Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project
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Crowdfunding the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project

4/24/2015

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I started the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) a little over a year ago.  The goal was/is to build a website that serves to assemble and freely distribute information about prehistoric house structures in eastern North America.  The current database contains information and county-level spatial data for 2130 prehistoric structures. I've started a campaign on GoFundMe to raise money to support a research assistant to work on the project for a semester. This post explains why.

As I learned when writing this paper,
much of the information about prehistoric houses in eastern North America resides in the so-called "gray literature" of CRM reports, theses, dissertations, and unpublished manuscripts.  I hoped that the EWHADP  would function as a magnet to identify information information locked up in the gray literature and make it known and available, allowing us as an archaeological community to capitalize on the work that's already been done.  What's the point of information stored in a publication that only a handful of people even know exists?  I really think we can do better than that, and we can save ourselves the wasted effort of repeated searches for the same information in the same stacks of legacy materials.

I was able to put a lot of time into the project to get it going, and as it sits now the website is functioning and is visited daily by people who make use of the information there.  I have no idea how much time I put into the endeavor (both to collect the original dataset and to get the website up and running), but it surely runs into the many hundreds of hours. 


With the demands of my job this year and other commitments, I haven't been able to devote any serious time to the EWHADP.  There was some forward progress this semester, however, thanks to the efforts of GVSU undergraduate student Emily Gilhooly.  She was able to spend a couple hours per week on the database, consulting primary sources and re-coding the information (primarily reclassifying structure shape and applying a finer chronological scheme).  For her trouble she got some experience that will hopefully be useful to her, and she'll be added as a contributor to the database when a new version is released.  Thanks Emily!  


Emily's work on the database gave me some insight into what it will take to get it fully updated.  She worked perhaps 25 hours and got through about 200 records (about 8 records per hour).  At that rate, it will take about 230 hours to get through the 1850 or so records that haven't been re-coded. Some records go faster than others, of course, and I'm hoping it will go faster rather than slower.  A few hours difference here or there won't change the reality, however, that a significant time commitment will be required to get the database ready for the next release.

I would love to have the EWHADP up and running in high gear again for a couple of different reasons: it's an important component of my research agenda for the job I'll be starting at South Carolina in August, and I know that a lot of archaeologists out there are using and will continue to use the information that is being assembled.  The EWHADP is also being knit into a larger effort to build an infrastructure of linked archaeologoical data in North America. None of the effort put into these kinds of projects is wasted when everyone can use it.

I've never done a GoFundMe campaign before, but I thought I'd give it a shot and see if it's a viable way to support something like this.  I'm l
ooking for funds to support a graduate student research assistant to bring the EWHADP database and the website up to where it should be (i.e., incorporating all the information I currently have in a clear, consistent format that is useful to others).  The goal of $3400 is based on a $12/hour rate for 280 hours (20 hours per week). 

I'll have some start-up funds at South Carolina that I could potentially use if this campaign falls short or doesn't work at all, but I thought this would be worth a try.  Projects like the EWHADP are on the ground floor of what is going to emerge as a new architecture for using our previously-collected archaeological data to address questions with big temporal and spatial scales.
The data collected by the EWHADP are, and always be, open access.  If I saw someone building a similar database that would add another component - radiocarbon dates, mortuary data, copper artifacts, etc. - I would support it.  I hope some of you will support the effort to continue to build this tool.

If you think that it's time we start really leveraging the archaeological information that we've spent untold dollars and person-hours collecting in this part of the county, please consider contributing to this project.

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Linking EWHADP Structure Data to DINAA: Work in Progress

4/13/2015

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In previous posts (here, here, and, most recently here), I have discussed what I see as the benefits of building a system of linking archaeological datasets together.  Though I haven't been able to spend much time this academic year on building the EWHADP database, the people at DINAA have been forging ahead.  I am third author on a poster that will be presented at the SAA meetings next week that will discuss the progress that's been made on using DINAA to cross-link datasets:

  • Sarah Kansa, Eric Kansa, Andrew White, Stephen Yerka and David Anderson--DINAA and Bootstrapping Archaeology’s Information Ecosystem

The poster will be at session titled "The Afterlife of Archaeological Information: Use and Reuse of Digital Archaeological Data" on Thursday, April 16, from 6:00-8:00 pm in Grand Ballroom A. I can't be there, but many of the cool kids involved with the project will be, and you should go and talk to them. Linking together independent datasets is going to be a real game changer for archaeological research in this country, and these are the people that are making that happen.

We've done a "pilot" run linking the entries in the most recent published version of the EWHADP dataset to the entries in DINAA.  The electronic matching was not complete: several states remain to be included in DINAA and the attempt to link the datasets revealed some other issues that will need to be resolved (both on my end and their end).  That's exactly the point of doing this sort of thing, though: someone has to go first and figure it out.  I've created an entry in my Database section to provide an Excel file that contains the automatically-generated hyperlinks to site records in DINAA.  The interface from the DINAA end is here (it also references data from the Paleoindian Database of the Americas).

This step of engineering the first links is important. It is moving linked data from the realm of the hypothetical to the world of the actual. There is much work ahead to really get things knit together, but what they've done so far is not insignificant. I will be able to devote some time to the EWHADP after I'm moved down to South Carolina in the Fall. Stay tuned!
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Poster At the 2014 Midwest Archaeological Conference

10/3/2014

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The alert observer will have noticed that activity on this site has more-or-less ground to a halt this Fall.  The reasons for that are explained in this post on my other website: my teaching job this semester is taking up nearly all of my time and energy.  This is as it should be. I'll be teaching again next semester, but the preparations won't be nearly as demanding.  So I hope to have time to expend on the EWHADP again during the Winter.  If the stars align, I'll find a promising undergraduate among my students who would like to gain some research experience helping me wrangle data for the site.  That would be helpful.

