Community Building for increasing open data skills in Environmental Archaeology

This presentation was given at the 44th Association of Environmental Archaeology Conference at University of Oxford on 12th December 2024. Conference website - Conference Information | Oxford Archaeology Talk abstract: Open data skills, and more broadly open research practices, are gradually permeating through sub-disciplines of Environmental Archaeology but many archaeologists still lack the skills to implement these best practices. This is affecting the speed of transition to open practices leaving Environmental Archaeology behind other disciplines and therefore hindering greater impact such as reuse of data and the adoption of new technologies such as AI. So how can we support this transition to greater use of open data and open research practices in environmental archaeology? Community Building is one way to do this and can be used to upskill and support the adoption of new open research skills such as FAIR data management and stewardship, and reproducible workflows. Training courses are often not sufficient to help researchers implement best practices as they need greater peer-support and mentoring to put what they have learnt into practice. This talk will highlight several initiatives within archaeology and beyond that have started to do this community work such as the FAIR Phytoliths Project - a project that aimed to raise awareness and knowledge of the the FAIR data principles in phytolith research, Open Phytoliths Community - this community has been offering training and advise in open research practices, The Turing Way - an open source, collaborative project that is building a guide to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science, and also the recently funded People in Data project, which aims to convene existing data professional communities to share knowledge, tackle challenges and build capacity across domains and sectors. Links to project webpages: Open Phytoliths - https://open-phytoliths.netlify.app/ The Turing Way - https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/turing-way People in Data - https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/people-data