[open-archaeology] SAA 2015 session on 'Open Methods'

Ben Marwick bmarwick at uw.edu
Wed Sep 3 06:30:31 UTC 2014


Hi everyone,

Andy Bevan and I are organising a session at next year's SAA
conference on open methods in archaeology. We're inviting submissions.

Here is the official title and abstract of our session:

Session Title:
Open methods in archaeology: how to encourage reproducible research as 
the default practice

Abstract:
Scientific progress famously depends on the evaluation of findings 
through replication. Likewise, while social sciences and humanities 
subjects may not always espouse this exact vision of how we build 
knowledge, many researchers in these fields would argue that they too 
can benefit from greater discursive transparency. However, as 
archaeology and other research areas have become more complex, 
especially with the use of computationally intensive methods, it has 
become increasingly difficult to reproduce findings and efficiently 
build on past research. While exact replication of results is sometimes 
not feasible because of limitations of time and resources, minimal 
standards of reproducibility are emerging as a norm of practice in 
contemporary computational and biological sciences. These include 
opening methods up for inspection by sharing and recognising code and 
data as a citable research objects, and in some cases including them 
directly and at an early stage in the peer review process. However, 
there remain some significant and continuing impediments to enabling 
such transparency in archaeology. In this session, we therefore wish to 
discuss our prevailing norms in archaeology, showcase some current best 
practice in terms of open methods, and advocate future directions for 
improving the reproducibility of archaeological research.

Here are a few more notes on our vision for this session:

Our goal is to investigate prevailing norms in archaeology, showcase 
some current best practice in terms of open methods, and advocate future 
directions for improving the reproducibility of archaeological research. 
  Papers will include 'how-to' elements and will be accompanied by 
online compendia (eg. data and code repositories, continuous 
integration, etc.) to allow others to study in depth the different tools 
and approaches that enable reproducible research in archaeology. We 
expect these examples will impact the way people work by making it easy 
for them to adopt open methods to do reproducible research. The main 
reasons why we want to promote reproducible research is because it more 
transparently shows the correctness of research results and it enables 
other researchers to easily make use of our methods and results in new 
research.

Please don't hesitate to write with any questions, etc. We're not going 
to be requesting slides or manuscripts to be circulated in advance, but 
we do want papers to make substantial reference to online repositories 
of code and/or data that audience members can access and interact with 
(without restriction of course). Our current plan to follow-up the 
session is a group-authored manifesto-type publication that summarizes 
the current best practices that emerge in the session.

The deadline for abstract submission is 11 Sept. The simplest way is 
probably to start here 
https://ecommerce.saa.org/SAA_AbstractSubmission/Account/LogOn and fill 
in your details and when it asks for a session ID, enter 741 to link 
your abstract to our session.

best,

Ben

-- 
Ben Marwick, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
Denny Hall M32, Box 353100, University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3100 USA

t. (+1) 206.552.9450   e. bmarwick at uw.edu
f. (+1) 206.543.3285   w. http://faculty.washington.edu/bmarwick/





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