26th EAA Annual Meeting, Budapest, 26-30 August 2020

We welcome proposals for SESSION #414: Digital pottery archives: new methods of data use and classification
Pottery recognition is a task of paramount importance for dating archaeological contexts and for their interpretation. Unfortunately, this task continues to be a very time-consuming activity. In a hyper-connected world, where the information is easily available online, pottery catalogues are still primarily found only in print format and can be difficult to obtain (especially for professionals or people without access to archaeological library resources). Furthermore, the availability of large amounts of data (e.g. images) may allow the application of new methods in archaeology, such as Machine Learning or other types of Artificial Intelligence.
Copyright, IPR, long term curation, and the need to update resources as new research is undertaken, often discourage the creation of digital pottery resources that are openly available and accessible. On the other hand, digital resources are offered to the public from volunteers or archaeology enthusiasts without any possibility of assessing the provenance of the published information. In recent years, digital catalogues have been created using different specifications, categories and thesauri. A common vision may still be missing, and meaning data can not interoperable and re-used for potential digital applications.
In this framework, the session welcomes a range of papers on digital pottery repositories regardless of geographic region or time period in order to start an open and collaborative discussion around the needs of archaeologists needs, and potential opportunities for re-use. This includes papers discussing problems related to pottery data digitisation and archiving, digital collaborative approaches to ceramic collections, copyright, accessibility, interoperability, re-use of data, validation of published information, updating of resources, and papers that aim to bridge the gap between archaeologists with and without a background in ICT.

Main organiser: Gabriele Gattiglia (Italy) MAPPALab – University of Pisa (gabriele.gattiglia@unipi.it)
Co-organisers: Holly Wright (United Kingdom) ADS – University of York
Francesca Anichini (Italy) MAPPALab – University of Pisa
Deadline: 13 February 2020
Submit here: https://submissions.e-a-a.org/eaa2020/

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