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The Digital Archaeological Record with Chris Nicholson - Ep 157
259 Plays4 years ago
The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is a repository for archaeological data of all types. Chris Nicholson is the director of the Center For Digital Antiquity and he comes on to talk to Paul about what it is and how it’s used.
Links
- The Digital Archaeological Repository (tDARThe Digital Archaeological Repository (tDAR)
- Open Context
- Ariadne Plus
- PeriodO
- Robinson, E., C. Nicholson, and R. Kelly, 2019. The Importance to Spatial Data to National Archaeological Databases. Advances in Archaeological Practice. 1-14.
- Nicholson, C., Fernandez, R. and Irwin, J. 2021 Digital Archaeological Data in the Wild West: the challenge of practising responsible digital data archiving and access in the United States, Internet Archaeology 58.
- Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA)
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Architect podcast episode 157. I'm your host Paul Zimmerman. Today I'll be talking to Dr. Christopher Nicholson of the Digital Archaeological Record. Chris is the director of the Center for the Digital Antiquity and TDAR, the Digital Archaeological Record, and the School for Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Christopher Nicholson
00:00:40
Speaker
This is Paul. I don't have Chris Webster, our normal host. He had a last minute thing, which is totally an odd event because normally I'm the one that has to cancel at the last minute, but we have another probably much better Chris on hand. So Chris, how are you doing today? Really well. Thanks for having me today, Paul. I appreciate it. You're out in Arizona right now, right? I am up down here in Phoenix, Arizona.
00:01:04
Speaker
where it's incredibly hot. It's about 118 today. And so we're just trying to stay cool. And it's a good thing that I'm a digital person. That way I don't have to go outside and mess with this. I can just play on my computer all day.
00:01:18
Speaker
air conditioned, I hope. So far, yes. Yeah. But you are, for our listeners sake, you are also an archaeologist. So you do know about the field work aspect of it, but that's not what we're talking about today. We're going to be talking about the computer work you do. In particular, we're going to start and mostly focus on TDAR.
What is TDAR?
00:01:34
Speaker
Can you give us our listeners a sense of what TDAR is? Sure. So so actually, I am a associate research professor at the Arizona State University at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.
00:01:48
Speaker
And there we actually have a center called the Center for Digital Antiquity. And that center runs TDAR, which is an acronym for the Digital Archaeological Record. And the Digital Archaeological Record is really simple. It's an online repository for any type of digital resource related to an archaeological investigation, right? So whether it's a document that you've produced, like the site report,
00:02:15
Speaker
or images, or data, or GIS, really is designed to preserve that information, that digital information, for the long term. It's just something that we often don't do in archaeology, and it's something from our center side of it, from digital antiquity side, which is sort of that umbrella organization that we really work to promote. So that's why I'm sort of excited to talk about this with you
Origins and Support of Digital Antiquity
00:02:39
Speaker
today. Yeah, this umbrella organization, digital antiquity, who's behind it? Who are your backers?
00:02:45
Speaker
So digital antiquities started back in about 2000. Dr. Keith Kintig, a professor at Arizona State University, along with a bunch of other folks, including Tim Kohler from Washington State University. Frank McManaman was heavily involved with this. They started this and got a National Science Foundation grant.
00:03:06
Speaker
Ended up getting a Andrew Mellon grant for rather large grant to get this off the ground And so that's who sort of got this going and but it's been housed at Arizona State University and they've offered you know a lot of just sort of the institutional backing that a repository like this is sort of needed but we try to we try to stand alone from them and
00:03:27
Speaker
In part because we're not just, we are definitely not for just for academics. We actually want to focus more on the CRM world because that's where by far most of the information is generated in the archaeological world, right?
Importance of Archaeological Data Preservation
00:03:41
Speaker
I mean, I think it was just last year, the SRI Foundation put out a report that I think it was to the tune of, you know, $325 million are annually spent in CRM and
00:03:56
Speaker
You know, honestly, that's a lot of money to be producing a lot of data. And so we're really interested in how is that information generated? Ultimately, we know that a lot of it goes to the SHPOs, but we also know that most of it doesn't go anywhere other than the PI's desktop or the hard drive that they carry around to protect. So we're really interested in that long-term preservation of that information that often gets sort of
00:04:20
Speaker
bundled and lost. You're saying that you're storing files, data, documents, all sorts of stuff. How are you getting these data to yourself from that PI who is hoarding that hard drive and hopefully taking good care of it but most likely not? How does that get from that PI to TDAR?
00:04:40
Speaker
So a lot of it is actually me going out and talking with people, right? Letting people know that that's, this is an option. This is really a data solution, right?
TDAR Partnerships and Legal Alignment
00:04:50
Speaker
It's the storage part, but it's also the access that you can ultimately have. And so a lot of it, you know, like when I, you know, I first met Chris at the SHAs in Boston, a lot of us talking to people and letting people know what we do. We regularly reach out to a lot of federal and state organizations.
00:05:08
Speaker
And honestly, our federal partners are some of the, our biggest users by far of TDAR. There's been a recognition from.
