Making Geospatial Data FREELY Accessible: Potential for Crowd-sourcing, Site-monitoring, and Multimedia Data Archiving

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The island communities of Oceania, and none more so than that of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), continue to develop their economies, modern identities, and narratives of their cultural past based on plentiful archaeological remains that are visited by hundreds, or even thousands, of people on a daily basis. While archaeologists surge ahead with ever more impressive technology, local communities struggle to find ways to benefit from advances in research. A spreadsheet-to-website approach to GIS allows archaeologists to host interactive, multimedia data on a Google Map to provide access to information, informational crowd-sourcing, and conservation-oriented site monitoring at no cost for the archaeologist or for the users who access the data. A combination of Excel, HTML, JavaScript, XML, and Google Maps API allows for automatic generation of interactive webpages to host massive, multimedia data sets (text, images, links, files, videos, 3D viewer, etc.). This freeware approach to GIS provides great potential for local communities to play a more active role in, and benefit sustainably from, collaborative international heritage management.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24963