Lecture Series > Lecture Series Schedule
Lecture Series Schedule | Connection Instructions | Archived Lectures
The University of Arkansas will coordinate the lecture series and other Access Grid® and teleconference interaction. For technical information on how to connect and participate in the sessions, click on Connection Instructions.
If you plan to participate please review the Connection Instructions and then send a message to rsvp@archaeoinformatics.org so that we can anticipate the network requirements.
With the permission of the presenters, we will make archived versions of the presentations available for download. The lecturer's PowerPoint presentations will be posted on the on this page so that you can download them and follow along on your own machine.
Archaeoinformatics Lecture Series Archive 2006-2007 (is available here)
Archaeoinformatics Lecture Series 2007-2008
Lecture 1
September 19, 2007 (Archived)
"LionShare: Secure P2P File Sharing and Collaboration"
Mike Halm, Pennsylvania State University
Michael J. Halm, is a Senior Strategist and Manager for the Special Project activities for the Teaching and Learning with Technology group, Penn State University. Mike also serves at the Co-Chair or the IMS Technical Board representing Penn State and the CIC. Additionally, Mike is the Project Lead for the LionShare: Connecting and Extending Peer-to-Peer Networks funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The LionShare project, which Mike will discuss in this lecture session, is dedicated to harnessing the promise of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing and the integration of P2P with organizational services to create a collaborative environment for use in academic communities. The LionShare Peer application is built around the themes of collaboration, security, personal responsibility, and access control of shared resources, along with access to large digital repositories.
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
Lecture 2
October 17, 2007 (Archived)
"Sharing our resources, sharing our understanding: Cyberinfrastructure
for Archaeology"
Mark Gahegan, Chaitan Baru, Boyan Brodaric
GeoVISTA Center, The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16802, USA. Email: mng1@psu.edu
Science communities are beginning to construct elaborate
cyber-infrastructures to try to overcome some of the fundamental
inefficiencies in the science process. This talk introduces the idea of
a layered cyber-infrastructure to support e-science activities,
concentrating on the problem of sharing understanding via one layer in a
cyber-infrastructure— the knowledge layer —whose purpose is to capture,
preserve and communicate meaning associated with sharable science
resources. The talk highlights one such e-science initiatives: the
Geosciences Network (GEON: http://www.geongrid.org) and shows how knowledge-level computational
tools can help communicate and mediate understanding between
collaborating scientists. It also asks the question: ‘is the solution
designed for the geosciences suitable for archaeology?’
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
Mark Gahegan is professor of geography and affiliate professor of
information science and technology at the Pennsylvania State University,
USA. He is a GEON Co-PI and has worked on other cyberinfrastructure
projects in the fields of plant pathology, e-education and
human-environment interaction. His research interests are in knowledge
computing, GIS, information visualization and e-science.
Lecture 3 (Archived)
October 31, 2007
“Interoperability and net-centric architectures: lessons for archaeoinformatics from the Open Geospatial Consortium”
Fred Limp
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. Since its founding in 1994 it has developed a model process for the effective development of consensus interoperability standards that have been adopted by the global community. While many of the standards will be of specific interest to the archaeological community, perhaps the most value is in the larger lessons on how to build an effective standards development community. In addition to serving on the Steering Board of Arcaheoinformatic.org Fred Limp was also one of the founders of the Open Geospatial Consortium and served on its Board of Directors from 1994 to 2002. Since 2002 he has served on the Open
Geospatial Consortium's Interoperability Institute (OGCII). OGCII is a university research focused group working to move the standards process into the university research community.
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
Lecture 4
November 14, 2007, 10:30-12:30 CST
“Ecological informatics: challenges and approaches, and potential relevance for archaeology ”
Mark Schildhauer
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara
This presentation will describe the goals and progress in Ecological Informatics as undertaken by the SEEK (Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge) and KNB (Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity) research projects-- two multi-year, multi-institutional efforts in technology development that were funded by the National Science Foundation. Both projects involved partnerships among ecologists, technologists, and computer scientists, working together to develop usable, powerful tools and cyberinfrastructure to facilitate synthetic, integrative research in ecology and the environmental sciences.
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
If you plan to participate please review the Connection Instructions and then send a message to rsvp@archaeoinformatics.org so that we can anticipate the network requirements.
Lecture 5 (Archived)
November 28, 2007, 9:30 CST
“Current challenges for digital preservation and delivery”
Julian D Richards, Professor of Archaeology, University of York
Director, Archaeology Data Service
The Archaeology Data Service recently celebrated its 10th birthday. This wide ranging paper will look forward to some of the challenges of the next ten years, as seen for a UK perspective. It will also outline a range of current research and development initiatives that are seeking to address these issues.
