Sharing Data in Archaeology

...I know it has been a long time since my last post and many, many things happened.  Our CAA session on Uncertainty was great (many thanks to the contributors, and actually many thanks to the organisers and  all the staff involved in the conference organisation!), lots of nice paper on a very wide range of topics from data collection to dissemination, going through all stages of analysis and data representation....

One thing that came out from the roundtable discussion and from some of the contributions was very much related to data format, standards and their representation. A big issue in archaeology where you struggle to find datasets and you are often tied to social obligations, nasty replies, and even when you get access to the data you find them useless as the data structure is comprehensible only to its creator, and sometime not even to him/her....

We tend to create data for the purpose to do something with it, and very rarely we care about others, and whether they are able to re-use our data-set and examine if the results can be re-created (see an interesting example of this for ABM here). This is profoundly unscientific, as not allowing the user to recreate the experiment or the analysis is essentially cheating. The problem is that creating datasets that can be used by other people is hard, damn hard. Personally I don't think making dataset re-usable for other people is the most exciting part of our research, but I love when I find data-sets that can be easily re-used and can be understood by anyone.

Then I discovered that my own university started this great project called REWARD and that CAA introduced a recycle award. Both were aimed to encourage researchers to make their dataset available, and to reuse them either to re-assess given knowledge, or to provide new analysis and possibly new interpretation. But how to do this? The currency of the academic word is citation (alas) and so the best way to change the system is to exploit such structure. If people can publish their data as papers, other people using these data have to reference them. That's the price you pay, a citation entry. Data becoming available in these format will need to be re-usable, and by doing this they will acquire visibility. People will start to choose these data, instead of asking dataset to some mean professor replying you with a nasty email. This will also create a feedback mechanism, the more a paper is being referenced the more it will be advertised. So scholars will start to submit their data paper to acquire the same visibility. If you fast-forward this everybody will submit data papers, providing the availability a vast amount of data which were previously hidden inside dusty cupboards. This can change the discipline. If there is a journal doing this....

Ah. I forgot to mention. Turns out that there is a new journal doing this now. The Journal of Open Archaeology Data  is exactly aiming to do what I wrote in the paragraph above:

"The Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD) features peer reviewed data papers describing archaeology datasets with high reuse potential. We are working with a number of specialist and institutional data repositories to ensure that the associated data are professionally archived, preserved, and openly available. Equally importantly, the data and the papers are citable, and reuse will be tracked. While still in beta phase, the journal is now accepting papers. We will also be adding new functionality over the next few weeks, and refining the look and feel."


I published a paper myself, using the settlement data I have used for this paper which I published (along with Andy Bevan and Mark Lake) on the Journal of Archaeological Science a couple of years ago. The data is slightly different (it's updated to a new chronology) but I attached an R script into the paper which should allow anybody to update the core components of the paper. The entire experience has been very thoughtful, especially as much of the stuff has been created 5 years ago... Trying to find the right version of the file, check if everything was matching is everything else...  tough job. But definitely worth it, and I'm looking forward to seeing somebody using my data-set, perhaps proving that I was wrong in my conclusions !

So open you dusty cupboards, look back at your data, fix all the small (and big) errors you'll find in there, and share your data by submitting a paper to the Journal of Open Archaeology Data.

source: http://openarchaeologydata.metajnl.com/about/

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

I'm currently reading "Fooled by Randomness" by N.Talib, and I'm really enjoying a chapter dedicated on randomness in humanities... So let me start with two quotes:

" 'Reality is part of the dialectic of consciousness' says Derrida; however, according to Scuglia[1] , it is not so much reality that is part of the dialectic of consciousness, but rather the absurdity, and hence the futility, of reality."

"Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification [...]"

Very exciting. Now you have to guess: one of the two quotes is from Hegel, and the other one has been generated from a computer using the Postmodernism generator, created by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine. (you can find the whole article I've created here, and if you want to make your own paper just click here).
Now, it's all fun, and if you know some philosophy you've probably guessed right (Hegel is the second one, also because it's very unlikely that he've quoted Derrida which was born 101 years after his death...). The point is, with another random combination (without Derrida being quoted) could someone have fooled you? To be honest I'm not a philosopher nor a postmodernist and I'll be concerned if you fool me with a scientific paper on spatial analysis rather than this (it would be nice to actually have a positivist generator to see how it would work...). I simply don't care much, but actually Alan Sokal, a physicist  of New York University, tried to submit a paper on Social Text by randomly creating (not with a computer this time) meaningless sentences... Well you can read his accepted and published paper here....Later in the same year, Sokal explains his point in another paper, (this time generated non-randomly I think):

"For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities [...]. I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?"


and then states:

"Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory -- meaning postmodernist literarytheory -- carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and ``text,'' then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and ``language games,'' then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre." (bold mine)

Scary, but perhaps true also in some archaeology and anthropology? While asking this question I've just read on Carl Lipo's blog how the executive committee of the  American Anthropological Association  are proposing to rephrase  their mission statement removing the word "science" (see here).