From digitization to datafication. A new challenge is approaching archaeology

Digitisation has changed archaeology deeply. In the last years, the continuous development of IT technologies brought out a new phenomenon: datafication. Datafication promises to go significantly beyond digitisation, and to have an even more profound impact on archaeology, challenging the foundations of our established methods of measurement and providing new opportunities. Digitisation usually refers to the migration of pieces of information into digital formats, for transmission, re-use and manipulation. Surely, this process has increased exponentially the amount of data that could be processed, but from a more general point of view the act of digitisation, i.e. turning analogue information into computer readable format, by itself does not involve datafication. To datafy means to transform the objects, processes, etc. in a quantified format so they can be tabulated and analysed. We can argue that datafication puts more emphasis on the I (information) of IT, unembedding the knowledge associated with physical objects by decoupling them from the data associated with them. Datafication is manifesting in a variety of forms and can also, but not always, be associated with sensors/actuators and with the Internet of Things. Moreover, a key differentiating aspect between digitisation and datafication is the one related to data analytics: digitisation uses data analytics based on traditional sampling mechanisms, while datafication fits a Big Data approach and relies on the new forms of quantification and associated data mining techniques, that permit more sophisticated mathematical analyses to identify non-linear relationships among data, allowing us to use the information, for instance, for massive predictive analyses. To datafy archaeology would mean to produce a flow of data starting from the data produced by the archaeological practice, for instance, locations, interactions and relations between finds and sites. A flow of data that the archaeological community should have available. Data are a “non-rivalrous” good, in other words, they can be processed again and again and their value does not diminish, on the contrary, it arises from what the data reveal in the aggregate. The ArchAIDE project goes exactly in this direction. ArchAIDE is a H2020 funded project (2016-2019) that will realise an as-automatic-as-possible procedure to transform the paper catalogues in a digital description, to be used as a data pool for search and retrieval process; a tool (mainly designed for mobile devices) that will support archaeologists in recognising and classifying potsherds, through an easy-to-use interface and efficient algorithms for characterization, search and retrieval of the visual/geometrical correspondences; an automatic procedure to derive the potsherd’s description by transforming the data collected into a formatted electronic document; a web-based real-time data visualization to improve access to archaeological heritage and generate new understanding; an open archive to allow the archival and re-use of archaeological data, transforming them into common heritage. This process requires a strong cultural and theoretical framework: from a cultural point of view any researcher must be aware of the opportunity of sharing data for improving their researches, from a theoretical point of view, the archaeological theory should shift towards data-driven research and a Big Data approach.