DINAA Means "Everybody Can Be a Digital Curator": Community-Powered Disciplinary Curational Behaviors with the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA)

This is a pdf copy of the PPT slides used for this presentation at the SAA symposium. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) has a massive compilation of archaeological site data. This paper presents recent findings from development of DINAA’s site database, efforts to link DINAA with mined references from digital literature, and efforts to prepare DINAA for future crowd-sourced professional data citations. The continental United States spans eight million square kilometers, with a multicultural past of over 15,000 years. Archaeologists have been practically and theoretically frustrated in search of curatorial practices, digital or otherwise, to make comprehensible the reporting and interpretation of such a vast spatiotemporal set. The federal organization of State and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and similar entities under the National Historic Preservation Act guarantees local systems of information management will maintain records of archaeological sites within territorial jurisdictions. DINAA has successfully interoperated and made completely public the non-sensitive, scientific information from many of these systems. Linkage of these data with other datasets at large scales, crosscutting political borders, facilitates archaeological and interdisciplinary studies of human adaptation. In cultivating an open source community, DINAA hopes to add value to site and collections data (digital and otherwise), make these accessible to researchers and stakeholders, and highlight ethical approaches toward distributed data curation.

本文件为SAA研讨会本次报告所用演示文稿的PDF副本。北美考古数字索引（Digital Index of North American Archaeology，简称DINAA）收录了海量考古遗址数据集。本研究阐述了DINAA遗址数据库开发的最新进展、将DINAA与数字文献挖掘所得参考文献进行关联的相关工作，以及为DINAA适配未来众包专业数据引用所开展的筹备工作。美国本土幅员达800万平方公里，拥有超过15000年的多元文化历史。考古学者在探索适配此类超大规模时空数据集的报告阐释与管理实践（无论数字化与否）的过程中，始终面临实践与理论层面的双重瓶颈。根据《国家历史保护法（National Historic Preservation Act）》设立的州与部落历史保护办公室及类似机构的联邦体系，确保了各地方信息管理系统可在其管辖权限内留存考古遗址记录。DINAA已成功实现与上述诸多系统的互联互通，并将其中非涉密的科学信息完全公开。将此类数据与跨政治边界的其他大规模数据集进行关联，可为考古学及跨学科的人类适应性研究提供有力支撑。在构建开源社区的过程中，DINAA旨在提升遗址与馆藏数据（无论数字化与否）的价值，使研究人员与利益相关方均可获取相关数据，并倡导面向分布式数据管护的伦理范式。