00:05:16
Speaker
Really, DOD, the Department of Defense, has been a big one for us. This recognition that they really have to meet the spirit of the law with the National Historic Preservation Act, which really does have some specific language in there talking about the preservation of data records, that along with even new types of legislation like the Open Government Data Act that was put out in, I think it was 2019,
00:05:42
Speaker
that basically said we want to make better decisions at the federal level, right? And in order to do that, we really have to have access to better data and
Ethics in Archaeological Data Preservation
00:05:50
Speaker
information. And if we're going to do that, we have to have machine readable information, right? It can't just be in a paper document sitting on somebody's desk. So it's got to be machine readable and it's got to be accessible. So really the DOD has been
00:06:04
Speaker
really a great partner in recognizing they have these legacy documents from their land managing activities over the years at these different installations.
00:06:14
Speaker
A lot of times they'll have digital records already created. And what they do within TDAR is they upload that information along with metadata, which is really key, right? Making sure that we know who, what, when, where, and why of that information that we're getting. And then ultimately they have access. So whether you're a CRM person, whether you're a land manager with the federal government, or if you're an academic, another one of our big partner sort of groups in general is when
00:06:42
Speaker
academics go to get a grant like the National Science Foundation. Now the National Science Foundation is requiring data management plans. So usually it's a two page plan that says, hey, when I'm done with this project, this is how I'm going to store this information and make sure that, you know, the federal funds that we're getting to do this are creating information that can ultimately be used by other people. And so we're usually some sort of line item in their
00:07:12
Speaker
in their grant budget. Do those laws have teeth or are you getting buy-in based off of the good intentions of the researchers and the land managers and so on? That is a great question. Honestly, there is no teeth. Really,
00:07:29
Speaker
you know, whether you're the federal government or whatever else, there's, there's really no punishments right out there. If, if tomorrow you were doing a project and you submitted your report to SHPO and you didn't submit a digital file, nobody's going to do anything, honestly. And that's kind of part of the problem. We have a lot of carrots to do stuff to do this digital archiving, right? We think it fits within our, our larger ethical obligation as archeologists.
00:07:57
Speaker
right, to provide this information to make sure it's out there in the public sphere so that people can learn about our cultural heritage and everything else. But there's really no sticks. I mean, honestly, nobody has ever said, you know, if you don't turn in your data, the chance of you getting another CRM contract or nil, or if you don't turn in your data to the National Science Foundation, you won't get another
00:08:21
Speaker
There's really no language out there that says that. So this has been sort of, you know, it's a really an interesting conundrum for us because we, you know, we really are relying on that ethical obligation for people, even though it's codified in law.
00:08:38
Speaker
I'm glad that you're actually talking about ethics already because Chris and I have been co-hosting this. Chris has had the podcast for a few years before I joined as co-host, but we've had this conversation. We've come to the point that digital archaeology is a pointless term, that all archaeology is sufficiently digital at this point, that we can just drop the digital part from it because everybody's using at least
00:09:05
Speaker
spreadsheets and word processors. And almost everybody's using some sort of GIS and GPS and on down the line. But then the other one that I would love to see die is ethics in archaeology. I feel that if we're not thinking about the ethics of what we're doing,
00:09:22
Speaker
we're not doing it right. So I'm very
Challenges in Data Accessibility
00:09:25
Speaker
pleased to see that you're talking about that. But of course, that makes it a heavy lift to try to tell a cash strap researcher or somebody that is trying to get the CRM job in competing for that, competing for that proposal with somebody else, trying to get them to buy into this other thing that may be viewed as a side project, not necessarily essential to what they're doing in terms of the archiving.
00:09:51
Speaker
But I'd like to believe that most of us, most archaeologists are well-intentioned enough. Has that been your experience? Is it a heavy lift? Yeah. No, it is and it isn't. Every time I talk to somebody, whether it's an academic or somebody in the CRM world, I tell them what we're doing with a TDAR and a digital antiquity and it is a no-brainer. This is one of those basic
00:10:16
Speaker
ethical things that we feel like we all should be doing. Now, the reality is that we don't, even by a long stretch. If you think about the actual ability to access our information that we generate, it's really difficult. You know, in SHPOs, you know, they're there, they provide a very specific need, right, in making sure that regularly, you know, archaeologists are making sure that our cultural heritage is protected.
00:10:46
Speaker
But in terms of making sure that that information is reused for some maybe larger purpose really isn't there, right? And if continuing on in sort of this ethical side, it's like I've talked to, oh, I don't know how many folks from the CRM world that are like, you know what, this is a great idea. Are we going to put our clients information in there? Probably not, no, because it's not mandated. You know, the SHPO doesn't tell us that we have to submit our digital data.
00:11:16
Speaker
to you or to anybody, right? We have to meet the scope that's been put before us. We have to meet our deliverables, which are usually a report, and that's it. Now, if somebody came by and said, Paul, you, as a part of your project, you have to do it. Guess what?
