IOSA.it Open Archaeology

Marco Valenti from the University of Siena and his LIAAM (Laboratorio per l'Informatica Applicata all'Archeologia Medievale) recently published a new manual about archaeology and computing, or as they like to say “an archaeological way to computing”.
In his introduction, he also writes:

In questo contesto il recente interesse dell’archeologia per il mondo open source può costituire un buon punto di incontro fra le discipline umanistiche e le scienze informatiche. Il tipo di approccio “mentale” proposto dalle comunità open source, le esperienze di utilizzo degli open format, la circolazione degli open content possono portare contributi importanti alle nostre ricerche; soprattutto se intesi come strumenti per attuare un fecondo interscambio delle informazioni e garantire qualità e trasparenza alla ricerca, incentivando un utilizzo della tecnologia come mezzo per facilitare la costruzione e la diffusione di un sapere storico collettivo, i due obiettivi principali (l’uno scientifico, l’altro sociale) dell’archeologia. In altre parole, traslare i principali concetti del mondo open source, applicandoli alla ricerca archeologica, significa essenzialmente progettare architetture del dato aperte e prevedere la condivisione delle informazioni, due principi alla base di tuttele attività e le soluzioni sviluppate presso il LIAAM.

I cannot but agree with his words, and I hope not only that our university will eventually play again a leading role in bringing technology and archaeology together, but also that new manuals expressing such “radical” views really help students in learning a new, different way for doing public archaeology.

From Undine Lieberwirth via Antiquist, even though readers will know in advance I dislike the over-multiplication of meetings with the same purpose:

The Excellence Cluster Topoi at Free University Berlin would like to invite you to submit a paper for the international workshop "Spatial Analysis of Past Built Spaces" on 1-2nd April 2010. We welcome contributions that discuss the theory and application of spatial analysis in built spaces, and especially methods such as access analysis, visibility graph analysis, isovist analysis, agent-based models of pedestrian movement, analytical approaches to visibility in 3D spaces. For more detailed information please visit our website http://www.topoi.org/ - call for papers.

This one is just 5 days before CAA. I thought the financial crisis would mean also a lower budget for academics travel expenses, but apparently this is happening only in Italy.

A few days ago, thanks to Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a proposal for a Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology was drafted. There's a wiki page for coordinating and collecting ideas — which acts also as a brief call for participation until a true one is sent. The idea came out after I discovered (and liked it a lot) the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN ... a name familiar to anyone using Perl or R), an OKF project defined as “Debian of data”.

A few months ago, we found out through Antiquist that DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, i.e. the German Archaeological Institute) has published a set of IT Guidelines for all its research projects. Even though it's primarily intended for a German audience (German-speaking too, obviously) it is a very interesting piece of standards. You can get it from the DAI website in PDF. With some help from tools like Google Translate, one can even get an idea of what these guidelines say also without being a native speaker. We did, and here is a partial summary of the document.

The XXXVIII Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology will be held in the world famous city of Granada, Spain.
Granada is a historic city where visitors can enjoy a large number of diverse experiences from the different cultures that have lived in this city (romans, arabs, jews and christians).
Granada is said to be a fusion of cultures, and this idea matches completely with the aim of the CAA Conference: the interdisciplinary and complementary work of archaeologists, computer scientists and mathematicians. So, the title of the conference, Fusion of Cultures, refers both to the conference scope and to the spirit of the city that is proud to host it.
Typical CAA topics include:

Good news from Anna Hodginkson of Oxford Archaeology North via Antiquist:

I would like to announce the release of the Survey and GIS manual produced at Oxford Archaeology North during the last few months after development of new on-site survey and GIS methodologies applicable to any archaeological project.
[ ...]
The downloading software used in this manual is Leice GeoOffice (can be replaced by whatever software comes with the Total Station used) and GIS software is the gvSIG OA Digital Edition. I furthermore recommend Inkscape as a vector editing software for touching up maps produced by gvSIG.
This document is available for download as PDF at http://www.openarchaeology.net/project/survey-and-gis-manual
I would be extremely grateful for feedback!

Forward from Benjamin Ducke (OA Digital):

Dear GIS users,
a beta version of the imminent gvSIG OADE 2010 has just been released.
This release is based on gvSIG 1.9 which represents a milestone achievement in bringing a full-featured, free GIS to everyone's desktops.
Although it is marked "beta", this release is mature and functional. The final release will mostly add minor enhancements.
Please see our release announcement for details on the new features and capabilities, as well as known problems for this release: http://www.oadigital.net/software/gvsigoade/gvsigoade2010beta
There is not yet any updated documentation that covers the new features. So for now please continue using the gvSIG 1.1.2 documentation, which still applies by and large: http://oadigital.net/software/gvsigoade/gvsigdownload
Best regards,
Benjamin