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A update on tDAR with Keith Kintigh - Ep 210
701 Plays1 year ago
We bring back one of the founders of tDAR, Keith Kintigh for this episode. Keith gives us the tDAR backstory and tells us how it’s staying relevant in a world of AI and digital archaeology. We talk about tDAR’s future as well.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to:https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/210
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- Chris Webster Twitter: @archeowebby Email: [email protected]
- Paul Zimmerman Twitter: @lugal Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction to Episode 210
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello, and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 210. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we talk to Dr. Keith Kinteg about the development of TDAR and where it's at today. Let's get to it.
Personal Catch-up: RV Trip and Stolen E-Bikes
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how's it going? It's going pretty good. It's, what, two hours since I talked to you last?
00:00:31
Speaker
Yeah, we're doing something unusual at this time is why we have two interviews in the same day.
00:00:37
Speaker
I take it you're still more or less in the same place. Your nomadic lifestyle hasn't taken you someplace totally dramatically different than before. Nope. I didn't know if I mentioned where I was last time we're in Las Vegas right now, but RVing event. So yeah, it was our first day. We got here yesterday. Our e-bikes were stolen this morning off the back of our RV. So we're dealing with that. That just means it's time for new e-bikes really. So otherwise, yeah, Las Vegas is great.
00:01:03
Speaker
So I'm sure you're not figuring out all sorts of ways to spend money on your RV now that you're at the show, right? Exactly. Exactly. So all right.
History of TDAR with Dr. Keith Kinteg
00:01:12
Speaker
Well, let's get into our show. So our guest today, we mentioned in the introduction, was actually on the show for episode 92 about five years ago. And we'll link to that in the show notes if you want to go listen to that episode.
00:01:23
Speaker
But, and when we talked about different things back then, so again, go ahead and go listen to that. We're going to talk about some of the same things, but we're just going to get a little more into it. So Dr. Keith Kintig, welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right. So we're going to talk TDAR. You were part of the development effort of TDAR when it first started back in, what was that? 1999, I think I read somewhere. Why don't you just tell us
00:01:48
Speaker
the impetus behind that. How were you involved specifically? What brought you into the development of TDAR and why? What got us
Inception of TDAR at Arizona State University
00:01:56
Speaker
started? I was at Professor at Arizona State University. We had a bunch of archaeologists and we got along. And Chuck Redman, our chair, sort of suggested maybe we should just get together as faculty and talk every once in a while. Well, that led to a process where we started meeting either every month or every other week.
00:02:18
Speaker
And that went on for about, I think, 20 years. So we had a really good group. And one of the things that we started working on is, well, each of us was used to working on our own projects in our own areas and time periods.
00:02:34
Speaker
We said, wouldn't it be interesting if we started to think about comparing our cases? As soon as we started to do that, even though most of us were working in the Southwest US, we still had data sets who were organized in a different way, used different variable names, different coding schemes. And even though it would seem that that might not be so difficult to integrate, it turns out that with formal databases, that really was a challenge.
00:03:01
Speaker
About that same time in 1999, the National Science Foundation had a program announcement for social, behavioral, and economic research infrastructure. And we thought, well, we'll try for that. And basically, we put together a proposal
00:03:19
Speaker
to really look at this problem of data integration for purposes of research.
Funding Challenges and Grants for TDAR
00:03:24
Speaker
So we wanted to be able to compare cases that were done during different coding schemes because what we wanted to do is integrate data in a way that people hadn't done it so much, using the raw data. So in a lot of times, synthesis in archaeology involves somebody sitting down and reading all this stuff or mostly reading everybody else's conclusions and then going from there. But sometimes those conclusions
00:03:49
Speaker
aren't correct when you go back and look at the data. I mean, a good example of this is some of the early tree-ring dating of sites in the Southwest before people really developed the methodology. The dates were correct, but how you interpret those dates changed. So, Emil Howery's dating of a late prehistoric site, that turned out to be pretty important. It turned out what he concluded the date of the occupation was,
00:04:16
Speaker
Was really, I'm sure at the end of his life, he would not have said the same thing because people had developed better interpretations of how you, you know, some of these triggering dates are cutting dates that are way too early because people are reusing beams and so forth. So anyway, we wanted to be able to
00:04:31
Speaker
to our data integration based on the primary data that we're collecting, not just other people's conclusions. So we got together with some computer scientists at ASU and put in a proposal. We came pretty close. They funded three projects and we were number four, but that didn't get funded. But in 2004, we were funded by the National Science Foundation with a sort of planning grant.
