Publications about dataARC

Alexander, S. M., Jones, K., Bennett, N. J., Budden, A., Cox, M., Crosas, M., ... Strawhacker, C.& Karcher, S. (2019). Qualitative data sharing and synthesis for sustainability science. Nature Sustainability, 1-8.

Buckland, P.I. & Sjölander, M. (2020). Approaches to Research Data Infrastructure for Archaeological Science.. Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice.  Watrall, E. & Goldstein, L..  University Press Florida..  .

Palsson, G. and Opitz, R. (2019) DataArc: a case study using CIDOC CRM as an ontology for transdisciplinary research. In Niccolucci, F. and Richards, J. (2019) The ARIADNE Impact, ARCHAEOLINGUA FOUNDATION, Hungary.  Publication link

Jones, K., Alexander, S. M., Bennett, N., Bishop, L., Budden, A., Cox, M., Strawhacker, C.... & Hardy, D. (2018). Qualitative data sharing and re-use for socio-environmental systems research: A synthesis of opportunities, challenges, resources and approaches.  Publication link

Strawhacker, C., Buckland, P., Palsson, G., Fridrikkson, A., Lethbridge, E., Brin, A., ... & Dawson, T. (2015). Building cyberinfrastructure from the ground up for the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization introducing the cyberNABO Project. In 2015 Digital Heritage (Vol. 2, pp. 457-460). IEEE.

Completed master's dissertation supported by the dataARC project.

Kaja Ronning - Archaeology, Environment and Human History: Examining the Spatial Links Between Human Settlements and Environmental Change in Iceland. University of Edinburgh.

Research on how humans have interacted with a changing environment over time requires linking complex data and information from a range of disciplines and contextualize it in both time and space. In recent years such interdisciplinary research has become increasingly more frequent as a way of unveiling hidden patterns between data from a wide range of subjects. One such research initiative is dataARC, whose objective is to enable studies of human ecodynamics around the North Atlantic during the middle ages, using both archaeological, environmental, and historical data.

This paper describes a project developed within the wider framework of dataARC and aims to help bridge the gap between research from multiple disciplines in a spatial context by implementing a multi-dimensional approach and produce a visualizing tool that effectively combines cross-disciplinary datasets and appropriately map their connections in geographic space.

The study focuses on investigating spatial connections between literary, environmental, and zooarchaeological data from Iceland, in order to create a visualization prototype that can be implemented into the continuing work of dataARC. Using Self-Organising Maps (SOM), an unsupervised clustering technique, the study explores methods synthesizing this information by identifying 10 cluster profiles with specific signatures related to the combination of sets of attributes or indicators. This analysis makes clear the considerable potential of a SOM approach in advancing pattern recognition between cross-disciplinary data. 

Access the full publication, including jupyter notebook scripts, here.

Access the SOM datasets here.

Completed master's dissertation supported by the dataARC project.

Pablo Barruezo Vaquero - Exploring the ontological links between Human Ecodynamics and field Archaeology through the integration of archaeological reports into DataARC's landscape ontology. University of Glasgow.

This research focuses on the processes of knowledge creation within a framework of Big Data. Concretely, my project focus on grey archaeological data and their underlying ontologies, and how to interlink such type of data with other data in a Computational Ontology. This research was carried out within the dataARC Project, which tries to represent Human Ecodynamics for the North Atlantic context using data generated over 25 years by NABO (North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation). The project has been developing a cyberinfrastructure whose main tool is a computational ontology. We try to include in this ontology diverse conceptual models (from archaeological and historical, to ecological or geological data) from different grey sources.

In my case, the main issue is the creation of knowledge using multiple datasets that comes from grey literature sources. Said another way, my thesis explores how to create a dataset by extracting data and their underlying ontologies from grey-archaeological reports with the final aim of interlinking them with other datasets. For so doing, these reports are transformed into a dataset, which in turn is mapped to the interdisciplinary ontology. This thesis, therefore, presents a prototype dataset and the process of conceptual mappings. In so doing, I explore how to decompose archaeological reports that are in Open Access to make their data FAIRer and (inter)linked. 

Access the full publication here.

Completed master's dissertation supported by the dataARC project.

Mar Roigé Oliver - Cairn and Landscape Interaction. A Study of Human Ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. University of Glasgow.

Cairns are very versatile constructions, used for a variety of human activities. For this reason, this master’s thesis focuses on the analysis of navigational and agricultural cairns as a way to further the study and understanding of human ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. The project was developed within the wider framework of dataARC, a cyberinfrastructure that interconnects several North Atlantic datasets while facilitating access to them. This master’s thesis aims to connect its results and datasets to cyberinfrastructure’s concept map. The study uses a variety of interdisciplinary data, methodologies, tools, and approaches in its analysis. It is divided into two case studies.

Case Study One analyses the role of navigational cairns and their relationship with the roads and the general landscape while creating proposed routes between late medieval/early modern farm networks in Iceland. The methods used in this case study are least-cost path and intervisibility analysis. The results support the hypothesis that cairns were being used as road markers, and suggests a dependence between landscape features and cairn positioning, indicating landscape agency.

Case Study Two focuses on analyzing the position and effect of clearance cairns in the Scottish landscape. Archaeological and landscape data (i.e. soil quality, land compaction, erosion levels, and continued use in agricultural practices) were combined in a newly created dataset that was examined with statistical analysis.

The results show a correlation between the presence of cairns and a high erosion risk while proposing three effects of clearance cairns on soils: so exhaustive they are no longer cultivable, they are cultivable but have a risk of erosion, and so non-exhaustive that they can still be cultivated. Overall, the project’s findings highlight cairns’ usefulness in the study of human ecodynamics. In both case studies, cairns are the physical representation of an active and ever-changing interaction between humans and their environment, and the relevance and agency of landscape. These are based on Case Study One’s feature-dependent cairns, and Case Study Two’s observation of human adaptation to the landscape’s changes. This opens the possibility of an expansion of the area of study, including other areas and continents, and/or a focus on developing studies that focus on cairn multifunctionality.

Access the data archive on zenodo.