Born-digital Data Research Articles

Creating a Software Methodology to Analyze and Preserve Archaeological Legacy Data

AbstractSoftware now allows archaeologists to document excavations in more detail than ever before through rich, born-digital datasets. In comparison, paper documentation of past excavations (a valuable corpus of legacy data) is prohibitively difficult to work with. This pilot study explores creating custom software to digitize paper field notes from the 1970s excavations of the Gulkana site into machine-readable text and maps to be compatible with born-digital data from subsequent excavations in the 1990s. This site, located in Alaska's Copper River Basin, is important to archaeological understanding of metalworking innovation by precontact Northern Dene people, but is underrepresented in the literature because no comprehensive map of the site exists. The process and results of digitizing this corpus are presented in hopes of aiding similar efforts by other researchers.

Unlocking digital archives: cross-disciplinary perspectives on AI and born-digital data

Co-authored by a Computer Scientist and a Digital Humanist, this article examines the challenges faced by cultural heritage institutions in the digital age, which have led to the closure of the vast majority of born-digital archival collections. It focuses particularly on cultural organizations such as libraries, museums and archives, used by historians, literary scholars and other Humanities scholars. Most born-digital records held by cultural organizations are inaccessible due to privacy, copyright, commercial and technical issues. Even when born-digital data are publicly available (as in the case of web archives), users often need to physically travel to repositories such as the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to consult web pages. Provided with enough sample data from which to learn and train their models, AI, and more specifically machine learning algorithms, offer the opportunity to improve and ease the access to digital archives by learning to perform complex human tasks. These vary from providing intelligent support for searching the archives to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks. In this article, we focus on sensitivity review as a practical solution to unlock digital archives that would allow archival institutions to make non-sensitive information available. This promise to make archives more accessible does not come free of warnings for potential pitfalls and risks: inherent errors, "black box" approaches that make the algorithm inscrutable, and risks related to bias, fake, or partial information. Our central argument is that AI can deliver its promise to make digital archival collections more accessible, but it also creates new challenges - particularly in terms of ethics. In the conclusion, we insist on the importance of fairness, accountability and transparency in the process of making digital archives more accessible.

Red Sky at Night: digital archiving in England 2020

Across Europe, countries are at different stages of dealing with digital archaeological archives and how those archives are dealt with is affected by differences in statutory requirements, legal ownership of archives and infrastructure. In England, there is no single national repository for archaeological archives and there is no legal requirement to deposit either physical or digital archives with public bodies, and deposition rates for digital remain low. The archaeological sector remains aware of the implications of producing ever-growing quantities of born-digital data, which interested parties are attempting to address. The current framework and situation regarding digital archiving in England, therefore, offers an interesting case study for how digital archiving is dealt with through the application of professional standards, rather than legislative requirements. This article aims to summarise the current situation regarding digital archaeological archives in England. Across the UK there has been a great deal of work and focus on archaeological archives, driven by two main factors: archaeological archives are curated by a network of regional and local museums and currently resources are shrinking in terms of storage capacity and archaeological curators. Repositories for physical archives can therefore be ill-prepared for the curation of digital archaeological archives, which can risk loss of archaeological digital data, and in 2017 this was recognised within the UK government's Mendoza Review. This article describes the current work to resolve these issues - including strengthening the planning process, providing standards and guidance for data creators and repositories.

A landscape of data – working with digital resources within and beyond DARIAH

The way researchers in the arts and humanities disciplines work has changed significantly. Research can no longer be done in isolation as an increasing number of digital tools and certain types of knowledge are required to deal with research material. Research questions are scaled up and we see the emergence of new infrastructures to address this change. The DigitAl Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) is an open international network of researchers within the arts and humanities community, which revolves around the exchange of experiences and the sharing of expertise and resources. These resources comprise not only of digitised material, but also a wide variety of born-digital data, services and software, tools, learning and teaching materials. The sustaining, sharing and reuse of resources involves many different parties and stakeholders and is influenced by a multitude of factors in which research infrastructures play a pivotal role. This article describes how DARIAH tries to meet the requirements of researchers from a broad range of disciplines within the arts and humanities that work with (born-)digital research data. It details approaches situated in specific national contexts in an otherwise large heterogeneous international scenario and gives an overview of ongoing efforts towards a convergence of social and technical aspects.

A novel method for binarization of scene text images and its application in text identification

The aim of this article is twofold. First, we propose an effective methodology for binarization of scene images. For our present study, we use the publicly available ICDAR 2011 Born Digital Data set. We introduce a new concept of variance map of a gray-level image for detection of text boundary in an image. Based on this boundary information, the image is binarized by means of adaptive thresholding. This binarization procedure produces a number of connected components. Next, these connected components are examined in order to identify possible text components. In this context, a number of shape-based features that distinguish between text and non-text components are proposed. We consider text component identification as an one-class classification problem, i.e., the ground truth information for only the text class is available for the ICDAR 2011 Born Digital Data set. Then, the ground truth text components are used to obtain a certain statistical distribution of the shape-based features. Here, we observe that all the features may not follow a single family of distributions. Therefore, we construct a joint distribution by using multivariate Gaussian copula which allows a coupling of different marginal distributions. As our experiments suggest, the copula-based method is superior to multivariate Gaussian distribution in describing the feature distribution. Finally, a text connected component of an unknown class is subjected to the trained statistical model, and by performing a hypothesis test we successfully identify a possible text component. For a comparative study, we consider a number of state-of-the-art methods. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms most of these methods in terms of recall, precision and F-measure in both the binarization and text identification tasks.

