IOSA.it Open Archaeology

A few months ago I posted here a vision to put pottery drawings on the Semantic Web. Now I’m trying to follow up on that vision, going into the details and problems that it brings to light.

I have created a new repository at bitbucket to give this idea more substance than a series of blog posts. For now there is nothing but a small set of pages written in reStructured Text for use with Sphinx. The plan is to add SVG samples, possibly some XLST snippets, and I know that I’m going to write some Python code.

There are some strong assumptions here:

• you want to publish your drawings on the Web
• you want to do it in a standards-compliant, sustainable way
• you are ready to change your current publishing workflow
• you like to experiment

These four reasons explain why SVG is the holy grail we should aim for.

It’s almost impossible to know how many potsherds have been drawn by archaeologists up to date. Their number is however no doubt well over one million (educated guesses welcome). However, when it turns to the standard question “How many of these drawings are on the web?”, there is going to be some disappointment. Especially if you don’t count Google Books, and in fact you should not — I’m going to explain why in a moment.

In 2010, most drawings are still done by hand on a piece of paper, but later it’s common to digitize these drawings using vector graphics software like Autodesk AutoCAD™, Adobe Illustrator™ or Inkscape.

Samian Pottery data are available in various formats, namely XLS, SXC (OpenOffice.org 1.0 format) and TXT (tab-separated values in fact). There is no actual difference between the content and the structure of files among the different formats, just the spreadsheet files have lots of contexts in just 3 files (each context is a single sheet), while the tab-separated values files are one per context. That said, and provided that I already planned to extract data using the Python standard library programming modules, I thought the text files would be the best choice to start.

The aficionados readers and users of iosa.it, if any, were probably asking themselves what was going on, given the substantial lack of updates here.
To make a long story short, I got my master degree cum laude in Late Antique Archaeology two weeks ago, on April, 21st (2762 a.U.c.). It took me several months of hard work, and obviously everything else, including this website and activity around it, hasn't been receiving lots of care. In a future post, I'll try to describe in detail my current situation and wishes concerning university, job and research.
My dissertation was entitled Defining complexity. The “circulation” of african red slip ware in Italy 400-700 AD. I've approached the subject by collecting a quite large dataset of published pottery from more than 100 archaeological sites in Northern and Central Italy. In the meanwhile, I've done my best to understand the most popular quantification methods (as usual, the good things about standards is that there are so many you can choose from) and their respective implications, even though in the end I've done very little work using quantification data, concentrating more on presence data (which have their bias problems, too). My analysis has been concentrated mainly on 3 directions: