Digital curation of archaeological knowledge

ARIADNE training workshop: Digital approaches to archaeological knowledge curation

13 – 16 June 2016, Athens, Greece

Organizer: Digital Curation Unit-IMIS, Athena Research Centre (DCU)

Co-organizers: Faculty of Information (iSchool), University of Toronto & Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business

The training workshop is the first module of a summer school on Digital curation of archaeological knowledge: New approaches to digital research, information management and communication in archaeology, organized as part of the activities of ARIADNE, the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. It is open to postgraduates, PhD students, academic researchers and professional archaeologists interested in the use of digital methods and approaches for the digital curation of archaeological knowledge, as it is manifested in pre-existing archaeological data, resources and archives. It involves an international faculty, including instructors from the Digital Curation Unit, as well as Greek, European and North American universities.

The workshop will enable researchers and professionals in the knowledge domains of archaeology, information and archival science, museums and cultural heritage management to engage with current and emerging approaches to the digital curation of archaeological knowledge. Archaeologists, stewards of archaeological resources, museum and cultural heritage professionals increasingly face the challenge of having to build upon valuable pre-existing archaeological knowledge, found in past excavation data and archives, commercial archaeology reports, archaeological museum collections, corpora and gazetteers, historical and ethnographic testimonies, grey literature, and diverse kinds of representations of archaeological realities. Such knowledge is often based on resources which are partially documented, uncurated, or generally lacking adequate documentation about their content and context. The emergence of organized digital infrastructures in archaeology, in tandem with the increasing use of pervasive digital networks, media and tools in archaeology, brings new challenges and opportunities for the future use of archaeological information.

The provisional programme of the workshop is presented below. Updated information on the programme, venue and other relevant information can be found at the 2016 summer school website . Places are limited.

The summer school receives funding from the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2012-1-313193 (ARIADNE).

Provisional programme

Monday, 13 June

9:30 – 10:00 Welcome and introductions

10:00 – 13:00 Digital curation of archaeological knowledge: key concepts, issues and approaches

14:30 – 17:30 Individual projects: understanding and developing a digital approach to legacy research data curation

Tuesday, 14 June

9:00 – 12:00 Metadata, semantic modeling and linking of legacy archaeological data

14:00 – 17:30 Individual projects: data modeling of legacy data and resources for research and scholarly communication