Firstly, the growing complexity and size of digital data sets presents new problems for digital repositories in the cultural heritage sector. The ADS has recently completed the Big Data project for English Heritage, and published its recommendations. We are now working on the EU-funded VENUS project, looking at the archiving issues associated specifically with underwater data sets collected via remote operated vehicles and other deep water technologies.
Secondly, user expectations continue to increase from a generation no longer content with simple downloads, but wanting instead to explore data sets online. The LEAP project has been investigating the issues associated with the linking of electronic publications and archives, creating a series of four exemplars with our sister e-journal Internet Archaeology. These also raise specific issues of long term sustainability.
A third, linked concern is that the Google generation expect to be able to find what they want on the first page of results by typing a single keyword into a basic search box. We are working with the Natural Language Processing Group in the Dept of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield on Archaeotools. This project provides a powerful way for users to browse through result sets according to an agreed ontology, and we hope to link this facetted classification interface with the results of data mining of the semantics from archaeological grey literature and antiquarian journals.
Fourthly, we need to find more efficient ways of aggregating data provided by a number of physically distributed services. We are collaborating with English Heritage on their Heritage Gateway project to use web services to provide interoperability and cross-searching across distributed data sets.
Finally, I shall describe how our thinking is currently evolving about business models for digital archives. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has recently withdrawn funding for our parent body, the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Funding for Archaeology has been ring-fenced for five years but we need to move towards a sustainable business model which relies more upon responsive mode funding rather than core grant. These issues are of concern to all those involved with the establishment of cyberinfrastructure services.
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
Lecture 6 (Archived)
December 12, 2007, 4:00 PM CST
“ECAI: The snowball still survives"
Ian Johnson
Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney
Starting in 1998, the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney, under Johnson's direction, developed a novel metadata directory and distributed mapping system based on TimeMap (www.timemap.net), for the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (www.ecai.org). The idea was collaborative online publishing of cultural datasets in map form. The definition of 'cultural' was as wide as the membership of ECAI - characterised more by the fascinating variety of its members than the focus of its mission.
The idea was somewhat under-resourced and technically and socially premature. On the technical front, they made it work and it is still up and running although perhaps more challenging to use than today's generation of instant web apps. On the social front, it long preceded social computing and web mashups, and little attention was given to the reward structure necessary to encourage the sharing of academic data. Consequently the snowball failed to gather substantial snow, except from its creators (a problem Johnson predicted at the 2000 ECAI conference in a paper entitled 'A Snowball's Chance in Hell').
In this presentation he will describe the history of the ECAI Clearinghouse and the lessons to be learned about situating technology in its social context. He will look at some examples of TimeMap use in Archaeology and History and our more recent work in using some of the features of the ECAI Clearinghouse to build a collaborative social computing and web publication framework, Heurist (HeuristScholar.org), which brings together database, clearninghouse, bibliographic and mapping capabilities.
If you plan to participate please review the Connection Instructions and then send a message to rsvp@archaeoinformatics.org so that we can anticipate the network requirements.
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
Lecture 7
February 27, 2008 (Archived)
"Collaborative Adventures in Distributed Digital Preservation: The MetaArchive Cooperative and the Educopia Institute "
Katherine Skinner
Digital Projects Librarian at the Emory University Libraries
The challenges presented by the concept of digital preservation require and have inspired a number of institutions to work cooperatively in order to accomplish meaningful programmatic advances. Among these collaborative ventures, the MetaArchive Cooperative, established in 2004, has developed an organizational model and technical infrastructure (building on the LOCKSS software developed at Stanford University) for preserving the digital assets of archives, museums, data centers, and libraries in a geographically distributed framework. This lecture takes as its focus some of the strategies that the MetaArchive Cooperative has employed in order to support, sustain, and grow its cross-institutional collaboration. During the session, Katherine will explore some of the logistical and organizational issues that have arisen for the Cooperative over the last four years and will talk more generally about the strengths of different organizational structures for accomplishing particular goals.
The MetaArchive Cooperative (http://metaarchive.org) began in 2004 as a collaborative venture of Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Louisville, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Auburn University, Florida State University, and the Library of Congress. The MetaArchive Cooperative has operated a distributed preservation network infrastructure for several years that is based on the LOCKSS software, and has now transformed into an independent, international membership association hosted by the Educopia Institute and based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
Lecture 8
April 23, 2008, (Archived)
"Fedora Digital Repository for Long-Lived Data Collections"
John Howard, Arizona State University
Presentation powerpoint is available HERE.
What's New
Mellon All-Projects Meeting: Archaeology, New York, March 2008
View the Archaeoinformatics Presentation
Joint Disciplinary and Technical Advisory Board Meeting, Santa Fe, February 2008
Joint Disciplinary and Technical Advisory Board Final Report
Technical Board Recommendations
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Evaluation of Existing Initiatives
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Joint Disciplinary and Technical Advisory Board Report
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New and Archived Articles and Abstracts
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