A presentation together with Lisa Börjesson and Olle Sköld reporting findings from an international interview study conducted as a part of the CAPTURE research project at the annual European Association of Archaeologists conference organised online
Abstract
Large-scale initiatives for archaeological data sharing (e.g. ARIADNE, SEADDA) and the many developing national and institutional data repositories and archives provide unprecedented access to archaeological research data. Access however does not equal impact. Multidisciplinary studies of data reuse (Pasquetto, Borgman & Wofford, 2019) show that infrastructures for data sharing become widely useful when deposited and archived research data are coupled with rich 'paradata'—contextual information detailing the processes of data production and repository curation (Faniel, Frank & Yakel, 2019). How to identify, document, and communicate paradata of purposeful quantities and qualities therefore makes up a burgeoning area of research in archaeological information science that requires committed inquiry into the practical work of archaeologists and other researchers heading for the archaeological data.
This presentation reports the initial results from a multi-national interview study of archaeologists with repeated experience of publishing data in state-of-the-art data repositories and archives. The presentation investigates archaeologists’ efforts to counter the so called “data creators’ advantage”(Pasquetto, Borgman & Wofford, 2019) by coupling their published research data with paradata with the intent to support data reuse. Particular focus is put on what we call the “publishing threshold”: the liminal space that archaeologists navigate when deciding which paradata to supplement in order to make published data as reusable as possible. Interview data will be complemented by an extensive range of examples illustrating the frontiers of paradata publishing and principal paradata categories in archaeological research.
The study is part of the CApturing Paradata for documenTing data creation and Use for the REsearch of the future (CAPTURE) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No 818210.