Digital Antiquity and ASU Libraries just submitted a project proposal to the The Knight Foundation Knight News Challenge, and we need your help to get our project funded.

The Challenge poses the question, “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” Our project, Digging Up Data – Teaching and Learning with Digital Repositories like the Digital Archaeological Record, is designed to help teachers and students learn to find and use the information stored online in digital repositories. Many digital repositories  provide free and open content to users who are searching for information on a topic, and  include everything from documents, to 3D printer files, to photographs, and audio and video collections.

The goal of Digging Up Data is to give teachers and students an incentive to use digital repositories and become familiar with the wealth of information they contain.  Libraries understand how to collect, archive and make digital information accessible – in digital repositories.  But, if you ask someone “where should I look for information on X” they will likely respond “read a book” or “search Google” but not “search in a digital repository.” The Digging Up Data team want to help teachers and students leverage digital repositories to find the “hidden” information, the new special collections, that libraries and domain repositories are now building and maintaining. Our project employs a contest format to incentivize teachers to design assignments that help students engage with and make use of the amazing digital materials in repositories such as tDAR.

To find out more about our project please check out our proposal at the Knight News Challege Website (direct link to tDAR’s entry here). Submissions are evaluated by a team of outside reviewers, but the projects are visible to the public who are able to show support (via “applause”) and provide feedback.  Any comments or suggestions for improvement would be very welcome in the comments section at the end of the proposal, as would your “applause”. Thanks!

tDAR’s Entry to the Knight News Challenge:

https://newschallenge.org/challenge/libraries/submissions/digging-up-data-teaching-and-learning-with-digital-repositories-like-the-digital-archaeology-record-tdar-http-tdar-org#

The Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST), University of Arkansas advances research, education, and outreach about geoinformatics, geomatics, and related digital data techniques (e.g., GIS, geospatial modeling, high density survey, remote sensing, etc.). The center, in collaboration with NSF, announced the Spatial Archaeometry Research Collaboration (SPARC) program to further the promotion of geospatial research in archaeology.

CAST recently published 3D scans of several famous archaeological sites through tDAR to publish the center’s work. As part of a Digital Antiquity grant project, CAST researchers curated scan data from high-density surveys at Machu Picchu, Peru; Tiwanaku, Boliva; Ostia, Italy, and Stabiae, Italy.

CAST’s 3D scans allow you to experience the built environment of these incredible places. Moreover, the center’s data allow researchers and interested users to conduct metric analyses of scanned structures and features.

Explore Macchu Pichu, its temples, and neighboring Huayna Picchu at https://core.tdar.org/collection/27264.

Visit Tiwanaku and study the site’s monuments at https://core.tdar.org/collection/27266.

Take a digital trip to Ostia, Italy and examine its architecture at https://core.tdar.org/collection/27267.

Finally, experience Stabia, Italy and the site’s Villa Arianna at https://core.tdar.org/collection/27268.

CAST researchers created documentation to help you download and view the center’s 3D scan data sets. User documentation is available at the following web address: https://docs.tdar.org/display/TDAR/Working+With+3D+Sensory+Data+Objects. The guide also teaches you how to get started with simple metric analyses of these data sets.

The Center for Digital Antiquity is delighted to welcome Cynthia Pillote as the newest member of the Digital Antiquity Board of Directors. Ms. Pillote is an attorney specializing in intellectual property at Snell and Wilmer, a law firm based in the Phoenix area with offices throughout the western United States.

Ms. Pillote’s expertise is in working with clients to develop, implement and manage business strategies for procuring, maintaining and enforcing intellectual property rights.  Her practice includes U.S. and foreign patent, trademark and copyright prosecution; patent due diligence; technology transfer and licensing; and business transactions.  Cynthia’s technical experience has primarily focused on nanotechnology, semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing, medical devices and products, organic and inorganic chemistry compounds and processes, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, electronic commerce, mechanical devices, mining technology, green technology and electronic communication.

Ms. Pillote holds a B. S. in Chemical Engineering and a M. S. in Materials Science Engineering from Arizona State University. She also is a graduate of the Sandra Day O’Conner College of Law at ASU. Cynthia’s knowledge, skills and abilities will greatly benefit Digital Antiquity. We look forward to her input and guidance as tDAR and Digital Antiquity continue to grow!