00:11:35
Speaker
as a part of the project you would. And those costs would be probably passed down to the client. And that's another thing I think we need to work toward more is understanding that if we're going to do this work, obviously it needs to be paid for. There's no such thing as free, right? There's no free storage in the world and TDAR costs money to run and make sure that everything's accessible. But all of these costs really should be borne by
00:11:59
Speaker
by the client. If they want a permit and if they want to truly meet the spirit of the law, we need to change our legal language that says, as a part of your project deliverables, this information will be in a trusted repository in addition to the SHPO. We really need to, I think, as a larger organization, do this because, to me, it really is a no-brainer of ethics.
00:12:24
Speaker
I was not expecting this conversation to go in this direction, but I'm fascinated now thinking about ethical responsibilities and legal obligations, which apparently exist but aren't enforced.
TDAR's Certification and FAIR Principles
00:12:38
Speaker
Another part of the legality of doing certain things is that there are certain places or firms that are licensed to do stuff. Do you have any kind of, I don't know the terminology that I'm looking for here, but do you
00:12:50
Speaker
have any certain way of verifying that TDAR meets certain standards, that you could meet the legal responsibilities if there were ones for a particular project to store their data? Yeah, that's another great question. And to be honest, you know, data repositories are interesting because they're almost a dime a dozen, right? And you have the Amazon Cloud, you have Dropbox, these are all
00:13:17
Speaker
in some effect a data repository, but really a trusted data repository is different, right? Because they have other requirements that they have to meet. Things like enhanced security, they have to have metadata standards, you know, accessibility, how things are accessed are really have to be well defined. And there's actually an organization called the Core Trust Seal,
00:13:40
Speaker
It's a global organization that basically certifies you as a repository that says you meet these standards of whether it be security or, oh, just, you know, cyber infrastructure. So you have to make sure that you're meeting their standards. And those are the standards that we actually work toward. Now, the thing is, is we're still in the process of actually being certified, but that's something that we hope to have done actually within the span of a year.
00:14:08
Speaker
But there's really very few core trust certified entities, especially for archaeology in the world. There's only a couple in Europe and there's not even a single one in North America. We would be the first one to meet those actual standards. So an archaeologist could say.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yes, we are actually housing our information in a truly trusted repository. That's interesting too. I would not have expected, but it's heartening to hear that there is something in the works to make a trusted, certified kind of repository for archaeological data because I would have expected prior to hearing you just say that it would have been not yet at that point. So it's farther along than I would have guessed.
00:14:51
Speaker
And when I was thinking about trusted data, I was thinking something like the laws that govern HIPAA and who can have access to your medical records and under what conditions and how you can grant somebody else access to it. And I was wondering,
00:15:06
Speaker
That has teeth. So if you do reveal medical information to somebody that shouldn't have it, you can be held liable and possibly criminally liable. So it's interesting to hear that archaeological data might be moving in that direction.
00:15:24
Speaker
And I think actually that would be a good thing for us. Add a certain amount of discipline to the field, which hasn't necessarily always been there. I mean, I've known and I think I've mentioned before, one of my professors did work in Iraq that was in the 50s and 60s, it was never published. That's not right.
00:15:41
Speaker
He was one of the top people in the field and I loved him dearly until he passed away a number of years ago. He taught me a lot but he didn't meet that ethical responsibility of what to do with the data that he had. That's such a critical thing and that's where I don't know if this is a lead in or not.
00:16:01
Speaker
But I'm going to go ahead and throw it out there where we're working on these fair principles. Yeah. Why don't we, um, we're just about at our break. So why don't we leave that dangling for our listeners. And when we come back after the break, we can discuss what fair is and, uh, you know, how it informs what you do with TDAR.
00:16:18
Speaker
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00:17:42
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect podcast, episode 157. Chris Nicholson, not Chris Webster, who's not here today. Just a moment ago, before we went to break, you were talking about FAIR, which is an acronym that's been applied with digital archaeology lately. And though I just said, I don't like the term digital archaeology, I'll use it there. Could you explain for us because it's broader than just digital archaeology, but many things in our digital and computer and internet lives. And you say that it applies to what you're doing with TDAR. So could you elaborate upon that for us?
00:18:11
Speaker
Yeah, so FAIR is an acronym that came about in about 2016. It was by Wilkinson et al. in a scientific journal that was just talking about the FAIR data principles in general across the sciences. It's not necessarily for archaeology, but everything, right? And it stands for making things findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. And this really, it's really taken hold in
00:18:40
Speaker
European archaeology and we're a little bit slow to the game here, but it fits so well with what we do in archaeology, right? It's like we have this information and whether it be through cultural heritage and teaching the public about our cultural heritage or whatever we want to make sure the information is findable, right? And so we have things like like archives, right? We have to make sure that there's a place to put it and so even with that we have things like metadata Because if you're gonna find something you have to know something about it
00:19:10
Speaker
So making something findable is really important. So whether it's a person that's searching for something or if there's a Google algorithm that's looking for it, it has to be found somehow, right? And so when you have a repository like TDAR, that really helps facilitate that findability. So the next part of that's the accessibility. And accessibility is, you know, well, who should have permission to access this? This is something that we were sort of leading into
00:19:39
Speaker
just a minute ago, thinking about archaeology, there's a lot of sensitive information. Geographically sensitive information, we don't want site locations out there in the world for
00:19:50
Speaker
for people to go around and looting sites or damaging, vandalizing things like we've seen with rock art. So we have to make sure that we're controlling that access. And so there's kind of this fun little saying, as closed as possible, open as, I'm sorry, open as possible and as closed as necessary. Again, that fits really well with what we do in archaeology. And that goes to culturally sensitive information too.
