Navigating Archaeology’s Big Data Reality

Navigating Archaeology’sBig Data Reality Digital Arts and Humanities InstituteCork 2014Frank LynamTrinity College Dublin

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1990s web chic

Amazon on their 1994 launch (retronaut.com)

National Audobon Society (blog.crazyegg.com)

David Hasselhoff online (www.subzerostudio.com/)

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My type of digital archaeology

3D visualisation (arcseer.com)

Augmented Reality cultural heritage apps (kindareal.com) 3D artefact capture

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The PhD early days

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The carrot of Open Data and the Semantic Web

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Mistake 1 - building everything from scratch

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My next mistake - focussing entirely on the data provider

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Linked Open Data by example

Asking a question of the British Museum’s Linked Open Data interface

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The RDF triple

subject(uri)

object(uri, literal)

predicate(uri)

object(uri, literal)

predicate(uri)

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An RDF triple example

‘…the man is from England…’

subject

predicate

object

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One person’s subject is another’s object

‘…England is a country…’

subject

predicate

object

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An introduction to SPARQL

SELECT * { ?s ?p "Rembrandt"} LIMIT 100

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The British Museum’s response

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The first record

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Christ Healing the Sick, etching(britishmuseum.org)

A reclining lion, ink drawing on paper(britishmuseum.org)Garden vase and pedestal, ink sketch

(britishmuseum.org)

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More complex SPARQL

SELECT ?s { ?s bmo:PX_object_type ?objecttype. ?objecttype skos:prefLabel "sarcophagus". ?s ecrm:P45_consists_of ?material. ?material skos:prefLabel "granodiorite"} LIMIT 100

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The query’s graph

?s ?objecttype?material

‘sarcophagus’‘granodiorite’

bmo:PX_object_typeecrm:P45_consists_of

skos:prefLabelskos:prefLabel

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lack of awareness

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data SILOS

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reliability

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data POLICY

institutional

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1. What does it mean to be a researcher in the new Big Data archaeological research environment?

2. What tools are we now to use and are these radically different to those used by our forebears?

3. Are the types of questions that we are now asking in some way different?

4. How much creative and/or intellectual authority will we cede to the control of machines out of necessity or choice?

5. All of these questions combine to ultimately ask whether we need to be talking in terms of new epistemological environments when considering Big Data research or not?

Parting questions

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Acknowledgements

Digital Arts and Humanities PhD programmePRTLI funded

Dep. of Classics, Trinity College Dublin

Dr Christine Morris

The Priniatikos Pyrgos Project

Dr Barry Molloy and Dr Jo Day

Web: www.franklynam.com

www.linkedarc.net

Twitter: @flynam

Email: flynam@tcd.ie