Shala Valley Project takes the LEAP

I am excited to be one of the co-authors of an upcoming article about the Shala Valley Project (SVP), the interdisciplinary expedition to Northern Albania directed by Mike Galaty of Millsaps College, that I was privileged to be involved with from 2004-2007. Any publication is cool, but I have a feeling that this one is going to be particularly fun because Mike and the rest of my colleagues are the lucky recipients of one of four initial LEAP II grants, aimed at providing practical exemplars of how archaeological researchers can truly link electronic archives with publication (Linking Electronic Archives with Publication, geddit!). LEAP II is an initiative of the Archaeology Data Service hosted at the University of York, and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

A Wordle word cloud created from the text of our successful application gives a sense of how SVP and the LEAP project fit together, and what the LEAP project is all about. It is also rather pretty.

As you can see, the "data" element looms very large indeed, which is how it should be when the preservation of irreplaceable born-digital data generated by archaeological projects is the biggest elephant in the digital humanities grasslands right now. You will also see that, although archaeological fieldwork was a major component of SVP, the data we collected was diverse, and included anthropological, ethnohistoric, and documentary components.

Our article, to be published in Internet Archaeology, is to be the first North American LEAP II exemplar, so I have been spending some time over the last couple of weeks "cleaning up" the intensive survey databases so that (a) they can be ready for deposit in the Archaeology Data Service archive, alongside the article, and (b) that there are relatively controlled vocabularies and naming conventions to which our article can "hook."

Going back over one's data is always a bit embarrassing. The fact that Mike was thinking very clearly about database structure from the moment he created the Shala Valley Project is a definite advantage, but it didn't stop us minions messing things up a bit. I can claim personal responsibility for sometimes mixing up European and American data formats (the "18/06/2006" format throughout the 2006 tract database was my fault), letting misreadings of my notebook like "cemetary" and "lentel" (for "lintel") slip by during our beer-fueled afternoon data entry sessions, and taking way too many pictures of pigs (which are now going to be archived for posterity). But I think I am capturing these errors now, and am having quite a fun time reliving our summers tract by tract from the comfort and boredom of a New Jersey apartment. Since the mountains surrounding the Shala Valley are over 2,500 meters high and my home in Hightstown, NJ, is basically at sea level, I could not, from the perspective of altitude alone, be physically and emotionally in two more different places!

The next stage in the LEAP enterprise will be linking the paper that Mike and Wayne Lee, my brilliant and versatile colleague from UNC, have been working on with the underlying data sets. Although the logistics haven't been worked out yet with the LEAP II team, I suspect that this process will occur in two phases. First, there will be the authors' conceptionalization of where such links can occur. Then, there will be the reality check when the team at the Archaeology Data Service work out what is actually do-able within budget. The creation of a spatial interface to the SVP data is being done by a professional GIS consultant, so we already know that this will be an important component of the publication, but I can also see the potential for a number of hooks for digital photos, scans of notebook pages, and subsets of database records in the draft paper. There may also be some linked audio and video files.

It seems to me that what is really going to be important with the Shala Valley Project exemplar, and the other three LEAP II pilot projects that have been funded through the Mellon Foundation's generosity, is not how "shiny" they are, but the degree to which the linking of the electronic archive actually adds value to the overlay articles. We can create all the links and pretty visualizations we like, but until the fact that the underlying data is instantly accessible and manipulable actually allows the reader of the article to do something that they would not have been able to manage in print, projects like the LEAP and LEAP II exemplars are in danger of remaining interesting ephemera. Keeping over-exuberance in check ("why don't we plot all the pig photos in relation to water sources on the GIS?") is going to be a crucial discipline for us and the Internet Archaeology team during the next few weeks.

Not trying to do too much clever stuff with the first LEAP II exemplars is going to be important for another reason. As Kate Wittenberg has noted in her interesting reflections on the Gutenberg-e project, also funded by the Mellon Foundation between 1999 and 2004, encouraging the young historians funded during that enterprise to really break the mold may have been a mistake, at least from the perspective of ensuring widespread acceptance and sustainability of new forms of electronic publishing. What was really needed was to encourage them to add value to their publications through the use of electronic media, but to keep each publication only moderately innovative and within budget.

In the light of the earlier experiments like Gutenberg-e, the challenge now is to try and create projects such as the LEAP II exemplars within the confines of a disciplined publication workflow, where the editorial team is not afraid to say "no" to the wilder flights of technological fantasy us wily authors may try and lure them into. Judith Winters and her team at Internet Archaeology have been producing important online-only articles on a shoestring for over a decade now (since 1996), so I am confident that she will keep the Shala Valley Project team under control. A tight deadline, a firm budget, and a sensibly matter-of-fact publishing contract all already augur good things.

Anyway, I better get back to the photo databases now. "Pigs under tractor, Tract 2005-208" . . . what can I have been thinking?!

