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27.03.12 Conference: Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archeology

Posted by: Will Wootton 12 years ago

Yesterday I went to the CAA 2012 conference in Southampton, one of the top conferences in the world in the field of computational archaeology. I couldn't stay for longer than a day, but I've seen enough to say that archaeologist definitely know their way around when it comes to combining IT with their discipline.

I presented a poster about the Art of Making project. In particular I was there for the Data Modelling and Sharing session: the formal ontology we're working on in the Art of Making (and the accompanying dataset) is likely going to become one of the first in its kind. So I was quite interested in finding out who's doing what, when it comes to sharing data about the the ancient world.

The answer is, there are a lot of people doing very interesting things (btw please get in touch if you know of other relatable datasets). Here're a brief report on some the papers that struck me (for the full list of the talks I would have liked to attend, check out my interactive schedule.)

 

 

    • A paper titled "When, What, Where, How and Who?" by Sarah May. She reported about a user-study aimed at understanding how archeologist search for information online, and whether an more integrated web of data would match their current information seeking behaviours.

 

 

    • A paper presenting the SAWS project, which looks at defining and linking related units of text in original manuscripts using semantic web technologies.

 

    • The Archeology Data Services, a York-based organisation that aims at 'preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology'. In particular one of their project, Stellar, has produced a number of software tools that facilitate the manipulation of archeological data and their transformation into rdf-compliant formats.

 


 

Finally, this is the schedule for the whole conference (notice the slick widget - it's powered by a new service sched.org) :

p.s. this article has been cross-posted also on my here