Tag: NSF

One Size Does Not Fit All: New NSF Grant

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

Principle investigators Keith Kintigh and K. Selçuk Candan recently secured a NSF Information Integration and Informatics small project grant for their proposal, “One Size Does Not Fit All: Empowering the User with User-Driven Integration.” Responding to the inefficiency of current schemes, which sacrifice possible data uses in order to produce early integration, User-Driven Integration (UDI) is an approach that takes advantage of expert opinions from the users of integrated data. Scientists and decision-makers have different needs and expectations from data integration operations, and their input will improve data management in complex systems.

UDI also benefits students: undergraduate Honors capstone projects and graduate computer science courses will be formed to test and improve the approach. tDAR data structure is in line with the UDI approach, which values user feedback over structured data, integrating dynamic and variable data sets which may mesh in a variety of ways.

Faunal Working Group

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

Since 2004, a national team of faunal analysts has worked together to use and improve the data integration tools of the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). The North American Faunal Working Group (FWG), led by Kate Spielmann, met in at the School of  Human Evolution and Social Change, ASU in Tempe this October to discuss their ongoing work. The FWG is divided provisionally into two parts: the Eastern and Southwestern regional groups. Each group currently is involved in separate pilot studies integrating faunal data sets in tDAR.  The Eastern group suggested several improvements to the tDAR integration tool itself, while the Southwestern group raised a range of challenges to be overcome regarding the coding of faunal data and the importance of their archaeological contexts. The workshop members also are drafting a new National Science Foundation funding proposal to move ahead with synthetic research—integrating faunal data sets from the Eastern and Southwestern regions—using tDAR.

See Kate Spielmann’s profile.

Response to the NSF SBE Call for White Papers

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

In August the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social and Behavioral Sciences Issued a call for white papers on future research directions as a part of its SBE 2020 Project. Keith Kintigh, Francis P. McManamon and Katherine Spielmann responded to this call with their submission entitled, “Synthesis and Cyberinfrastructure for SBE Research.” Their essay argues for the vital need to invest in social science data digital infrastructure by the NSF. The authors cite vast improvements in synthetic natural science research as the result of massive NSF investment in its infrastructure and synthesis. They note that social sciences have not yet made a similar investment and cannot simply adopt extant natural and physical science infrastructures. Due to the nature of the data, research is needed on appropriate forms of metadata, data integration and synthesis for different types of social, behavioral and economic science data sets.

Get specific! See Kintigh, McManamon and Spielmann’s recommendations here.

NSF Announces Changes to its Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

In May, the National Science Foundation revealed that there would be changes to its Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG) mandating the inclusion of a Data Management Plan in all proposals submitted on or after January 18, 2011. The Foundation also noted its intent to evaluate the Data Management Plan as a part of the Intellectual Merit criterion, the Broader Impacts criterion, or both criteria as appropriate to the project. This change to the PAPPG marks an important commitment by the NSF to social science data accessibility for the scientific community and the public, and will likely promote wider interest in how archaeological data and documents are made accessible and preserved for future generations.

To read more about the changes, visit the revised NSF PAPPG. Also check out the latest version of the NSF Grant Proposal Guide.

NSF Human Social Dynamics Grant Awarded for Development of Archaeological Data Integration System

Posted on by Leigh Anne Ellison

Archaeologists and computer scientists in SHESC and the School of Engineering at ASU were awarded a 3-year grant for the development of a knowledge-based archaeological data integration system. The purpose of the system is to amalgamate long-term archaeological data on society, population, and environment in an easily searchable database, so that scientists across disciplines can utilize important archaeological data sets. This revolutionary project involved a multidisciplinary team of researchers, graduate student assistants and undergraduate interns. One of the outcomes of the research project was the prototype of the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) which is the repository further developed and used by Digital Antiquity.

For more information, please see the full 2006 Project Summary.