I'm a co-author on a poster at the Midwest Archaeological Conference (going on right now) that discusses using the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) as a bridge to link independent datasets (including EWHADP data). 

Josh Wells was the lead author of the poster, which I have posted here on my academia.edu page.  Other co-authors are Eric Kansa, Sarah W. Kansa, Stephen J. Yerka, David G. Anderson, Thaddeus Bissett, Kelsey Noack Meyers, and R. Carl Demuth.

As I discussed here and here, I'm a big fan of seeing what we can do to link open sources of data.  It will take some doing to make it into a reality, but it will happen.  And it will have a huge upside.  Stay tuned!



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Inter-linking with DINAA; Database Search; Dataset Clean Up

8/7/2014

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I haven't spent much time adding new data to the database lately, but I am working on some changes.  I have a backlog of "new" data to add - I will get to it as I can.

The change I am most excited about is linking the EWHADP database to the DINAA (Digitial Index of North American Archaeology) project.  I wrote a little bit about that here this morning.

I'm also attempting to add some search functionality to the database.  If you look at the Database Search page you'll see some messy, unformatted, non-functional stuff. I've never attempted to incorporate a searchable database into a webpage before, so I'm learning (and seeing if it is possible here given the limitations of weebly) the way that I learn: trial and error.  My original hope was that both this website and DINAA could access and return records from a single database file (e.g., located at GitHub) containing the most recent data, but it doesn't look like that is going to work.  But I haven't given up yet.

I'm also going back and checking/recoding information from all the structures currently in the database.  I came up with what I think are improvements in the ways I was classifying shape, summarizing architectural information, and representing temporal period.  So I'm taking another look at everything and trying to get all the records on the same footing.  That is taking some time.

I hope to be working on adding new data again soon and putting up a newer, larger, cleaner, and more consistent version of the database.
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A Weeden Island House Structure at the Sycamore Site, Gadsen County, Florida

7/18/2014

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Florida is about as far my "home" research area as it possible to get and still be within the Eastern Woodlands.  As a consequence, the EWHADP database contains only two entries for the state:  the Horr's Island site in Collier County and the Aspalaga site in Gadsen County. I'm sure there is a lot more information out there, I'm just not aware of it yet.  As I was reviewing my Florida data this morning for a presentation at the upcoming DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology) workshop in South Bend in August, I came across a 1974 report by Jerald Milanich about excavations at the Sycamore site (8-Gd-13) near Aspalaga. 

The structure at Sycamore was an oval defined by postmolds (illustration to right taken from Milanich 1974:Figure 7).  It measured approximately 8.9 m x 6.2 m
and was associated with a variety of features. It will be Structure 2260 when I update the database.

See how easy it is?  In just a few moments I increased the size of my Florida sample by 50 percent.

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DINAA Presentation

3/20/2014

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Today I gave a short presentation on the EWHADP to the DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology) workshop that is taking place at the University of Tennessee.  I couldn't go in person, so I missed being able to meet the participants face-to-face. I also missed out on the sandwich and salad bar lunch, which, according to the workshop agenda, included "your choice of a brownie or a cookie + two gallons of extra coffee."  That sounds about right.  Anyway, I think the presentation went well and I hope that we can figure out how to made the EWHADP data accessible through the DINAA database and vice versa.  That could be pretty sweet. The presentation is here (small version without animations).
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Digital Index of North American Archaeology

3/17/2014

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I've been invited to give a short presentation on the EWHADP for the DINAA (Digital Index of North American Archaeology) workshop that will be going on at the University of Tennessee this week.  DINAA is operating through Open Context, which is a web-based, open access initiative that "reviews, edits, and publishes archaeological research data."  It is possible that this site and the information it contains will eventually be linked to DINAA in some way or another.  There could be several advantages to such a linkage.  The most obvious one, of course, would be a general increase in the ease of access to information for everyone.  Open access is good. Period.

I'm not yet sure exactly what I'm going to talk about. Since the site is new, I will probably focus on my motivations for creating it and what I hope it accomplishes. 
I will be able to give my opinions on the downside of the regionalization of research data and agendas and the upside of blurring the lines between regions by linking smaller scale datasets into larger ones.  Whatever the specific content of my DINAA presentation, it will be a relief to talk for an entire 15 minutes without attempting to describe complex systems theory.  Also, since it will be via Skype, I can wear slippers and be almost certain that I won't miss my connecting flight.
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I produced the map above for my presentation.  It shows the current number of listings in the database by state/province.  The large numbers of structures at many Mississippian settlements produce the high counts in Illinois and several states in the Southeast (figure to right).  The dataset is weakest all along the Atlantic coast and on the western side of the Mississippi River. 

It would be interesting to know to what degree we can attribute the absence of database listings to (1) the absence of structures and/or (2) the absence of excavated structures.  In other words, does the absence of structures in the database reflect a real absence of structures or, alternatively, simply the absence of information about those structures? 

The EWHADP will not be able to answer that question by itself.  First, it is far too early in development of the database to know if a lack of reported structures from an area means that structures have not been identified there.  There are a lot more data to be entered and a lot more tree shaking to be done before we can really see where there are spatial gaps.  Second, because the EWHADP is only concerned with positive evidence (i.e., sites with structures present), it cannot answer questions about negative evidence (i.e., sites with no structures present).  Linking to efforts like DINAA will be required to allow one to confidently discriminate between the absence of evidence and evidence of absence.  Such a linking will also allow the spatial distribution of structures to be systematically examined in relation to the spatial distribution of other kinds of archaeological remains.  Sounds like a winner to me. 
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    Author

    Andrew A. White
    aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu

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