Synthesizing Legacy Data : Using tDAR’s Data Integration Tool

Archaeological projects generate abundant data that is often underutilized in research and analyses beyond the life of the project. Although some projects curate their data, they often do not make those data widely available, accessible, or easy to aggregate at different granularities for additional research. Discipline specific digital repositories and data publishing platforms (e.g. tDAR, ADS, Open Context) are beginning to address problems related to the access and the utility of legacy databases and data sets. Now, tDAR has a tool to aid in synthesizing data collected without a priori standardization, meaning researchers can easily bring together large data sets from within and across sites and regions for new and exciting analyses. This poster presentation describes the tool and how to use it for synthetic research with case studies from the American Southwest.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.