Digital public archaeology: Excavating data from digs done decades ago

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-digital-archaeology-excavating-decades-today.html

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

59 11 2 years ago

dsign2• 2 years ago

Yes. And often there are digital sources which are difficult to use and blocked by copyright. For example, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is publicly available as scanned PDFs which are not searchable :/ . I suppose that with the current state of computer vision and text interpretation, it's just a matter of some labor needed to set up some pipelines. But if a citizen assyriologist were to do the work and make the results publicly available, the copyright owners would very likely sue.

willismonroe• 2 years ago

The CAD PDFs are searchable; parsing the PDFs, on the other hand, is more of an issue with custom fonts etc...

krisoft3• 2 years ago

But if a citizen assyriologist were to do the work and make the results publicly available, the copyright owners would very likely sue.

Have you actually reached out to them or are you speculating? I found the Editor-in-Charge's email address very easily. If you write a letter to them and politely explain what you are thinking about doing they might even provide suggestions and/or help.

These are people who put the full dictionary on their website as PDFs for free. They have an "Integrated Database Project" they are working on. I don't know for sure but it sounds like they want the info to be as accessible as possible.

dsign2• 2 years ago

No, I didn't because this is a project that I can't pursue. But the usual situation in academia (and, I guess, anything that is not self-published) is that the copyright owners of publications are not even the scientific institutions that produce those materials, much less the researchers themselves.

People who are interested on the subject and who may want to pursue a project like this one are likely to be academics or ex-academics, and they know beforehand that it's not just the technical work they need to put on, but also everything connected to matters of intellectual property involving multiple parties. That knowledge is enough to discourage most.

eszed2• 2 years ago

As sibling poster pointed out, the researchers themselves likely would prefer that their work be available to all, and that it is not will be by decree of someone other than themselves.

In that vein, I have never once failed (across at least several dozen attempts) to obtain a gratis copy of a paper by writing an author directly, even if I don't have access to the journal which published it. More often than not the researcher has been thrilled to have been contacted by a random person with interest in their work; I've had some interesting personal interactions and several times had follow-up questions answered. I highly recommend doing this.

Edit: you probably know this. I'm posting my experience for the benefit of others who may come across these comments. Most people in academia are nerds at heart, and very nice to anyone who shares their interests.

jgalt212• 2 years ago

Great videos on similar stuff by CuriousMarc

Fossil Data Part 2: 8-Inch IBM Floppy Data Recovery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FVwheTVWko

Fossil Data Part 1: Paleontologic Data Fossilized on IBM 8” Floppies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPOYHQTMnf8

lovasoa• 2 years ago

It's encouraging to see how digital tools are helping address the "legacy data backlog". This aligns well with the collaborative open-science approach.

For those interested, I recently translated an article by french archeologists on the same topic: https://sql.ophir.dev/blog.sql?post=How%20archaeology%20is%2...

Digital public archaeology: Excavating data from digs done decades ago

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