00:04:58
Speaker
And that led to a conference at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, where we had
00:05:06
Speaker
Oh, geez, 31 different participants, mainly archaeologists, but also people from computer science and information science to get together. And the conference was entitled, The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration. So we're really trying to sort of address this problem, research problem of synthesis or data integration. And how do we do that? And so that was in 2004. In 2006, that was published in American Antiquity.
00:05:35
Speaker
in an article with the same name. And we argued in that article for the development of a national archaeological information infrastructure, which eventually was TDAR. And just a sentence from the abstract of that, concept-oriented archaeological data integration will enable the use of existing data to answer compelling new questions and permit synthesis of archaeological data that rely not on other investigators' conclusions, but on analyses
00:06:02
Speaker
of meaningfully integrated new and legacy data sets.
TDAR Development and Data Issues
00:06:06
Speaker
So we're really trying to sort of work on this problem of synthesis and data integration. That planning grant had a little sort of pilot funding and then in 2006, we got three quarters of a million dollars from the National Science Foundation to really start a serious implementation of this.
00:06:26
Speaker
you know, within a month of getting that, I got a, I think it was an email or maybe a phone call from the Mellon Foundation saying, basically, would you like to come to New York? We might want to give you some money. Don't fall for that.
00:06:47
Speaker
at their own expense. Well, that's pretty good. And they had independently, I mean, they had a program called scholarly communications and that, I think it's the same program had funded JSTOR.
00:07:02
Speaker
the sort of pilot things of JSTOR. They're really interested in this issue of preserving knowledge that's being generated. And at some point they got an interest, they sort of saw, they had funded a bunch of different kinds of archaeology things in the past.
00:07:17
Speaker
and they got interested in a more general solution to trying to deal with the data problems or the data loss really in archaeology. So at the same time they gave us another planning grant and that was followed by three and a half million dollars of funding from them. Their goal was a little bit different. I mean they were happy with the research component but they were really
00:07:42
Speaker
interested in the problem of just preserving all this data that's getting generated and being lost due to media degradation, computers crashing to CRM firms going out of business, and what happens to the computers? Well, nothing. And then these data sets that have cost, in many cases, millions of dollars to produce are completely lost.
00:08:09
Speaker
So they were more interested in the sustainability issue of the data and making it available for scholars to advance. Well, those two things fit together pretty well. So we really proceeded with an integrated concept of doing data integration in the context of this national infrastructure that would collect and preserve data. Our original focus was on databases and formal
00:08:38
Speaker
coded data sets, but we expanded that to include documents and images and 2 and 3D images and so forth as we developed TDAR to really sort of have a more comprehensive way of just capturing all of the data from archaeological projects. So that's what led to the sort of initial development of TDAR was those sort of two projects joining together as a collaboration between archaeologists at ASU
00:09:05
Speaker
and computer sciences there as well. Okay. All right. And yeah, we've, we've talked to, I think several people about TDAR on this show. So people should be relatively familiar with it, but what's your involvement with TDAR today?
TDAR Users and Adoption Challenges
00:09:18
Speaker
Today, I'm on the board of directors. TDAR has an executive director, Chris Nicholson, who manages the staff, including the programmers and the data curators that make the sort of institutional infrastructure of TDAR. TDAR is housed within a Arizona State University center. So it's the Center for Digital Antiquity.
