Upcoming: ARKDIS at the Information Access Seminar, UC Berkeley School of Information

"...RELEVANT, USABLE, AND ACCESSIBLE TO ALL...". ON DOCUMENTATION IDEALS FOR EXTRA-ACADEMIC RESEARCH, THE CASE OF DEVELOPMENT-LED ARCHAEOLOGY

Information Access Seminar

Friday, April 10, 2015, 3:10 pm - 5:00 pm

107 South Hall, UC Berkeley

In several disciplines, such as medicine and engineering, significant parts of the knowledge production take place outside academic research. Another such discipline is archaeology. Most archaeological surveys are conducted as development-led archaeology prior to land development. The documentation of such surveys is surrounded by legislation and guidelines. In this seminar we will take a closer look at the documentation ideals in those regulations. Additionally we will discuss how those ideals are interpreted by authorities in archaeology, notably academic archaeologists, museum professionals, and government professionals. From a distance, and with some humor, these ideals and interpretations may be likened to an administrative meltdown and they present an enigmatic challenge for the professionals who try to do the actual documentation. The seminar will focus on the case of archaeology, but the discussion will also be extended to the general circumstances for documentation and communication of extra-academic research today.

Bio: 

Lisa Börjesson, M.A., is a second-year doctoral student from Uppsala University in Sweden. During Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 she is a visiting student researcher at School of Information. Her research is a part of the research project Archaeological Information in the Digital Society (ARKDIS).

ARKDIS in the Netherlands

Visiting the Keys to Rome exhibition
at the Allard Pearson Museum.

For about a month ago, ARKDIS project was visiting colleagues in the Netherlands during a five day study trip to Amsterdam, Leiden and the Hague. The trip gave us a good idea of some of the current state-of-the-art in Dutch archaeology, archaeological presentation and information management.

At Allard Pearson Museum of the University of Amsterdam we were hosted by Dr. Wim Hupperetz who took us around at the museum and introduced us to their work on ArchaeoHotspots, a room where archaeologists and volunteers actually do archaeological research and work with finds in the museum, and where the public can come, watch and discuss.

At DANS, the Data archive and networking services, the Dutch data archive that preserves digital archaeological research data in the Hague, Hella Hollander and her colleagues presented their work and current state of the affairs in the archaeological information management in the Netherlands. In comparison to many other countries, including Sweden, the clear mandate of an organisation with a similarly clear focus on archaeological research for both preserving and making available digital archaeological data is an apparent advantage in the Netherlands.

At Europeana in the Hague, Joris Pekel hosted us and gave us a good overview of their work and highlighted the new strategy to focus on quality and partnership-based content production instead of attempting to incorporate as large quantities of content as possible.

We visited also the Faculty of Archaeology (yes, a faculty not a department) in Leiden and discussed with Dr. Hans Kamermans on education and research and the Vrije universiteit Amsterdam where Dr. Philip Verhagen and his colleagues presented their research and we had an opportunity to give a glimpse of the on-going work in ARKDIS. As a final stop, we visited the e-humanities unit of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences where Prof. Sally Wyatt hosted us and told about the e-humanities work in the country. We had also an opportunity to participate their weekly seminar, this time with a guest preseentation of Joseph Tennis from the University of Washington iSchool.

In addition to the common programme, all of us had an opportunity for additional visits to museums and