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

Author(s): Britton Shepardson

Year: 2019

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.

Cite this Record

Making Geospatial Data FREELY Accessible: Potential for Crowd-sourcing, Site-monitoring, and Multimedia Data Archiving. Britton Shepardson. Presented at The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM. 2019 ( tDAR id: 451551)

Spatial Coverage

min long: 117.598; min lat: -29.229 ; max long: -75.41; max lat: 53.12 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24963