00:09:40
Speaker
We set up TDAR quite intentionally, though we didn't want it to be an ASU thing as opposed to a University of Arizona thing or University of Michigan thing or whatever. We wanted it to be a national institution. And so the board of directors was selected and continues to be selected nationally and internationally, in fact. So I've served on the board of directors since the very beginning of TDAR.
00:10:05
Speaker
And the board is a pretty active and really a great group that's provided a lot of intellectual support for TDAR. Chris Nicholson was actually on episode 157 of this podcast, talking about TDAR. So we'll link to that as well. We're going to also change the name to the TDAR podcast. So from this point on, that's right. That's right. If only. I'm curious too, this is at the University of Arizona, Arizona state, Arizona state. Sorry about that. No, that's a big, that's a big error right there. I'm going to have to cut that out.
00:10:37
Speaker
I'm in cultural resource management archaeology, so is Paul. TDAR isn't really, I should say, talked about too much in CRM circles, at least up in Nevada, California, some of the places that I've worked before. Probably because of the data sets and who owns them, to be honest with you, and what goes on there. If it's a private project,
00:10:57
Speaker
I'm not even sure you're allowed to put it in some sort of resource like that. But I'm wondering, primarily today, and we'll get onto those other uses in a minute here, but primarily today, what is your sense of who's using TDAR as far as institutions or how they're affiliated, things like that?
00:11:14
Speaker
Over the last several years, our biggest client has actually been the United States Air Force. So in the Air Force, there's often only one archaeologist who's assigned to several different bases. And then just due to the way things are structured, those people change. And so what the Air Force was finding and their various CRM contractors were finding is every time there's a change in personnel on the Air Force side,
00:11:41
Speaker
Everybody was screwing around asking for new copies of reports, trying to figure out what was going on. And so they have invested in basically taking a lot of their legacy, especially reports and putting them in TDAR so they can be found and used sort of
00:11:58
Speaker
by them and other people across the bases. So in the CRM world, we should talk about the issue of data ownership and so forth. But I think one of the things the Mellon Foundation really focused on, which was quite important, is how do you sustain this infrastructure? Who's going to pay for this in the long run? And our original model was that the federal agencies, when there's a
00:12:26
Speaker
an undertaking, the federal agencies have some responsibilities. And just like they have responsibilities to curate data and their federal regulations, I'm talking about curate artifacts, and there's a whole code of federal regulations about the curation of artifacts, they have responsibilities
00:12:44
Speaker
that are now very clearly laid out in law and in regulation, both in the National Historic Preservation Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and then there's some new legislation that's made it even more explicit. The federal agencies have responsibility to preserve the data that are coming out of archaeological investigations,
00:13:04
Speaker
and to make it available to the extent that that's appropriate to whoever is interested. So we anticipated incorrectly as it turns out that federal agencies would jump at the chance to have a solution to really
00:13:20
Speaker
ways of maintaining these data. That's happened sporadically. One of our early supporters was an archaeologist with the Bureau of Reclamation in the Phoenix area office where they were doing millions of dollars of work and really were committed to really the goals of the National Stark Preservation Act, which is, you know, if the federal government is going to break things, we ought to have some opportunity to preserve the information that's coming out of it. I mean, after all, that is the whole logic of
00:13:48
Speaker
the whole cultural heritage infrastructure in the US is to try to preserve the information that's being lost due to actions in which the federal government has, or state governments in some cases have a hand. So basically we were, and we're still trying to sort of make that happen to be, to allow TNR to become the place that people can both find things and preserve things, can deposit and preserve things,
00:14:16
Speaker
for the benefit of other archeologists and for the general public to the extent that they're interested. Right. Okay.
Sustainability and Funding Strategies for TDAR
00:14:24
Speaker
Well, that is a good introduction into TDAR again, for those who haven't heard it before. So let's take a break and we'll come back and continue this discussion with Dr. Keith Kinteg on the other side, back in a minute.
