Thursday, April 19th marks the 10-year anniversary of the first record appearing in tDAR so this week we are celebrating here in the office, and we want to bring our users and contributors along to celebrate with us. We are pleased to introduce the new Digital Antiquity Instagram account (@digitalantiquity), and will have multiple opportunities for our followers on Twitter, Facebook, and now Instagram to participate and win prizes.
Many tDAR users may not know that the repository was born as a side project to a major data synthesis challenge. Specifically, once someone had gone through the effort to track down and digitize data from across a region, how can these data be made more easily available to the next researcher? Led by Keith Kintigh, Kate Spielmann, and K. Selçuk Candan, a group of 31 researchers met to develop recommendations for the discipline’s need for digital infrastructure to support synthetic research. tDAR was born out of these recommendations. Read more about the early history of Digital Antiquity and tDAR over on the tDAR website.
It seems appropriate then, that one of Kintigh’s other endeavors, the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis just awarded its first awards last week during the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Washington DC. Synthesis remains a challenge in archaeology, but tools like tDAR (and ADS, Open Context, and others) are providing the infrastructure to support this important work. Congratulations to the team at Digital Antiquity and happy birthday tDAR!