800 years on can Magna Carta still disrupt the executive?

AbstractIn June 1215 King John put his seal to Magna Carta, which over the centuries has become an icon of English (British) liberties. Clause 40 about not selling, denying or delaying justice, and Clause 39, that no free man is to be imprisoned or dispossessed “save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” are still in force today. For these reasons Lord Denning described Magna Carta as “the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. In other words the executive can never be above the law, but for this principle to be enforced the state must disclose evidence by due process to the public by which it can be held to account. This essay explores the threats to openness of government in the digital age, which runs the risk of undermining this fundamental principle of the British constitution. These range from the intrusiveness of our surveillance society, ill-considered notions of a post-privacy world, misconceived concepts of open data to the immense difficulty of scrutinizing born-digital data released under due process for sensitive content. Such threats are balanced by a much more assertive judiciary under the supreme court, which like its American counterpart strikes down legislation, an unelected second chamber willing to challenge the executive and House of Commons select committees that are increasingly baring their teeth. This article is published as part of a collection entitled ‘IT as a utility’.

Shedding light on the Cypriot rural landscape: Investigations of the Athienou Archaeological Project in the Malloura Valley, Cyprus, 2011–2013

Since its inception in 1990, the Athienou Archaeological Project (AAP) has focused on diachronic patterns of rural land use within the Malloura Valley located along the edges of Cyprus’s fertile Mesaoria plain. Employing careful field methods of excavation and recording, members of AAP have sought to reconstruct ancient life in this understudied region by charting local responses to regional and pan-Mediterranean networks of exchange. The present contribution reports on the results of excavations (2011–2013) in the Geometric to Roman period rural sanctuary and of limited pedestrian survey (2013) in light of the project’s research goals, while highlighting AAP’s effective implementation of a mobile computing platform that streamlined field recording through an increased reliance on born-digital data. For a discussion of AAP’s mobile computing platform in the context of our fieldwork in Cyprus, please see our online supplementary article on the JFA website (http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1179/0093469015Z.000000000112).

Research data management and libraries: relationships, activities, drivers and influences.

The management of research data is now a major challenge for research organisations. Vast quantities of born-digital data are being produced in a wide variety of forms at a rapid rate in universities. This paper analyses the contribution of academic libraries to research data management (RDM) in the wider institutional context. In particular it: examines the roles and relationships involved in RDM, identifies the main components of an RDM programme, evaluates the major drivers for RDM activities, and analyses the key factors influencing the shape of RDM developments. The study is written from the perspective of library professionals, analysing data from 26 semi-structured interviews of library staff from different UK institutions. This is an early qualitative contribution to the topic complementing existing quantitative and case study approaches. Results show that although libraries are playing a significant role in RDM, there is uncertainty and variation in the relationship with other stakeholders such as IT services and research support offices. Current emphases in RDM programmes are on developments of policies and guidelines, with some early work on technology infrastructures and support services. Drivers for developments include storage, security, quality, compliance, preservation, and sharing with libraries associated most closely with the last three. The paper also highlights a ‘jurisdictional’ driver in which libraries are claiming a role in this space. A wide range of factors, including governance, resourcing and skills, are identified as influencing ongoing developments. From the analysis, a model is constructed designed to capture the main aspects of an institutional RDM programme. This model helps to clarify the different issues involved in RDM, identifying layers of activity, multiple stakeholders and drivers, and a large number of factors influencing the implementation of any initiative. Institutions may usefully benchmark their activities against the data and model in order to inform ongoing RDM activity.

Automated Metadata Harvesting: Low-Barrier MARC Record Generation from OAI-PMH Repository Stores Using MarcEdit

For libraries, the burgeoning corpus of born-digital data is becoming both a blessing and a curse. For patrons, these online resources represent the potential for extended access to materials, but for a library’s technical services department they represent an ongoing challenge, forcing staff to look for ways to capture and make use of available metadata. This challenge is exacerbated for libraries that provide access to their own digital collections. While digital repository software like DSpace, Fedora, and CONTENTdm expose bibliographic metadata through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), few organizations have a simplified method for harvesting and generating Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records from these metadata stores. Fortunately, a number of tools have been developed that can facilitate the harvesting and generation of MARC data from these OAI-PMH metadata repositories. This paper will examine resources that enhance technical services staff’s ability to use existing metadata, with specific focus on one of these current generation tools, MarcEdit, which was developed by the author and provides a one-click harvesting process for generating MARC metadata from a variety of metadata formats.