00:14:36
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 210 of the Archiotech podcast. And we're talking to Dr. Keith Kinteg about TDAR and some other things. So I'm curious, before we get into data ownership, as we were talking about in the last segment, you mentioned TDAR getting some pretty substantial funding from a couple sources early on. How is TDAR funded now? And what do you think the security of that is going into the future?
00:15:00
Speaker
The sustainability of digital resources in general, as you're probably aware, is really a challenge. TDAR is funded now primarily through grants and contracts.
00:15:17
Speaker
We've been committed from the very beginning to making data available for free. So that is, it never costs anything to download data. And we charge for the upload of data. If you want personalized training, we charge for that. There's lots of free training that's available online. And we charge for what we call data curation. So for contractors or agencies that have a bunch of data that they want to get deposited,
00:15:45
Speaker
Basically, it's critical really for the usability of and findability of data to have good metadata. The metadata is the information about the data. Who did it? Where did they do it? Why did they do it? What's the location? What's the time period and so forth?
00:16:03
Speaker
So creating good metadata allows the data to be found, but that takes some time. And that's actually the most time consuming part of it. Uploading it, as you can imagine, doesn't take very long at all. But creating the metadata is something that really takes some time. In many cases, agencies or whoever wants to deposit the data don't have the personnel to do that, or they'd rather simply pay somebody else to do it. So much of our revenue is doing just that, that is taking a whole bunch of
00:16:31
Speaker
of reports, sometimes in paper and other times digitally, and our data curators will go through those and extract the relevant metadata, do the uploads, check everything is correct.
00:16:43
Speaker
and then deposit the data with TDAR. We'll actually deposit it sort of provisionally, send it to the contractor to whoever our client is for review, and then it'll be made publicly available. In some cases, we get grants specifically to do the curation where as a part of the grant, this is often the case for National Science Foundation grants, the grantee will
00:17:07
Speaker
do the data upload and do the metadata creation. So we designed TDAR so that people could do the metadata creation on their own. And then there's an upload fee associated with depending upon the size primarily of the dataset.
00:17:21
Speaker
So, it's a combination of those basically labor services, which are the data curation and then the upload cost on a profile basis. Okay. I have a question about that upload cost. You've mentioned it a couple of times now. Is there an ongoing curation cost or is it all encompassed by that single upfront cost?
00:17:46
Speaker
The way we designed it and the way it continues to be was there's not an ongoing cost. It's a one-time fee for doing the upload. And the goal was to
00:17:58
Speaker
try to make that sufficient to cover not just the initial costs, but the original goal, which I don't think we've met, was to basically endow a data set. I mean, so that is you try, and I think, and our model here is from the Archaeology Data Service in the UK, which has been quite successful, is you basically charge enough that
00:18:19
Speaker
when you sort of consider that the storage costs are decreasing over time, if you were to sort of invest some of that money, you obviously don't invest that individually per data set, but sort of put that in a pool, you then are providing enough revenue to do it. We haven't ever been able to meet that yet, but what we're doing now is basically the ongoing costs are mostly, the storage costs are fairly small,
00:18:45
Speaker
Data migration can be more expensive. If all of a sudden Microsoft changes how its database files are organized or how PDF documents are done or something that Adobe does, then we need to migrate those datasets so they continue to be readable and useful. That's a more challenging and more expensive proposition.
00:19:11
Speaker
The idea is to try to have a one-time fee that will cover both the ongoing storage and maintenance costs. Part of it is just the software maintenance because, as you know, TDR is a big package that depends on lots of open source other software packages that get security updates and other kinds of updates that stop being supported. There's an ongoing
00:19:36
Speaker
software maintenance costs, which is actually probably our largest sort of technical costs associated with the structure. Yeah. Ongoing software development and maintenance costs are usually the thing that people don't even think about the most. We've talked to
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, we talked to other people that have put together software packages, whether they're open source or not, or something they're trying to sell. And they're like, oh yeah, so we're going to put this together. And I'm like, great, what does this look like in a year when iOS 17 comes out, or when the next Android operating system comes out, or the next operating system for your computer, for that matter? What's that look like? So yeah, that's absolutely huge. And then along those lines,
00:20:15
Speaker
Again, I have a CRM focus, but CRM companies are just used to paying for stuff. Subscriptions, Esri costs, and all kinds of stuff that we have to pay for.
