GNewArchaeology workshop

About:

The GNewArchaeology workshop is part of a cultural project promoted and organized by the student from the University of Ferrara – Department of Biologia ed Evoluzione and funded with the Cultural Fund of the University of Ferrara, Italy.

The name GNewArchaeology is a wordplay between two reciprocal concept, the New Archaeology of L.R.Binford¹ and the free GNU/Linux OS² in order to bring up the innovative nature of one and the infinite potential offer to the archaeological research of the other.

The union between archaeological research and informatics technology had a relatively recent story. One of the first conference Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology³ took place in 1973, while the first number of the journal Archeologia e Calcolatori⁴ came out in 1990, which recently merge as the Archaeological Computing Newsletter⁵ supplements, active since 1985.

If in principle the interest was principally turned to the quantitative analysis, nowadays the camp research sweep from the statistic to the spatial analysis, from the 3D reconstruction to the predictive model and so on… Such a richness of data requires inevitably adapted tools for the storing and the analysis.

The workshop follows the trail of projects and communities more and more numerous, entering in the panorama of a greater cultural renewal. International initiative, for example, the Science Commons⁶, invite the whole research world to reflect on the importance of this thematic. For Italy, in the archaeological area, we must name the annual congress ArcheoFOSS⁷, which has reach its 6th edition, the IOSA⁸ project and ArcheOS⁹, GNU/Linux distribution, developed by Arc-Team¹⁰, explicitly dedicated to the archaeological research.

gnewarchaeology flyer call for papers 2011

The aim of the workshop is to create, with presentations, tutorials and round tables, opportunities for meeting and debates about topics regarding the use and dissemination of several free and open source software in the public institutions and particularly in archaeological research processes.

The mornings will be devoted to an introductive approach to free software culture, with some explanations about the bases of the software. The software required to attend the tutorials will be communicate with the publication of the schedule. For whom who will find difficulty for the installation, an assistance will be offer during a special session of the workshop.

Relations, debates, documentary’s projection, and distributions of informative materials will be organized in collaboration with local Linux User Group¹¹

The afternoon will be more technical with talks, round-table and tutorials about topics regarding FLOSS in archaeological research processes.

The objective is to bring the discussion also beyond the limit of single faculty and structures of the University of Ferrara, for a real exercise of multidisciplinary and common knowledge.

Important dates are:

Submission deadline: September 28th, 2011
Notification of acceptance and publication of abstract: September 29th, 2011

speakers

people attending:

Giovanni Braga
Enzo Cocca
Sandro Colussa
Francesco De Virgilio
Damiano Lotto
Luca Mandolesi

note

¹ New perspectives in Archaeology, Binford L.R., Binford S.R. (a cura di), 1968

² gNewSense is one of the completely free software distribution of GNU/Linux promoted by the Free Software Foundation

³ “CAA is an international organisation bringing together archaeologists, mathematics and computer scientists. Its aims are to encourage communication between these disciplines, to provide a survey of present work in the field and to stimulate discussion and future progress.” From: http://www.leidenuniv.nl/caa

⁴ “Since 1990 Archeologia e Calcolatori has been an international observatory of theoretical and methodological aspects of computing and information technology applied to archaeology.” From: http://soi.cnr.it/archcalc

⁵ “This newsletter has been in production in paper form since 1985. In this time it has been widely recognised within its field as an important reference source.” From: http://soi.cnr.it/archcalc/acn

⁶ http://sciencecommons.org/

⁷ http://www.archeologiadigitale.it/archeofoss/2010.html

⁸ http://www.iosa.it/

⁹ http://www.archeos.eu/wiki/doku.php

¹⁰ http://www.arc-team.com/wiki/doku.php

¹¹ http://ferrara.linux.it/