 Earlier this week NPR’s All Tech Considered explored the question, “How Long Do CDs Last?”  Since the 1990s an increasing amount of data began to be stored on CDs.  According to Michele Youket, a Library of Congress preservation specialist quoted in the story, there is considerable variation in manufacturing standards for CDs.  This means there aren’t standard tools for preservation that will work on all CDs. So, as these CDs age and decay, the data stored on them is at risk of being lost. 

 While individuals, libraries, and archaeological curation facilities around the country store CDs that contain archaeological information, many are not equipped to preserve them properly.  A better solution to continuing to store important archaeological data on CDs—where it might be lost—is to put them in a digital repository, such as tDAR. tDAR is a dynamic solution for archaeologists worried about losing important data and information.  Digital files archived in tDAR are stored and preserved with rich, discipline specific metadata.  The files are actively checked for corruption at the time of ingest and then on a regular schedule. Additionally, tDAR combats software obsolescence by maintaining files in current standards so that our users can download and use them long into the future.  This level of service and support is something you will not get from a CD. If you’re interested in learning more about ensuring the long term preservation of your digital archaeological information, contact us today.

Written By M. Scott Thompson
M. Scott Thompson is a Digital Curator at The Center for Digital Antiquity. He received his PhD from Arizona State University in May 2014.

Dissertation data should remain alive in the digital age. I am trying to maintain my dissertation data as living, usable data by curating multiple sets in a widely accessible digital repository – the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). Let me tell you how and why I ditched the appendix.

Curating Dissertation Data in a Digital Repository

Recently, I completed my dissertation titled “Interaction with the Incorporeal in the Mississippian and Ancestral Puebloan Worlds.” The project is a comparative examination of the performance of mortuary ritual in the Prehispanic American Southeast and Southwest to understand the identities for the spirits of the dead in these two cultural environments. The examination involved the collection, management, and analysis of large amounts of mortuary data that span multiple archaeological culture areas.

I decided to present the dissertation data solely through tDAR (no appendices necessary). You can view the dissertation project page at the following URL: http://core.tdar.org/project/380979. Here is how I “published” all that data online.

Foremost, I curated the dissertation’s primary, raw data in tDAR. I uploaded the complete relational database that I used for collecting and managing the project’s information. I was able to make the primary data available immediately to other researchers who are interested in the dissertation. Moreover, I continue to manage and enhance the primary data and all the associated metadata. I am still currently documenting the large amounts of metadata that describe the database.

Second, I wanted to curate the processed data sets that I used in each of the study’s analyses, as well as the metric results that each statistical analysis returned. In the dissertation project, I conducted a series of multivariate, exploratory data analysis (EDA) procedures to characterize particular aspects of mortuary ritual within large mortuary samples. In order to perform these analyses, I had to process and format the raw data a great deal. During the course of the analyses, I gathered analysis results (such as multiple correspondence analysis [MCA] and multidimensional scaling [MDS] scores), and then continued to manipulate that information to interpret it. I needed to present these data in a way that allowed other researchers to obtain and use it – with no additional effort.

I uploaded to tDAR the processed data and the results that pertain to each multivariate analysis. These data are directly linked to figures and tables that present analysis results in the document. I placed persistent URL addresses in relevant figure captions and in the text to direct readers to appropriate tDAR resources/pages. You can view several of the processed/analysis results data sets at the following URLs: https://core.tdar.org/dataset/391946 and https://core.tdar.org/dataset/391948.

I hope that the curation of my dissertation data with tDAR ensures that these data are widely available in easily accessible, active formats. Like all others who spend too many years to count with their dissertation projects, I want the data to be used. I want other researchers to continue to analyze the information, to build upon or perhaps refute my study’s results, and to discover novel ways to approach these data in order to answer other questions.

Thinking Beyond the Appendix to Save Your Dissertation Data

In the paper age, authoring a dissertation presented many challenges for publishing associated data. The document itself was often the only venue for presenting these data. A manuscript does not offer ideal or even suitable formats for publishing large amounts of data. Presentation of data in a dissertation requires an author to make difficult decisions about data simplification simply to fit information into neat tables, which then span page after page after page. It eliminates any relationships that exist among the pieces of information. Finally, it lengthens a manuscript that, as your chair and your committee often remind you, is already long enough.

The dissertation’s primary vehicle for data presentation was and typically still is the dreaded appendix. Lurking beyond the dissertation’s references, appendices are often a no man’s land of supplementary information. They are long halls of formatted tables, with lists of categorical variables, numbers, and codes. Because they are printed, they require researchers to conduct hours of work to recreate the data in a format that can be manipulated and used. Thus, the appendices are only visited by those researchers who have such a pressing need to understand a dissertation’s primary data that they are willing to digitize it and re-analyze it.