Integrating TDAR into CRM Practices
00:20:26
Speaker
Has there ever been any discussion about, I don't want to necessarily call it a tax, but like a TDAR tax.
00:20:32
Speaker
on CRF firms. If you plan on getting federal permitting, then you have to pay so much into TDAR as a part of this or something like that. I'm just curious as to doing something like that would maybe encourage them to use TDAR, but then also provide ongoing revenue.
00:20:48
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, and basically that's something like that has been our model from the beginning. Our idea was that basically the agencies would put into RFPs that just like they put in curation costs for artifacts, they put in curation costs for TDAR so that an RFP would say, well, any contractor who wants to bid on this has to have a plan for the data curation. And TDAR would be the obvious place for that and budget for it.
00:21:17
Speaker
We've talked as a way of implementing that, we've talked about also just having a subscription. So it would cost either an agency, we've talked to the agencies about this a bit, you know, if they would come up with, you know, if it's a big agency.
00:21:33
Speaker
you know, some substantial amount of money every year, and that would cover all of their contractors. So that's another model that we thought of. And then that way, but part of our original idea with the just having a part of the RFP was that there wouldn't be any new money involved. That is, we weren't trying to get money from the agencies. The agencies always complained that they have, you know, not enough staff and not enough money. But if we just put the costs into the ongoing contracts, that doesn't take care of the legacy data, but it would take care of the ongoing data.
00:22:01
Speaker
We haven't gotten there yet. We had a big meeting last March, I think, with the lead people and almost all the federal agencies about how to implement something like this to get there. The problem with doing it with the CRM firms, which we're very happy to do and we can do right now,
00:22:20
Speaker
is that the feedback we get is that as soon as the government requires it, we'll be happy to do it. But otherwise, our bids are going to be non-competitive because our competitors across the street or on the other hand, are going to not do it and it's going to cost them less to do the same project. I gave a presentation a few years ago in Spokane, I think, to Accra about TDAR.
00:22:48
Speaker
you know, we get a lot of sympathy about, yes, this would be really good, because I know in CRM firms, people spend a lot of time on a new project, digging up all the reports from other contractors who've worked in the same area and stuff like that. So, you know, it would be a good thing, but we haven't
00:23:05
Speaker
Even though we have a lot of sympathy from the contractors and actually ACRA has a nice statement about what ought to be done in terms of digital that the board adopted. There hasn't been much action with a few exceptions from the contractors themselves. For reasons I completely understand.
00:23:23
Speaker
It's interesting to me that you're mentioning building it into the contracts, not related to TDAR at all, but similar sort of thing is that on academic projects I've worked on, part of the grant application process is now describing in detail what your digital management plan is, your DMP.
00:23:41
Speaker
Because without it, you're not going to get that grant because you don't trust that you're going to curate the data effectively. So those also are coming out of NSF and other federal agencies. So I would expect that there's already some purchase. I don't know within the agencies that govern CRM work, but I expect that there's already the knowledge of the need for such a thing in funding agencies and regulatory agencies.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they recognize the need, but they also haven't come up with any way, you know, it's amazing to me that really, you know, we, I think our first production version of TDHR was in 2010 or so. So it's been 13 years and we've been pushing this since before then. And, you know, it's just, if you talk at the local level, they'll say, well, you know, whatever the state, let's say Bureau of Land Management or whoever it is,
00:24:36
Speaker
Well, you know, somebody else needs to tell me to do this. And then you talk at different levels. And we've talked at the national level and people sort of saying, well, yeah, we should do something. But there's all these problems. And, you know, there's always some sort of impediment to doing it. I mean, everybody says, yes, we need to do something. Nobody says it's a bad idea. Nobody says to you, it doesn't work. But
00:24:59
Speaker
getting them to actually do something has been a real challenge. Okay. All right. Well with that, let's take our last break and we'll have a little bit laundry discussion on the other side of us. We wrapped this up with Dr. Keith Kintek back in a minute.