00:20:12
Speaker
You know, bear, we work a lot with tribal entities, which are, you know, fantastic partners, but there's times where the information that's in a report or something is, is culturally sensitive. And so that's information that should be locked down. And that actually ties into a whole nother set of principles. We can talk about the care principles, but let's sort of just focus on the fair side of this first. Um, and then, um, yeah, I can't, I can't spell. So AI bear.
00:20:41
Speaker
Interoperable. That's, you know, making sure that the information that we produce can be used with other information. And this has been, I know it's a challenge and I started my archaeology training as a zoarchaeologist and having interoperable data with that has been really interesting. You know, everybody calls a bison a bison. So that's pretty easy. A humorous is a humorous. And so you can begin to take data sets across
00:21:09
Speaker
you know, time and space and you can begin to say, start comparing whether the skeletal elements or whatever it is across, you know, multiple data sets. And that's not always the case with other types of archaeological information. You know, lithics is always challenging. Ceramics are even more challenging. Oh, absolutely. But trying to think of thinking about how we can make our data talk to each other and not only talk to each other, but talk to different programs, whether it be, you know, you pull your data into a GIS
00:21:39
Speaker
And then you can feed that information into a statistical program. How does that information talk back and forth across technological platforms?
The Role of Data Reuse in Archaeology
00:21:48
Speaker
Is that a matter of lexicon? Is that a matter of data format? Is that a matter of interchange between databases, all of the above? All of the above. I mean, one of the things, yeah, we stress ontologies, right? Making sure that you've defined the vocabulary of what you're doing.
00:22:09
Speaker
So if somebody comes back in and says, OK, well, what did you do? Do you have a really clear ontology instead of coding sheets that exist as a part of that data set so that somebody can do these types of things so that they can integrate their data set with yours? And so that's really important, making sure all of that, what you said is it's compatible. But it takes effort and some forethought to do that, for sure.
00:22:34
Speaker
Another question about accessibility interoperability before we get to the last letter in our acronym here. I don't want to derail this too much. Just a quick question is a language. Is TDAR multilingual? It is. That's a bit of a challenge, right? Because you originally had something. Just a slight one. When you're a programmer, if you've got, you know,
00:22:57
Speaker
unique characters coming into your data set, it can be a real challenge. And so, yeah, that's been sort of an interesting thing we do. And we actually reconnect to another international data repository that's more of a portal called Ariadne. And if your listeners have a chance, they should Google it. It's A-R-I-N-D-E plus Ariadne plus. And it's a data portal that links to all sorts of data portals around the world. And that's been an interesting challenge. Yeah, show notes.
00:23:26
Speaker
Yeah, because everybody, you know, whether you're in Poland or in Italy, we've, we're trying to work together to have more consistent language for certain things, especially like time periods, where we use a program called periodo. It's another one that people should check out that, you know, whether it be time period, because, you know, paleo Indian and.
00:23:47
Speaker
Western United States doesn't mean much to somebody in Cantabria, Spain. Well, and if you go to Spain, Bronze Age might be something totally different in Spain that is in Iraq. Exactly. Neolithic. How many times do you hear the word Neolithic? Oh my goodness. It means something to somebody else.
Applying FAIR and CARE Principles
00:24:05
Speaker
So that's a challenge for sure. All right. So let's go on to the R, that last letter in our FAIR acronym.
00:24:11
Speaker
Sure, the magical R, the reusable. What in the world are we doing in archaeology if we can't reuse our information somehow? You know, it's like we create reports and we do all this information about our cultural heritage, but what's the meaning behind it? Can somebody else learn from it?
00:24:29
Speaker
Are we reusing the information to be better land managers? Are we doing it to teach people about the cultural heritage of the United States? That sort of long, really deep, rich history here and reusing it in all sorts of settings. Like I said, it could be a land manager.
00:24:46
Speaker
that really wants to know what's the spatial distribution of the stuff on the lands on managing, or it could be an academic archaeologist who wants to do some type of synthetic research across a larger area to learn maybe more about the human condition over time, right? Whether it be looking at things like mobility or how has climate impacted populations over time. How can we use this information really to inform all sorts of other decisions, but really,
00:25:15
Speaker
making the information reusable is kind of a surprising challenge. And again, it really starts with those other letters, making it findable, making it accessible, making it interoperable. Because if you do those, then really making it reusable is simple, but you've got to do the whole thing, really. Right. Well, this acronym is also a little bit of a fortunate hierarchy then too, isn't it?