In the digital age, there are new and emerging ways to disseminate dissertation data. These technologies and digital venues can lift dissertation data from the depths of appendices and place the information in curated formats that are widely discoverable. Through the use of digital data repositories, authors can preserve their primary data in perpetuity and make them widely available. Most importantly, though, they can use digital repository tools to ensure that the data are usable, right away.

It’s Still Alive

Let’s make the printed dissertation appendix a vestigial structure. With new digital technologies and venues, we have an opportunity to move beyond the simple publishing of data.

We have tools that allow us to curate and present primary data in increasingly flexible and creative formats. These tools enable authors and other researchers to interact with primary data in the formats in which they were originally created. More importantly, they allow researchers to interact with primary data in new and exciting ways, which can promote and even demand collaboration, continued manipulation, and growth of existing data. Let’s consider the management and presentation of dissertation data as a living process.

Dissertation data should not become the undead. Dissertation data should remain alive.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced an opportunity to support projects that make it possible to preserve and share information from collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant is filed under the Division of Preservation and Access. Institutions with large and important collections of archaeological information that needs to be digitized, organized and/or more accessible to the general public may apply. The professional and highly-trained staff at tDAR would be happy to collaborate with you to develop a budget or proposal. The deadline for applications is July 17 for projects beginning May 2015.

 

To read more about this opportunity, click here. Or send us a message at info@digitalantiquiy.org for more information on collaborating with tDAR.

Digital Antiquity and tDAR will have a strong presence at both the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) and Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conferences this year. Come see us at either conference this week!

CAA

Keith Kintigh will discuss some of the challenges he sees in the future for digital repositories and digital research.

What do you want from Digital Archaeology?

Friday, April 25 2:00 – 4:45 PM, Panthéon S02

Enormous quantities of archaeological information and knowledge are embedded in articles and often-lengthy reports. Only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of gray literature and published reports is digitally accessible. These reports are often the only available data that document the excavation of important sites that are now thoroughly excavated, destroyed, or otherwise unavailable. We must develop improved methods of finding and extracting relevant information and knowledge that is embedded within those texts.

 
SAA

tDAR will also be at the SAA Annual Meeting in Austin this week. Stop by our booth (511) in the exhibit hall and enter to win a prize, or learn more about tDAR at one of the following events:

Forum on using tDAR

Thursday, April 24, 6:00 – 8:00 PM, Room 9C (Convention Center)

How do your colleagues use tDAR? Come hear students, faculty, CRM professionals, and agency archaeologists discuss how they’ve made tDAR work for them.

 

Lightening Talk on Data Integration using tDAR

Friday, April 25, 12:45 – 1:30 PM, Meeting Room 414 (Hilton)

Interested in data integration with tDAR? Come see our lightening talk at the Digital Data Interest Group meeting. The 3 minute talks start at 12:45 and we are in slot #7. We should go on at 1:03!

 

Make the Most of Your tDAR Student Membership

Friday, April 25, 1:00 – 5:00 PM, Room 8B (Convention Center)

Are you a student member interested learning more about your tDAR member benefit and ways you might use it? We’ll be dropping in on the Student Futures Forums to answer any questions you may have!

 

 

Last week, internet security experts announced a major flaw ‘heartbleed‘ in commonly used encryption software (OpenSSL).  We take the security and safety of data entrusted to tDAR seriously.  We wanted to take a moment and both outline what we’ve done regarding the ‘heartbleed’ bug, but also take a moment to discuss how we protect your data. 

Was tDAR affected?

Like much of the internet, tDAR’s infrastructure was running a version of OpenSSL that was affected. We have seen no evidence that this bug was exploited.  The Digital Antiquity staff took immediate action on a number of fronts including:

• immediately patching each of the affected servers within hours of the announcement
• working with our vendors to re-issue the SSL certificates that may have been compromised in the process

How do we handle server security?

The security of client’s data is of critical importance to us.  We take a number of standard approaches to managing the security of tDAR.  These include:

• Limiting access to each of our machines and running and testing firewalls that limit this access
• Running Enterprise focused OS versions which tend to be more conservative from a security standpoint and undergo more testing.
• Patching our servers regularly, usually daily.
• Limiting the services and applications running on our machines.
• Coordinating with external IT specialists in the University and elsewhere to test our servers for common vulnerabilities.

How do we handle application security?

  Beyond testing and patching our servers, we also test the application regularly.

