Open, reusable and interoperable data work in plural, or making (open) science practices in archaeology open to whom?

Presentation at the 2025 Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods conference in Athens.

Abstract

Archaeology has a long history of emphasising the importance of documenting not only research results but also their underpinning scientific and scholarly practices, decisions and intellectual premises in notebooks, grey literature reports and publications (Huvila, Sköld, och Andersson, 2023). While producing documentation is only one of the possible approaches to opening science and scholarly work, it has advantages to, for example, direct participation in enabling asynchronous conveying of understanding of archaeological practice over time and space. Documenting such information – increasingly often termed paradata in the literature – has, however, varied to what extent and how this has been done in practice – similarly to for whom the practices and their premises have become (more) open and understandable (Huvila, 2022). From this outset, a crucial question to ask when aiming at advancing openness of science and scholarly work, reuse, reusability and interoperability of data and data work through documentation, and especially when discussing mandates, is to consider the implications of specific efforts to different degrees and forms of desired and problematic senses of openness to various audiences. Openness is much more than sharing data or documentation. It is about processes, collaboration and inclusion (Leonelli, 2023) – the practices of making science paradata elucidate.

Based on comprehensive interview, survey and document based research on archaeological paradata and paradata practices in the ERC-funded CAPTURE project (www.uu.se/en/research/capture) between 2019 and 2024, this presentation sheds light on how specific types of practices of generating paradata are linked to particular forms of openness, how individual types of paradata are informative for different audiences, and how all meaningful paradata generation is contextual to research practice. An assumption of the possibility of generic acontextual openness, reusability and interoperability through documentation is deeply problematic. Instead, the findings emphasise the importance of accounting for research practice and context as a key premise of understanding what is needed to attain particular forms of openness, and to be mindful and explicit of what forms of openness are worked towards and how the chosen means are aligned with the chosen aims. In the closing, the presentation outlines starting points for possible strategies to address the multiplicity of opennesses in practice on the basis of the findings.

References

Huvila, Isto (2022). “Improving the Usefulness of Research Data with Better Paradata”. I: Open Information Science 6.1, s. 28–48. issn: 2451-1781. doi: 10.1515/opis-2022-0129.

Huvila, Isto, Olle Sköld och Lisa Andersson (2023). “Knowing-in-Practice, Its Traces and Ingredients”. I: The Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice The- ory: Re-imagining Method in Organization Studies and Beyond. Utg. av Michela Cozza och Silvia Gherardi. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, s. 37–69.

Leonelli, Sabina (juli 2023). Philosophy of Open Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. isbn: 978-1-00-941636-8 978-1-00-941639-9. (Häm- tad 2023-11-08).