‘Interactive Visualization of Digital Archaeological Collections on Open Context’ sought to develop digital tools to navigate and explore digital archaeological collections on Web-based platforms. Such digital tools are necessary to enable public understanding of archaeological data and their interpretation, promote the re-use of digital collections, and to build capacity in digital archaeology. This blog provides a brief description of the project and the research team’s progress on over the last few months.

The research team is comprised of Dr Neha Gupta (CCGS), Dr Fatemah Fard (CS), Dr Eric Kansa (Open Context) and Mohammad Hadi, a graduate student in Computer Science at UBCO. As a result of Covid-19 restrictions on meeting on campus, the team held its meetings virtually and we have been working remotely throughout the summer. We experience some delays in starting our research as a result of the global pandemic, however, we have made significant progress toward creating a ‘digital output’ based on digital archaeological collections. The tool and documentation is available here:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1m66CmKAmrYwOmeZPc3BU89wBTDm9IABX?usp=sharing https://observablehq.com/@mohammad-abdul-hadi/open-context-force-directed-graph-with-tooltip-decorative https://observablehq.com/@mohammad-abdul-hadi/open-context-force-directed-graph-with-tooltip-motif-to-mot https://observablehq.com/@mohammad-abdul-hadi/open-context-force-directed-graph-with-tooltip-motif-to-dec

Creating a well-documented digital tool involved four phases, namely:

• Identifying an appropriate, interesting archaeological dataset and selecting specific archaeological categories to further investigate;
• Developing a preliminary workflow to transform data in Open Context into forms for visualization;
• Creating a re-usable and reproducible digital tool to analyze archaeological artefacts and categories;
• Trial and testing of visualizations in terms of potential insights into archaeological collection