00:25:39
Speaker
No, actually, it's not going to be accessible if it's not findable. And if it's not interoperable, accessible and findable, there's no way it's going to be reusable. Exactly. And it's interesting because this actually this acronym got off the ground first, like I was saying in 2016. But
Data Authority and Access Control
00:25:54
Speaker
more recently, there's there's been a sort of a partner
00:25:57
Speaker
acronym to this, and it's called care. And this is really focusing on indigenous populations and the importance of making sure that the information that we're collecting meets that care principle, which is collective benefit, let's see, a authority to control are responsible and ethical with all of this information. So even if you're meeting that care principle, making sure that you're meeting the care principle also
00:26:21
Speaker
is kind of an important part because so much of what I mean, all of what we do in North America, right, is it revolves around indigenous archaeology. So, you know, while we're trying to meet our mandates of things like the ARPA and the NHPA, you know, making sure that we take into account the concerns of indigenous communities has been a real important part of data archiving too for us.
00:26:43
Speaker
I'm listening to you describe that and A really stands out to me authority because when it comes to archaeological data, especially in North America with our long and fraught problems between academic researchers, land managers against developers and natives, there are many people who could claim authority over particular data. How do you negotiate that?
00:27:09
Speaker
Because by putting yourself as the controllers of the data, you become, whether you want to or not, you also become an authority in this whole chain. Right. And actually we try to remove ourselves from that as much as possible. And that goes for a lot of the stuff in, in TDAR. So if somebody ultimately comes to us and they want to put something in TDAR as the repository, it's really up to them to, to, to decide who has that authority to
00:27:35
Speaker
And we have mechanisms within TDAR to do that. So any record or any resource within TDAR can be set to be public so that anybody can have access to it. It can be set to embargo. So you can embargo a resource and say, hey, you know what? I want to store this right now. It's really important that I get it stored. But I'm going to be working on this information for the next five years. I'm going to embargo it. And so in five years, it becomes accessible.
00:28:04
Speaker
Or it can be marked as confidential, in which case the only way that somebody else can have access to it is if they email the original resource owner. And then it's the onus is upon them to decide who has access to it. Because really, I shouldn't be the one, right?
00:28:24
Speaker
And, you know, for all sorts of reasons, you know, it's not my product, it's, you know, whether it be an indigenous community that decides that they want to have complete control over a set of resources, then that's their prerogative then. And so oftentimes, yeah, it can be a little bit of a sticky weight, wicked, honestly, on who controls it. But we leave that up to the resource owner to say, hey, you decide.
00:28:47
Speaker
Now that can be a little bit tricky, though, too, because we're not really vetting everything that comes through to say, OK, well, you put up a shapefile and maybe you shouldn't have. We aren't really playing data police in that capacity.
00:29:03
Speaker
So if you're not playing data police in that capacity, are you playing data advisors, data attorneys so that you don't go to the police? Yeah, no, that's a good point. We make it very clear in our users agreement. We have policies set out on our website to make it clear that there's information that should be marked as confidential. And this is where training as an archaeologist is really important. If I think back to my training as an archaeologist,
00:29:33
Speaker
It's really before archaeology was really, really digital. I mean, we were still so much about what we did wasn't digital. And so really, I think it's important that we really work on educating this new generation of archaeologists on what does it mean to
00:29:50
Speaker
to be doing archaeology because it is digital now, right? And what are all those other pitfalls that come with it, right? Making sure that we're thinking about access and that spreadsheet that you have. What does it mean to have digital information in this format?
00:30:06
Speaker
And cause ultimately where does it go? How is it used? So, you know, it's one thing just to have a quantitative methods class, right? One of the things that we would like to see more of is, is, is talking about how data are used and how they're managed and how we should be doing that sort of on a much broader scale so that students have a better understanding of what digital archeology is. Cause you're right, it's all digital now.
00:30:30
Speaker
But really there are ethical parts of having digital data out there in the world, which is very different than sort of the paper forms that I grew up with. Right. The paper forms required access and access meant going to somebody's office and they could agree to meet with you or not. And digital just published willy nilly. And I'm certainly guilty of this myself on the web is accessible potentially to anybody anywhere at any time. Yeah.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah. So you have those mechanisms in place through GDAR so that you don't let anybody, but let me, how about the
TDAR's Future Plans and Innovations
00:31:05
Speaker
other side? So if the owner of the data gets to decide who has access, which is a certainly sensible approach, how do you deal with cases where the owner cannot be reached anymore? Somebody has a very legitimate reason
00:31:20
Speaker
But they can't because the owner has passed away, just like my old professor. Right. This is something that we're really starting to struggle with. Well, I don't want to say struggle. We're starting to think about more now. And we actually, within our policies, we say that if you have information in TDAR, you should really consider assigning somebody else as a proxy.
00:31:41
Speaker
or if you're going to make something confidential. But you know, you're right. This is and this goes to actually a really interesting. It was a paper done by Bill Mitchner in like 1997 talking about metadata in in ecosystem sciences. Right. And he has this fantastic graph of the decay of knowledge over time. It's it's like it's called data entropy. Right. And so when you first have a piece of information, you know, you remember everything about it. Right. You remember the time date, everything about that piece of information you collected.
