary field of knowledge that bridges the gap between the quantitative and the qualitative, can act as a connector between the study of the past and data-driven attempts to address the challenges of the future. To do so, however, we must find new ways to integrate the results of archaeological research into the digital platforms used for the modeling and analysis of much bigger data.

Planet Texas 2050 is a grand challenge project recently launched by The University of Texas at Austin. Its central goal is to understand the dynamic interactions between water supply, urbanization, energy use, and ecosystems services in Texas, a state that will be especially affected by climate change and population mobility by the middle of the 21st century. Like many such projects, one of the products of Planet Texas 2050 will be an integrated data platform that will make it possible to model various scenarios and help decision-makers project the results of resent policies or trends into the future. Unlike other such projects, however, PT2050 incorporates data collected from past societies, primarily through archaeological inquiry. We are currently designing a data integration and modeling platform that will allow us to bring together quantitative sensor data related to the present environment with “fuzzier” data collected in the course of research in the social sciences and humanities. Digital archaeological data, from LiDAR surveys to genomic information to excavation documentation, will be a central component of this platform. In this paper, I discuss the conceptual integration between scientific “big data” and “medium-sized” archaeological data in PT2050; the process that we are following to catalog data types, identify domain-specific ontologies, and understand the points of intersection between heterogeneous data sets of varying resolution and precision as we construct the data platform; and how we propose to incorporate digital data from archaeological research into integrated modeling and simulation modules.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• US Archaeology Data Science Session: National Science Foundation US-Serbia & West Balkan Data Science Workshop

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Contact(s): Adam Rabinowitz

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