Date/Time
Date(s) - March 13, 2020
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Location
Clark B216

Categories No Categories

Christopher Nicholson is the Executive Director of the Center for Digital Antiquity in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Chris started in archaeology at Colorado State in the late 1990s, working with Dr. Larry Todd on bison kill sites across the Plains.

He will speak during a brown bag lunch, as part of our ongoing spring seminar series, sharing his talk, “FAIR Practices, Synthetic Research, and Archaeology in the ‘Big Data’ Era.”

WHEN: March 13, 12-1pm
WHERE: Clark B216 (subject to change)

This event is free and open to the public.

Abstract: For the past two decades, archaeology has been experiencing a shift from strictly fieldwork-based collections analyses towards synthetic research using existing datasets. As such, both CRM and academic archaeologists need to make a concerted effort to change the manner in which project data are archived, preserved, and shared. Since archaeology provides a unique time-depth perspective, we can only contribute to the discourse on current social problems if we do a better job of data consolidation and provide data in open access platforms similar to what has been done in other disciplines (i.e., ecology, geology, computer science, etc.). Large-scale synthetic research that addresses any social issue is not practicable unless archaeologists embrace both the costs associated with the long-term preservation of information and the understanding the data accessibility is an ethical part of archaeology. Thus, the FAIR data concept (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) will need to be embraced to move the discipline forward, as for many years both academic and cultural resource management archaeologists have been reluctant, and unwilling, to abide by this convention. In this talk, I advocate for the long-term preservation of archaeological data, open-access platforms, and provide synthetic research examples to demonstrate how archaeological data can help address issues society is facing in the incipient era of “big data”.

For more information, contact joshua.zaffos@colostate.edu