00:32:11
Speaker
Then five years down the line, you're like, oh, crap. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember doing that. Then 20 years down the line, you're like, I don't know. Then you die. Then what happens to that information and everything else? It is a challenge now because we're seeing a lot of legacy information being put into TDAR and who controls that? Who will control it for the long-term?
00:32:36
Speaker
You know, we can obviously assign a proxy to that information. So somebody else down the line continues to market as, you know, give people access who should have access. But this is something that we need to think about more and more. And this actually, I swear this just came up yesterday. We just submitted my colleagues and I a paper to Nature in their scientific data communications section on
00:33:03
Speaker
a radiocarbon database that we've been working on globally. It's a really great project, part of the People 3K project that was funded by the PAGES program. We have tens of thousands of radiocarbon dates from around the world, and it took a lot of work to pull the information together. I credit everybody but me on the project did a lot of work. I just sort of
00:33:28
Speaker
helped out on the end of getting it into TDAR. And so now that it's in TDAR, one of the reviewers said, OK, what is long term access being in TDAR for these confidential files? They asked that very question. And to be honest, I was like, you're right. I mean, we have it written here that assign a proxy to it. And I'd like to think that 20 years down the line, I'll have the wherewithal to think, oh, crap, I should really
00:33:54
Speaker
Give somebody else access to that. But that's something we need to consider more and more. And how do we have that conversation about us because it's
00:34:02
Speaker
It's kind of a sad conversation when a researcher dies, right? And there's all those other things that go along with it. So it is something we need to think about. So related to that, one of the questions, I'm not sure if you put this down here on our show notes, things to ask, or if Chris put it, but it says, what is your long-term data security plan? And what happens if you lose funding? What happens if TDAR goes belly up? What happens to all that data that you've so carefully
00:34:27
Speaker
cataloged and organized and made accessible. Does it just disappear or do you as a project also have some sort of proxy? Yeah, we have a backup plan. We're lucky at Arizona State University that we have a wonderful relationship with our libraries and they have an institutional repository. We have a memorandum of understanding that says if
00:34:49
Speaker
TDAR goes belly up and I'm knocking on wood that we don't right now, that they will actually step in and they'll take that information. And so what we've done in terms of creating our repositories, making sure that it is compatible with other repositories, right? So that you can, they could easily consume our relational database. They can consume those records and make them available over the long term. So we do have a backup plan.
00:35:14
Speaker
That makes sense and it makes sense that you do that with the libraries because libraries deal with that all the time. What happens when the community library goes up? What do they do with materials and archives as well? That's not a new problem, just not necessarily a problem that I've thought of and I don't know how much most archaeologists have thought about in the past. Why don't we go to our last break and we come back and I've got some questions about maybe the brighter side of TR's future.
00:35:46
Speaker
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00:36:05
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect podcast, episode 157 in our third and final segment. We're going to finish up our discussion with Dr. Christopher Nicholson about TDAR. Chris, I was looking in preparation for this at the TDAR website. It's a very nice website, very sensibly laid out. I got a good sense of what the project is and it made me want to actually probably upload my own dissertation research to it.
00:36:31
Speaker
One of the things I liked about the website was that it had some very informative short, that is five to 10 minute videos, giving any viewer the why, how of TDAR. But in watching them, I was struck by the fact that the repository is largely file-based. You were talking about uploading documents, you were talking about uploading spreadsheets, you were talking about uploading photographs and so on. Most of my data, however, are locked up in my project database.
00:36:58
Speaker
Do you have any current capacity or future plans for either storing or even hosting project databases? Because I think most projects, at least most academic projects nowadays, are not too dissimilar from what I did.
00:37:12
Speaker
Right. No, this is a common thing that we see that, you know, whether you're a large entity or a small serum firm, that you have some type of back end, right, your database that's growing. And so having some type of repository for a living data set is something that is really on our radar. And I've put in a National Science Foundation grant to do something like this, starting with radiocarbon data.
00:37:36
Speaker
in growing a radiocarbon data set. But we realize that's the same thing that's the exact same mechanism that we'd like to do for all sorts of other data sets. So making sure that we have versioning within our archives and making sure that new data can be uploaded. Because really when this started, it really was looked at as a snapshot, right? And that when you're archiving some little piece of information and really those living data sets are becoming so much more common now. So that's definitely a direction that we want to go.
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually another challenge. Now you're saying living data sets. I hadn't even thought of that. I was thinking of, you know, my project is long since completed. I finished my PhD in 2008. It's not a living data set. It's static. But oh, I hadn't even thought about these ongoing projects. An excavation, for example, that's ongoing year after year for 20 years and has had three different dig directors and tons of grad students that have gone through it. That's a whole different kind of challenge. Yeah.
00:38:35
Speaker
For sure. I am hard to hear that you're saying you're applying for an NSF grant, which tells me that TDAR is itself not a finished project, but actually is looking towards expanding and growing in the future in new directions. So what directions are you actively pursuing right now? Yeah, so no, absolutely. We've been lucky over the years to get grants to do improvements on all sorts of things. And right now we'd
00:39:06
Speaker
I'm glad you mentioned the videos because those videos are something that we just put out and I go back and I watch them and I hate them. First of all, it's I don't think they're informative. I hate the one that I did.