"JSTOR and Atypon Agreement to develop Custom Content Delivery Platform." So what does this mean for the ancient world?

The announcement on Friday, January 19, 2007 that JSTOR is planning to migrate its wonderful archive of scholarly content to the Atypon platform is probably good news for the scholarly world in general, and humanities and social sciences in particular. Although I haven't heard many complaints at all, on any topic, from JSTOR users, the ones I have heard have been about technical glitches in the operating system. The Atypon Premium service has been so well-trialed by large publishers like Blackwell (Synergy) and University of California Press (Caliber) that most of the kinks in the display of "regular" books and journals must have been ironed out by now.

Even though Atypon will probably remain in the background, the agreement must be good for their reputation and name recognition among librarians especially. JSTOR's pioneering work on electronic archiving shows that they recognize the importance of sustainability, and the mere fact of their selection of the Atypon platform is a clear recognition that their commercial partner will probably be around for a while.

While the immediate benefits to my employer, ASCSA, are not clear, there is some exciting potential here. Firstly, the current and recent issues of our quarterly journal, Hesperia, (i.e., those outside the JSTOR 3 year moving wall), are hosted on Atypon Link which last year was migrated to the same software platform as Atypon Premium. If both the journal's recent issues and its archive sit on the same base, surely there must be room for integration of some sort between the two. Seamless searching, and a common username and password for individual subscribers, have long been one of our hopes. The engineering that Atypon needed to do to link Anthrosource current issues with their JSTOR forbears sounded as if it was beyond our limited financial grasp. Perhaps the new agreement moves these dreams a little bit closer.

Secondly, perhaps a more flexible publishing platform will help JSTOR meet one of the next exciting challenges for its future; the display of "non-regular" written materials--like handwritten archives, databases, or unusually shaped books. A number of the early publications by the American School of Classical Studies, for example, were in large formats. Printed in Germany until the outbreak of World War II, several of the first reports on the School's excavations at Corinth (started in 1896) were elephant folios in which, peculiarly, text was printed to scale with the large architectural drawings that justified such extra expenditure (resulting, for example, in a hard to display, 36 pt, preface to Bert Hodge Hill's publication of the Fountain of Peirene). Since launching the volumes published in the Athenian Agora series in December 2006, JSTOR's next challenge on behalf of ASCSA is to digitize and display the Corinth series. While I do not know for certain if the Atypon system will make their job any easier, as JSTOR's staff wrestle with how to display these giant books to the standards of integrity they are famous for, I hope that it does.

As I have written elsewhere, the scholarly opportunities that the appearance of the two great series, Agora and Corinth, side by side on the same platform will offer looks sure to provide one of the most powerful proofs of why JSTOR is such a wonderful thing. As the ACLS's recently finalized report on the prospect of a "cyberinfrastructure" for the humanities (mirroring the NSF concept of one for the sciences) makes clear, one of the major barriers facing the development of electronic publishing in subjects like archaeology is the unwillingness of humanities scholars to share their data or otherwise collaborate. The problem of scholars who excavated or "were assigned"bodies of archaeological material to publish earlier in the century, but never produced is one that will be familiar to archaeologists in many countries. However, the lack of communication between sites that have published huge amounts (like Olympia and Delos, or Eleusis and Samothrace) is equally frustrating.

There are often good reasons for such a lack of communication. For example, Olympia has traditionally been excavated mainly by German archaeologists, and Delos by the French. Language and national pride gets in the way. However, even when two projects are run by the same institution, staffed by archaeologists who share a common language and culture, and came from the same graduate schools, academic tribes and "ways of doing things" develop. In the past it often seems to have been a matter of course that "Corinthians" (scholars working on Corinth) and "Athenians" never talked to each other, and spent some effort in devising different ways of doing things and even different names for pottery types.

It is the opportunities to explore across such territorial barriers that makes the potential appearance of the Athenian Agora and Corinth volumes on a common platform so dedicated to cross-searching tremendously exciting. Sure, the JSTOR search will always be fairly fuzzy. And, in the end, we will always be looking at fairly flat page images and fairly dirty OCR. But JSTOR is so well-used, so easy, and so well-liked that it will not be long before serendipitous discoveries of unexpected connections across paper volumes that were previously shelved in different locations in the physical library should surely provoke a renewed interest in contact between the two ancient cities.

After all, even if they have been studied in relative isolation, Corinth and the Agora were intimately linked in antiquity. As we know from the development of pottery styles, the craftspeople of ancient Athens and Corinth kept very careful eyes on what the latest trends in the other great city were. When JSTOR offers Corinth and Agora volumes side by side, facilitated by the mighty Atypon software platform, the scholar crafting their next article or student writing their overdue term paper can follow the Eleusinian highway, skim around the mountains, and check out the "competition" too. And all that done without the two day walk through hot and lawless country!