00:25:16
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast. And we are wrapping up this discussion on TDAR and, you know, digital preservation methods, so to speak, in general with Dr. Keith Kinteg. And a couple segments ago in the segment one, and we didn't get to it last time, we were talking about this subject of data ownership and how
00:25:35
Speaker
you know, that is a problem with CRM, of course, you know, private companies paying for cultural resources to get done, not on federal land or on a place where that report doesn't get stored with, say, the BLM or the, you know, the Army Corps or something like that. What kind of discussions have you guys had around that with the storage of potentially that kind of data and access to it and things around that nature?
Handling Confidential Data in CRM
00:25:58
Speaker
I think there's sort of two parts to that. One thing TDR does that's essential for CRM data is it has two different kinds of data sets. All the metadata is public, but the data sets can either be confidential or public. And basically, in the US, there's some categories, particularly site locations that are
00:26:21
Speaker
protected under federal law. They're protected from FOIA requests and things like that. And there's no way that most agencies are going to allow any data to go in as public that have site locations and that sort of thing. So what we've encouraged people to do with reports is to try to segregate the parts of reports. Often there could be an appendix that's a technical appendix that has a site locations or maybe just a table of site locations.
00:26:48
Speaker
or other confidential information and then put the body of the report that doesn't contain any confidential information. The other way to deal with it is to have a confidential report and then a redacted report where with Acrobat, you go through and you redact the confidential information. And ideally, people would be putting in where there is confidential information, they'd be putting in both a
00:27:11
Speaker
confidential report where the agency's doing the depositing or the individual or company doing the depositing controls the access. That is, if somebody else may find the metadata right in TDAR, you can generate a quest to the data owner saying, you know, I would like to get access to this and here's who I am and here's why. And then the owner can decide
00:27:33
Speaker
and then go on TDAR and either give them permission or just let it go. So that sort of part of it is covered. What we haven't sort of dealt with, and I think it really just needs to be dealt with by the federal agencies, is the sort of idea that the contractors or the contractors' client, you know, some private client, land developer or whatever, they somehow own the data because they've paid for it.
00:28:01
Speaker
I mean, my view is that they've paid, to the extent that it's something that is done subject to federal law or regulation or a state law or regulation, the whole purpose of the federal regulation is to get that, to preserve that information. And if it's not preserved in a way that can be used by the parties, by responsible parties, there's no point in doing it. So I think there just needs to be,
00:28:27
Speaker
in my view, some clarity from the federal agencies that, no, to the contractors. No, you can't, you know, part of, you don't own the data. Your client does not own the data. The federal government, if anybody owns it, it's a public resource because it was generated with public money or was generated due to a public interest as expressed through ARPA or an HPA or whatever. Okay.
00:28:55
Speaker
So I'm wondering as we're in this last segment here, what you would like the future of TDAR to be, right?
TDAR as a Central Data Hub
00:29:03
Speaker
I mean, I think we all know where we'd want it to go, but I think from a realistic standpoint in the near term, but then in the far future, what would you like to see TDAR become?
00:29:13
Speaker
Well, first, I'd like to see it become the place where people deposit data, whether it's from an academic project or a CRM project. And I think the route to that is for one way or the other agencies, just like they require the curation of of artifactual materials to require the curation of
00:29:35
Speaker
digital materials in a responsible digital repository that can make them findable and accessible and preserve them in the long term. So I think the only way to do that is for agencies to one way or another require that and pay for it either directly from the individual contracts or through some sort of subscription, but in some way.
