Virtual Institute for Spatial Technologies in Archaeology
Modern archaeology uses a wide variety of information technologies, particularly those dealing with spatially referenced data. These include geographic information systems, remote sensing, computer cartography, global positioning systems, object and relational databases, visualization and those mathematical areas encompassed in the term "geomatics", such as geodesy, spatial statistics and a variety of modeling approaches.
Due to faculty sizes, however, it is rare that there is more than a single individual at any institution who has an active research focus in these areas. Furthermore, effective use of these methodologies for research or in a teaching setting, requires mastery of a very wide range of technical areas and of areas that are under rapid change. This is particularly hard where these areas are essentially collateral to the primary interests in prehistoric, classical or historic archaeology.
In addition to the individual problems of maintaining currency in this arena, it is also a challenge to provide high quality education for undergraduate and graduate archaeology students in these same domains. In most institutions it is necessary for students to enter into a long sequence of required courses in departments of computer science, geography, etc. before they are able to take courses of substance that are relevant to their interests.
To address these problems we propose the formation of a “virtual institute” of archaeologists throughout the world who have a substantive involvement in these areas to jointly develop (first) instructional and (later) research materials utilizing the virtual setting of the world-wide-web. Consider the following practical example. A number of us have realized that we have (or are planning to) developed upper division/graduate level courses that introduce information technologies and geographic information systems to an archaeological audience. Institutions offering such a course(s) include: University of Southampton; University of Sydney; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; St. Cloud University, Minnesota. Many of these programs are placing their materials on the world-wide-web e.g. Information technologies in Archaeology (University of Arkansas) or Introduction to computers, data management & GIS (University of Sydney).
Many of these courses attempt to deal with the same topics and have similar student populations. Utilizing the capabilities of the world-wide-web, we should be able to jointly create very high quality instructional materials with each institution/individual contributing those materials that he or she is most qualified and or interested in producing.
To immediately implement this idea, we propose to use these existing course materials, expand upon them and create a virtual course with modules provided from the participating institutions. This first course would be followed by additional course/modules. The specifics of this collaborative effort are described in a separate document. In addition to the creation of these on-line courses we would also propose that the member units consider other ways in which they may cooperate.
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