DARIAH is delighted to publish the second Spotlight article on ArkeoGIS: Opening Archaeological Data Across Temporal and Political Boundaries. This article is part of the DARIAH Spotlight campaign, a monthly series that focuses on digital scholarship within the DARIAH network. Written by Loup Bernard, Université de Strasbourg, CNRS Consortium-HN MASAplus, the article sheds light on the development of ArkeoGIS, the challenges and needs this platform came to address to help archaeologists share and use spatialized data about the past.
It is not uncommon for current regional, state and linguistic boundaries to be practically meaningless for the people, places, and artefacts which are the subjects of archaeological study. Yet, for archaeologists, they can be significant barriers to the study of the past.
Administrative entities determine the scope and focus of research programs, temporal distinctions, data collection and data-sharing processes that may be incompatible across these boundaries. For archaeologists, it is an increasingly a time-consuming and arduous part of the research process to navigate these barriers, especially when aggregating archaeological information.
ArkeoGIS was developed to address these barriers for archaeologists working in the Upper Rhine region which is at the nexus of three countries: France, Germany, and Switzerland. The goal was to compile and analyse data produced by many researchers in French, German and English, as well as within national disciplinary traditions that do not necessarily share the same periodization of the past.
This article is part of DARIAH’s latest outreach campaign, DARIAH Spotlight, which makes research within the DARIAH network more visible. This monthly series will showcase digital scholarship in the humanities, from both DARIAH Working Groups and DH projects within the DARIAH network. Follow this campaign for more Spotlight articles.