00:30:01
Speaker
In a broader sense, my goal is also that theater would be used a lot, that people would use it to do the kinds of synthesis of data that isn't really covered by our model of cultural heritage in the US. That is, the whole model in the US is the sort of polluter pays model, where if somebody's going to, whether it's build a cell tower or build a highway,
00:30:27
Speaker
you know, whoever's doing the damage needs to pay for the mitigation. But that is done on a sort of project by project or often site by site basis. But nobody's paying for sort of putting all this together, you know, and so we get a lot of comments about yeah, you know, how many more
00:30:43
Speaker
you know, burned rock minutes do we need to see or how many more houses or whatever it is. And without some way of synthesizing that data, we need to really, what's the point? And so the synthesis, what we're trying to do is enable that synthesis. We've got some really powerful data integration tools that will allow you to take, and our biggest success there has been with faunal data.
00:31:06
Speaker
where you can have a input and ontology of faunal data categories, whether it's species or different kinds of damage to the bones or element, whatever.
00:31:18
Speaker
We got a group of people together internationally to develop a set of ontologies for the variables that faunal analysts typically use. Any individual data set can then be mapped into that ontology in a hierarchical way, and then you can do a data integration. We've now got a project that Kate Spielman led.
00:31:37
Speaker
I don't know, 350,000 elements across the Southwest from, I don't know, 30 some sites, all integrated so that you can query that as one integrated data set. So having people use the data integration features of TDAR or
00:31:54
Speaker
do it on their own if they want to, but should really be able to use TNR to do archaeological synthesis. And I've been involved with Jeff Altschul in the creation of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, which is really developed, devoted to encouraging archaeological synthesis and trying to figure out ways to do it.
00:32:13
Speaker
Looking back at your comment about data synthesis analysis and having people use TDAR, I'm wondering, is TDAR jumping on the AI bandwagon, like pretty much everybody else is these days? Because I've always said, and it's really bad here in Nevada, I think, because we walk across the desert on a huge pipeline or something like that. And we record these two flake lithic scatters that nobody really cares about, or single flake isolates and things like that, that by themselves don't really mean anything. But together as a whole,
00:32:43
Speaker
Obviously, you can tell things from that, but it's difficult for humans to see that sometimes, you know what I mean? And like I said, is TDAR thinking about using or integrating any sort of AI tools in order to help with some of these things or
AI Tools and Metadata Creation in TDAR
00:32:57
Speaker
anything else? We haven't really talked about that specifically. We have talked about and done a little experimentation with
00:33:03
Speaker
automated metadata creation, that is having the machine basically read the report and be able to extract the metadata. I mean, that would go a long ways. And ADS has done some experiments with this.
00:33:19
Speaker
That's probably the closest thing, you know, it's sort of AI related. And we put in a proposal, I put him with an AI guy at Arizona State a few years ago, but turns out to be pretty complicated to do that just because of the way archaeological reports are structured. And, you know, you know, there's simply the mention of a pottery type, you know, you know, somebody could say, and we didn't find any X. Well, that then X. Right. Right.
00:33:49
Speaker
But I think there is some future, I think, in doing that. We hadn't talked about AI for analysis. I think there has been, I reviewed an NSF proposal of doing some visual stuff with AI basically related or neural network processing of images to try to extract things. But we haven't done too much on the analysis side. I think that is probably
00:34:14
Speaker
We've got plenty to do, so I think that's probably for other people to do, but we could certainly try to supply the data to make that possible. I think I know the answer to this, but I want to hear what you say. Who's TDAR's biggest, I don't want to say competitor necessarily because we shouldn't be competing for archaeological data, but I guess obstacle maybe to national dominance in data storage.
Competition and Integration Challenges
00:34:36
Speaker
Who is the biggest competitor right now?
