Eric Kansa of OpenContext.org presented remotely via Google Hangout.
Abstract:
Digital data hovers at the margins of intellectual interest and professional recognition in archaeology. NSF data management plan requirements may reinforce the notion that data have more to do with administrative compliance and little to do with the intellectual core of research. Thus, discussions about data heavily focus issues of standards, metrics, interoperability, “best practices,” and required investments in cyber infrastructure.
Experiments in “data publishing” in multiple disciplines attempt to address some of the incentive problems to encourage greater intellectual rigor in research data management. Journals like PLOS-ONE require availability of data associated with papers. In archaeology, The journals Internet Archaeology and the Journal of Open Archaeological Data similarly have introduced peer-reviewed “data papers” (introductory summaries about datasets in repositories). While most publishers of data papers mainly focus on reviewing datasets stored as files in digital repositories, Open Context’s data publication workflows reformat and restructure data for Web dissemination, providing common human and machine interfaces and Linked Open Data interoperability to dynamically hosted data. This stands in marked contrast to the approaches taken by most digital repositories. Open Context’s approach is more expensive and harder to “scale” than conventional digital repositories, since it requires more expert human labor to prepare data. Nevertheless, we argue experimental approaches in data publication like this are needed- data management plans will achieve little if they only fill our digital repositories with messy and incomprehensible spreadsheets.
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Files:
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