00:39:19
Speaker
But we're going to be working with a student this next year to create some more informational videos, to be more graphically oriented. I would love to change the layout of TDAR to make it more intuitive. So there's user interface things that we want to be able to do. Like I said, at some point, I'd love to be able to create living data sets so that if you have ongoing projects, you can easily archive them and version them.
00:39:46
Speaker
We recently, another great one, and I hope your listeners will take a look, is our Membrace Project. We got a grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities with Dr. Michelle Hageman to take images of Membrace POTS from the Southwest and relate those to a database. And so now you can do a query on a database that says, hey, I want all Membrace POTS that have
00:40:15
Speaker
figurative designs, those figurative designs should have antelope on them, and it'll query our database and pull back images of all of those pots. And so there's all sorts of possibilities with all sorts of other images that we could do with that too. And so, yeah, these are just a couple of the things that
00:40:37
Speaker
I wanna explore and I'm sure we've got other people that, you know, that's one of the great things about what we do is I think, I feel like we're community-based and if somebody else had an idea, dial me up because I am interested. I would love to do a project with whomever on something. I had somebody ask me about a rock art database, right? Wouldn't that be cool if we had, you know, images associated with data, so yeah.
00:41:02
Speaker
I'm
Managing Culturally Sensitive Data
00:41:03
Speaker
just going to go out on a limb here that, uh, that members pottery, uh, looking for particular features that's dependent then on that metadata, right? Uh, somebody uploads a photograph of a particular pot and a particular vessel and the, uh, and they have textual description. That's part of the metadata that goes along with it. Exactly. Yep. And it'll say, you know, the size of the pot, what's the images on it, what's all the, all that information that metadata and attribute data.
00:41:28
Speaker
is what allows us to create that functionality to do these searchable image databases. And so it's really a fun one. And there's another one that really we've had to think about in terms of accessibility because there's a lot of pots that have kill holes in them, right? And so those being culturally
00:41:49
Speaker
There's also some of the repositories where Michelle got the images and the information, didn't want those images made accessible online. So they're actually behind our, you know, our sort of security wall. And then unless you get permission from Michelle to use the entire collection, I think there's 9,000 images there. Unless you get permission to use all 9,000 images, you might only have access to 2,000.
00:42:15
Speaker
And her and I did a short piece in the SAA record, I think last year on that one. So if people want to check that out, they can go there too. Okay, I'm going to look for that and I'll also put that in the show notes. Maybe again in a question a little bit in the weeds, but given a pot that has a kill hole, that obviously you don't want to show a photograph of it because it's culturally sensitive.
00:42:36
Speaker
Would the description of that also be as culturally sensitive? Would I, as a researcher that doesn't have the appropriate access, be able to know that this exists in the collection, but I'm not allowed to see it? Or is its existence even hidden from me? In this case, even its existence would be hidden from you, right? Unless you have the entire... Is that on the permissions model for this project or is that something particular to the pottery?
00:43:03
Speaker
And again, I'm asking this question because, I don't know, I'm just curious about what kinds of access one would have. Sure. No, and that's contingent upon this project, right? And that's something that, you know, Michelle decided that was important along with her collaborator, Steve LeBlanc and all these other, you know, repositories where she got the information, you know, and I know she gets regular requests for that information. And sometimes, you know, she, you know, she bets the people
00:43:31
Speaker
to see if it's appropriate. And there's times where she said no. And I think that's totally appropriate. No, it certainly makes sense. I was just just curious what kind of granularity was applied to those to those filters. And I can imagine that some things would be different depending on the culture and the context and what the material is. You know, a description might be totally inappropriate or might be acceptable. It's just the image that's inappropriate. That's a tough line to
00:44:01
Speaker
The complications I can add to doing this are really, it would spiral out of control. I don't know really how you can manage the complexity of it, but I'm very impressed that you're even trying because there's so many different competing interests. Who owns the past? That's a question that gets asked all the time. We know in many cases who can and should, and there are plenty of other people who think that they also can and should.
00:44:31
Speaker
wow, what a tough line to draw and to make this still follow those fair principles that you're trying to do. As I add complications to this, maybe let's just wrap this up. You told me a few directions that TDAR is going. What if
00:44:47
Speaker
you really hit the jackpot with funding and you have the greatest staff possible and you probably do, but you've got even more of the greatest staff possible and you've got no need to worry about the future or the near to midterm future funding and viability of the project. What kinds of pie in the sky things would you be doing with TDAR? Which direction would you like to see it go? If you could, sky's the limit. Oh man, this is a great one because
00:45:17
Speaker
And it's a tough one at the same time because, you know, wouldn't it, this is, you know, the holy grail is if you could go online, right. And you could, you had a map interface, right. And you said, you know, I'm interested in learning all of the information about this in this area. And I drag a box and it's the four corners area crosses four different states. And it retrieves every archeology project that was ever done there.