00:34:38
Speaker
You know, we don't, I mean, the only, the only other thing that I'm even aware of really, and of something that's sort of organized, I mean, our biggest competitor is really everybody putting their own stuff on their own hard disk and then thinking they've, thinking they've dealt with their data. But I mean, that's the real competition. Right. Dropbox. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Open context that's run by Eric and Sarah Kansa has been,
00:35:07
Speaker
you know, they advertise themselves as a publishing platform, but they're doing a lot of good work. We've actually got a joint grant with them to implement that Sarah, I mean, I led an initial effort and then Sarah's led the current one to implement the fair and care data principles.
00:35:27
Speaker
and doing this across open context, but bringing in agency people, native people, a big group to really try to figure out how to do that. So open context, as some of what we do, open context is not all of the data in open context is public. They don't have any ability to do confidential data and they don't want it.
00:35:47
Speaker
But that basically rules them out for dealing with CRM data in almost all cases. So it's not really competition for the most part. I mean, in some cases, academic units will go to them rather than us. But that's not the real obstacle, I think, for us. But I think what they do is really important, and they've done a lot of good.
00:36:09
Speaker
Right. Good work both within open context and just in publicizing what needs to be done. But we're very much in sync with them and we support them and they support us in many ways. Yeah. It seems like bringing all these, all these things together would help, I think, uh, I think give people a little more confidence in, you know, where they're putting their data and what's going on. Cause the other one that came to mind was Dina, the digital index of North American archeology, I think it is. And they're,
00:36:36
Speaker
cataloging, so to speak, of archaeological sites on public lands in the southeast. And I don't know how far they've branched out these days, but it all seems to come together to be really good for archaeologists to do analysis and large scale analysis and to really see the big picture out there and to find things. But there's still
00:36:55
Speaker
I don't know. To me, there still really should only be one place where everybody goes. Again, there shouldn't be competition. There should just be, hey, do you want to store data here? You go here. You want to do a big data analysis? Well, you go here. It should be the same place because that's where the data is stored. But I don't know how long it would take us to get to that point. Somebody would have to come and buy everything up and provide a lot of funding probably.
00:37:15
Speaker
Oh, it's even worse than that. I mean, I mean, Deena is, you know, basically most of the states in the West have simply refused to deal with them. And so I think the state side files are the other place where a lot of data goes, but those
00:37:31
Speaker
I was actually for a long time or for several years early in my career responsible for the state of Arizona system as site. But those things are so tightly held and you even try to have a discussion with those groups and they're like incredibly protective and you couldn't possibly, I mean, I think that's a long ways off to be able to integrate all of those.
00:37:55
Speaker
all of those site files. That's a huge political problem. Almost every state has their own and then like the forest service has its system which is totally closed and
00:38:09
Speaker
You know, so the, the state site, the site files are really the most difficult thing, although Andina has tried their best to try to sort of make some of those data available. It's not really competition to TDAR cause they're not storing the data and so forth. Okay. Yeah. I'd be more like a layer on top of what TDAR has if, if we could look at it that way, right? Right. Okay. Well, we're just about at the end here. Is there anything you wanted to mention and get out there about TDAR that we haven't talked about?
00:38:35
Speaker
No, I just encourage people to go to TDAR.org and try it out. And there's lots of information. Um, if you have any questions, contact the staff and there's a contact us button there, but really I think it's, it's a, it's a great resource. It's there. We'd recently obtained the core trust seal sort of certifying the capabilities of TDAR. And we're the only one that's got that certification in the U S so I encourage people to try it. It's, it really is a great resource for, for archeology. Awesome. All right. Well, maybe, uh,
00:39:05
Speaker
Maybe next year we can debut the TDAR podcast on the Archeology Podcast Network. We'll talk about that. Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Awesome. Thank you, Keith, for coming on. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Anything else you guys want to talk about in the future?
00:39:21
Speaker
you know where to find us. And we were more than happy to talk about it. Anybody that's got questions or comments or anything like that, find us on all the socials and you can comment right on this episode at arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 210. With that, we'll see you guys next time.
00:39:43
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash Archeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.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.
00:40:09
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.