Probing, Publishing, and Promoting the Use of Digital Archaeological Data

Summary

On the wintery morning of 5 January 2018, the panelists in the scheduled session, “Probing, Publishing, and Promoting the Use of Digital Archaeological Data,” at the 119th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and a small, but engaged audience participated in the session. Unfortunately, the blizzard conditions of the day, and “severe winter weather” warnings of the previous day prevented more of the panelists and potential audience members from attending.

In Boston, the session benefited from the last minute addition of a presentation by Andrew Vaughn and Marina Gabriel describing the digital data being collected concerning damage to cultural heritage properties in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, part of the Cultural Heritage Initiative of the American Schools for Oriental Research (ASOR). These data are being compiled, reported, and assessed to monitor cultural heritage damage caused by the conflicts in these countries. Displaying true intellectual grit, for which all of them are well-known and refusing to be stifled by weather-related flight cancellations, all of the panelists who were prevented from attending sent notes and/or digital slides that illustrate their comments. The notes and slides prepared by all of the participants, those present and those in absentia, are gathered in this document for wider distribution.

Modern archaeological investigations produce vast amounts of digital data. Fieldwork, laboratory analysis, collection research, and literature-based studies all utilize and produce data and information in digital formats. Individual professionals and the discipline as a whole are now challenged to develop and implement methods and techniques to explore, present, publish, and preserve a wide range of digital data. In their recent edited volume on digital archaeology, Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future, Averett, Gordon, and Counts (2016: 20) assert the need for more professional focus on digital “…publication and its attendant issues of long-term accessibility and preservation,…a central concern of the discipline since its inception, …[and] a notable omission in the digital archaeological process at present.” Digital data present distinct challenges and opportunities, making digital archaeological practice particularly complicated. For example, what works for access and (re)usability in published data might not be optimal for the long-term preservation of digital data. In addition, there are practical aspects related to the treatment of digital data that are unfamiliar to archaeologists and different from dealing with physical archaeological resources remains and records.

The forum brought to the fore discussions related to access, sharing, and publication, as well as preservation of digital data. The topics to be discussed in this workshop cover key aspects of this challenge:

• How can digital data be made discoverable and accessible to others for education and research?

• What metadata is needed to provide sufficient contextual and descriptive information for data to be re-usable?

• What is the range of detail in metadata available for legacy and new digital data? How can archaeologists make best use of what is available?

• How can data be preserved and made available in the long-term for re-use?

• What are the examples of archaeologists being credited professionally for curating and using digital data? How can such crediting be made more common, in particular in academic evaluations for tenure and promotion?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Presentations on Digital Antiquity and tDAR

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