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Archaeology is one of those sciences that is desperate need of attention from CS. While there have been many advances, they (generally speaking) are still at le

Archaeology is one of those sciences that is desperate need of attention from CS. While there have been many advances, they (generally speaking) are still at least 10 years behind the technology curve and lack the knowledge required to really leverage the advances that have come. The entire field is ripe for the picking for cross collaboration of people who can bring technical skills to "big data" and other problems.

jdavis703 10y ago
Can you elaborate more on specific scenarios you've seen where big data or CS techniques would improve research? I've always thought of archaeology and history as being more anecdotal endeavours, which might indicate a certain ignorance of these fields on my end.
- benbreen 10y ago
  I'd love to hear more too. It's funny, both archaeology and history are indeed highly anecdotal in many ways, but both disciplines have become well established enough by now that the anecdotes have started to become quite numerous. I.e., we probably have at least 300 to 400 scholarly monographs written about individual towns in the medieval and early modern era, and if we could scrape the data about, say, farming yields or criminal trials or what have you from all of those studies, suddenly we'd be dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of data points.
- Joof 10y ago
  Took an archaeology into once and it's pretty clear they do analysis on all types of data. All artifacts are collected and meticulously tested for a variety of things, soil samples are taken and so on. Some poorly informed ideas: Artifacts of various make and size could be placed in history and culture by neural networks. We could guess the locations of undiscovered sites. We could also analyze cultural trends in cultural anthropology and relate cultures to each other. Socially speaking, a prof of mine studied African American representations in media and sentiment analysis on images could have helped him sift through that data.

jdavis703 10y ago

Can you elaborate more on specific scenarios you've seen where big data or CS techniques would improve research? I've always thought of archaeology and history as being more anecdotal endeavours, which might indicate a certain ignorance of these fields on my end.

benbreen 10y ago
I'd love to hear more too. It's funny, both archaeology and history are indeed highly anecdotal in many ways, but both disciplines have become well established enough by now that the anecdotes have started to become quite numerous. I.e., we probably have at least 300 to 400 scholarly monographs written about individual towns in the medieval and early modern era, and if we could scrape the data about, say, farming yields or criminal trials or what have you from all of those studies, suddenly we'd be dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of data points.
Joof 10y ago
Took an archaeology into once and it's pretty clear they do analysis on all types of data. All artifacts are collected and meticulously tested for a variety of things, soil samples are taken and so on. Some poorly informed ideas: Artifacts of various make and size could be placed in history and culture by neural networks. We could guess the locations of undiscovered sites. We could also analyze cultural trends in cultural anthropology and relate cultures to each other. Socially speaking, a prof of mine studied African American representations in media and sentiment analysis on images could have helped him sift through that data.