• We work with external IT specialists to run common security analysis tools on our software to identify vulnerabilities.
• We try to hack our own software.
• We run over 1000 tests on our software prior to release, many of these are focused around rights and permissions. A number of these tests also attempt to perform actions that a user would not have rights to perform, eg. escalate permissions.

FPMcManamon

Archaeologists are up-to-their-ears in digital data and, just like physical artifact collections and paper records, these digital data must be curated properly so that the information they contain is not lost.  But, what does this mean?  What is good digital curation?  Well, it is more than storing digital data in iCloud or a Dropbox account, neither of which provide for long-term preservation, data-sharing, or future use of the data.  And, it isn’t simply putting your data on a website and hoping that colleagues who might be interested will find it and use it.

The level of understanding of what comprises digital curation and why it is important within the contemporary archaeology community is reminiscent of the situation a generation ago regarding the curation of physical collections and records from archaeological investigations.  Then, many archaeologists did not consider how the physical collections of artifacts, samples, and records they created in each field investigation would be curated.  These concerns were left to be dealt with by museum curators or not at all.  Now, planning for archaeological investigations must take account of how and where physical collections and records will be curated.  Archaeologists are required to consider this aspect of their archaeological projects.  Similarly, planning and appropriate treatment of digital data as a normal part of archaeological investigations is essential to ensure that these results of studies are discoverable, accessible, and preserved for future use. An important challenge for the archaeological community and individual archaeologists is how to bring digital curation into archaeological practice without waiting for another generation to pass.  We need to shorten the period within which proper digital curation and preservation of archaeological data becomes a regular part every archaeological project.

The Digital Curation Centre, a national authority on the subject in the United Kingdom, describes digital curation as “maintaining, preserving, and adding value to digital research data.”  To flesh out these terms a bit, one can describe good digital curation as:

• organizing a project’s digital files logically for efficient administration, management, and research;
• creating detailed and “rich” metadata describing the file contents and linking this metadata directly with the files;
• uploading files to a repository (we would recommend tDAR for archaeological data) where they can be discovered and appropriately accessed; and,
• managing files in the repository to ensure their long-term availability for future uses. 

Detailed guidance about digital curation is available, for example, the Center for Digital Antiquity and the Archaeology Data Service provide quite body of methodological, practical, and technical information about organizing and treating digital data on their webpages, Guide to Good Practice.  Last year these organizations published a handbook with basic guidance about good digital curation methods and techniques, Caring for Digital Data in Archaeology, available from Oxbow Books.

Now, word is spreading wider.  The recently published Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, by Springer, includes an article: “Digital Archaeological Data: Ensuring Access, Use, and Preservation.”  A preprint version of this article is available in tDAR, where it can be viewed and/or downloaded by registered tDAR users.

There are positive developments based on broader national and international efforts.  For example, the US government recent policies requiring improved access to research data and information generated by government agencies.  Another positive development is the greater emphasis on requiring good digital data management by granting agencies like NSF and NEH.  Academic and scientific publishers, including the Society for American Archaeology and Elsevier, are emphasizing making data used in published articles available in digital formats. All of these general developments are moving in the right direction for improving the inclusion of good digital curation as part of contemporary archaeological practice.  With all this positive background, there is no reason for individual archaeologists or agencies responsible for archaeological information to delay the incorporation of good digital curation into their own work.  Let’s not wait for 20, or 25, or 30 years for digital curation to become part of archaeological good practice.  We will have lost much too much data and information if we delay.

There are lots of reasons to backup your data, including protection from loss, accidental damage, or device failure, or to simply have access to older versions in case of mistakes.  Good backup practices require maintaining multiple copies of the data, ideally in physically different locations.  If you’d like more information on backup procedures (or horror stories!), review the Guides to Good Practice. 

Importantly, storage media (CDs, Flash Drives, External Hard Drives, etc.) are great short-term backup solutions, but are not designed to protect your information in perpetuity.  Burned CDs have a lifespan of only a few years[1], and hard and flash drives have a limited number of write-cycles[2]. 

Are you looking for a more long-term solution? Celebrate World Backup Day by archiving your archaeological information in tDAR!  tDAR is so much more than simple file storage–the repository offers a full archival solution.  

Digital files in tDAR are 

• protected from catastrophic loss; 
• accessible from anywhere with an internet connection;
• always available in up-to-date file formats so you can open and use your files today and long into the future;  
• associated with rich, archaeologically specific metadata for easy search and discovery.

Don’t wait!  Upload your digital files today before it is too late!