Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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material record that they document so meticulously with the grow<strong>in</strong>g textual record, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g text
collections <strong>in</strong> digital libraries and pr<strong>in</strong>ted editions found <strong>in</strong> mass-digitization projects.
Efforts to re<strong>in</strong>tegrate the material and textual records of archaeology were recently explored by the
Archaeotools project 243 (Jeffrey et al. 2009a, Jeffrey et al. 2009b). Archaeotools was a major e-Science
<strong>in</strong>frastructure project for archaeology <strong>in</strong> the United K<strong>in</strong>gdom that sought to create a s<strong>in</strong>gle-faceted
browser <strong>in</strong>terface that would <strong>in</strong>tegrate access to the millions of structured database records regard<strong>in</strong>g
archaeological sites and monuments found <strong>in</strong> the ADS with “<strong>in</strong>formation extracted from semistructured
grey literature reports, and unstructured antiquarian journal accounts.” Archaeotools
explored both the use of <strong>in</strong>formation-extraction techniques with arts and humanities data sets and the
automatic creation of metadata for those archaeological reports that had no manually created metadata.
Jeffrey et al. (2009b) observed that archaeology has an extensive pr<strong>in</strong>ted record go<strong>in</strong>g back to the
n<strong>in</strong>eteenth century and <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g monographs, journal articles, special society publications, and a vast
body of grey literature. One unique challenge of much of the antiquarian literature, they noted, was the
use of nonstandard historical place names that made it impossible to automatically <strong>in</strong>tegrate this
<strong>in</strong>formation with modern GIS and mapp<strong>in</strong>g technologies. Their project was <strong>in</strong>formed by the results of
the Armadillo project, 244 a historical text-m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g project that used <strong>in</strong>formation extraction to identify
names of historical persons and places <strong>in</strong> the Old Bailey Proceed<strong>in</strong>gs 245 and then mapped them to a
def<strong>in</strong>ed ontology.
The Archaeotools project ultimately created a faceted classification and geospatial browser for the
ADS database, with the ma<strong>in</strong> facets for brows<strong>in</strong>g fall<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>to the categories of “What,” “Where,”
“When,” and “Media.” All facets were populated us<strong>in</strong>g exist<strong>in</strong>g thesauri that were marked up <strong>in</strong>to
XML and then <strong>in</strong>tegrated us<strong>in</strong>g SKOS. Selected fields were then extracted from the ADS database <strong>in</strong>
MIDAS XML 246 format, converted to RDF XML, and then mapped onto the thesauri ontology that
was previously created. The project also created an extendable NLP system that automatically
extracted metadata from unpublished archaeological reports and legacy historical publications that
used a comb<strong>in</strong>ation of knowledge eng<strong>in</strong>eer<strong>in</strong>g (KE) and automatic tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g (AT). 247 The f<strong>in</strong>al task was
to use the geoXwalk 248 service to recast “historical place names and locations as national grid
references.”
Despite the growth of projects such as Archaeotools, one scholar <strong>in</strong>terviewed by the CSHE concluded
that he had yet to see any revolutionary uses of technology with<strong>in</strong> archaeology. “What I see still is
ma<strong>in</strong>ly people be<strong>in</strong>g able to do much more of what they always were able to do, and do it faster, and <strong>in</strong>
some cases better, with the tools,” this scholar observed; “I don’t see yet that the technology is
fundamentally chang<strong>in</strong>g the nature of what people are do<strong>in</strong>g. …” (Harley et al. 2010, 120). This
argument, i.e., that scholars aren’t do<strong>in</strong>g qualitatively new work but are simply answer<strong>in</strong>g old
questions more efficiently with new tools, is seen often <strong>in</strong> criticism of digital classics projects.
The CSHE report concluded that to support more archaeological scholars <strong>in</strong>terested <strong>in</strong> do<strong>in</strong>g digital
scholarship, both tra<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g and technical support would be required. Such support, they added, would
need to reflect the vary<strong>in</strong>g capabilities of scholars as well as their limited funds:
243 http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/archaeotools/
244 http://www.hrionl<strong>in</strong>e.ac.uk/armadillo/objectives.html
245 http://www.oldbaileyonl<strong>in</strong>e.org/
246 http://www.heritage-standards.org.uk/midas/docs/
247 Further details on the results of Archaeotools research with mach<strong>in</strong>e learn<strong>in</strong>g, automatic annotation, and the evaluation of doma<strong>in</strong> experts’ annotation
of archaeological literature can be found <strong>in</strong> Zhang et al. (2010).
248 http://ed<strong>in</strong>a.ac.uk/projects/geoxwalk/geoparser.html