00:45:45
Speaker
you can hyperlink to that's report, you can access its data, you can see images of whatever was done there, all in a one-stop shop.
TDAR's Vision for the Future
00:45:55
Speaker
Now, that would be great for all sorts of reasons, right? If you're, you know, a lot of shippos are working toward this now, where they're trying to create, you know, a really
00:46:06
Speaker
a really robust system that helps CRM firms and everything through the permitting process. And there's lots of states that do this, right? Whether it's Washington or Texas, Wyoming, there's a lot of states that have systems in place that kind of do this, right? But more and more, we work across state lines, right? And so being able to do this kind of thing at different spatial scales
00:46:32
Speaker
would be just absolutely fantastic. And the ability to actually house all of that information about a project. And, you know, one of the fun things about TDAR is you sort of dig around in there, you come across all sorts of great nuggets. You know, one time I was just milling around and I found a project from Mesoamerica. It was done in the, I think in the, in the eighties and they had, you know, obviously the report, but they had a bunch of field photographs.
00:46:59
Speaker
And it was wonderful just to flip through their field photographs and see the short shorts and the high socks and the old station wagons they were driving around in and the students that were there on the project. And it sort of gave sort of this really rich contextual information to that excavation, right? And that's something that wouldn't necessarily, you wouldn't get all of that other information if you were to maybe just go read that original peer reviewed paper.
00:47:26
Speaker
or just to get that document off the ship of shelf. It's all of that other really rich information that we have as an archaeological community that we create all the time that oftentimes I think we forget that it's a part of even the history of our discipline that's locked in an archive like this. And I would love to be able to make sure that information is available to people. And not necessarily for just us, because we do a lot of great
00:47:56
Speaker
great work, but I'd like to think that the next generation of archaeologists are going to do even better work. They're going to do something really interesting. There's going to be new technologies. There's going to be new theories and ideas. And they can only really, I think, do more and more better work if they have access to what we've done. And that's why I think that I think TDAR is important.
00:48:16
Speaker
Awesome. I'm going to ask one last question. This might be, again, one that derails the conversation, but you're mentioning SHPOs and their databases. And I know that we have other projects that are similar, like open context. How do you work with or compete with these various multiple different kinds of projects? Is it essentially collaborative or are you working against each other or in your own silos?
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a good question. And actually, I'm going to do a little self-promotion. I just wrote an article in Internet archaeology. It's called Digital Archaeological Data in the Wild West. And in that, we sort of talk about what's the landscape of digital archiving in the United States. You know, like you said, we have SHPOs, right? And they're doing a lot of work. A lot of times they're really cash strapped to do certain things.
00:49:07
Speaker
There are certain states that are on the cutting edge of this. But we'd like to be able to, and we really haven't done this thus far, but we'd like to work with some of the SHPOs that maybe don't have access to those funds or the cyber infrastructure to help them get further along the line. Because really, SHPOs really, it's a diverse group, right? And the next SHPO sort of sits there and sort of has, you know, sort of, they have a technological committee, they have other communities that sort of
00:49:34
Speaker
try to evaluate this, and the disparity is really profound, honestly, between states. And so one of the things we would like to be is more of a collaborator, right? Because for one, SHPOs don't take digital data, right, for the most part. It's really those reports and some of the other ancillary information. So we would really like to be, for the SHPOs nationwide, if somebody's going to do a project
00:50:00
Speaker
deposit your data that's associated with that project into TDAR and provide the SHPO with that DOI to say, hey, you've got a report, but here's another way that you can access ancillary information. We don't want to view ourselves as antagonistic in any way to SHPOs. We think they do a critical job. And then in thinking about other folks who are doing digital archiving open context, we actually have a fantastic relationship with
00:50:30
Speaker
Sarah and Eric Kanza, they're working on this fair principle workshop that we hope to do. They do things a little bit different than we do. They're really honed in on this data interoperability side, which is really critical, something that we don't. Another one is Dina, the group that Josh Wells and David Anderson run. Again, it's like we all do slightly different things. Really, we need to be working as partners and
00:51:00
Speaker
and not being antagonistic, I think.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:51:03
Speaker
Well, I think that we can wrap it up right there. That is a nice, positive way to end this, and I definitely agree. I've enjoyed having you on. Thanks so much for taking the time today. And Chris sends his apologies for not being able to be here today, but I think it's fine because I have no offense to him, but I'd rather hear from you than him. You've done a great job. Much better than Chris.
00:51:25
Speaker
I agree wholeheartedly, and I'll tell them that next time I see them. It sounds like you're doing great work, and it sounds like you really are being very, very thoughtful about it, which is important.
00:51:40
Speaker
who work in IT and tech often do things just because we can or just because it seems cool without actually thinking about the social and historical impacts of things that we do. And so when you see a project like this, they could have very positive effects and also some negative effects too. It's nice that you're taking the time to think about how to be fair, how to care and try to apply it. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, Paul. I appreciate it.
00:52:16
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at luval.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:52:42
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:53:05
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.