'Data re-use, digital literacy and the Roman Rural Settlement Project: Structured deposition in Roman Britain'

This repository contains the presentation, data and training materials that accompanies the TRAC Webinar: 'Data reuse, digital literacy and the Roman Rural Settlement Project'.

A recording of this presentation can be found on Youtube here.

Abstract

Archaeological advocates for FAIR data, namely that which is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, now form part of a chorus of voices across digital humanities (Marwick et al., 2017). In Britain the archaeological data deluge (e.g. Bevan, 2015) has been tempered in many ways to make this data Findable, Accessible and Interoperable, however, there has been a distinct lack of data reuse. This deficit is partly attributable to the nature of academia, which appears to assign a higher importance on primary data creation, but also due to a general lack of digital literacy training in standard archaeological curricula (Garstki, 2022).

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is the leading accredited digital repository for heritage data generated by UK-based fieldwork and research. The ADS is an advocate for FAIR data and many of our collections are Open Access and are available to download via our website to facilitate reuse by the heritage sector. These archives include several large-scale specialist collections that relate to understanding of Roman Britain, including the Roman Rural Settlement Project (RRSP) database, which is widely visited and downloaded but rarely reused in academic research.

In this paper I will discuss the barriers to data reusability in Roman studies and how we can overcome these limitations. I will then demonstrate how easy it is to access, download and manipulate data from the RRSP archive to prepare it for immediate reuse. This talk will demonstrate how RRSP data can be reused to undertake original research and better understand facets of the Roman world. In this case how the ubiquitous evidence for the structured deposition of human remains on rural sites in Britain changed across the Late Iron Age and Roman period. All code and data outputs will be available for attendees before the talk via the speaker's Github account.

Reproducibility of research

In order to make this research open and reproducible (e.g. Marwick 2017), the R code used for the analysis and visualizations from this presentation can be accessed here through this Github repository. In accordance with the TRAJ editorial policy, these files are offered under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).

Data

The following data is available via this repository

• A pdf of the presentation given as part of the TRAC webinar - 'Data re-use, digital literacy and the Roman Rural Settlement Project: Structured deposition in Roman Britain' [The pdf contains live links to other resources throughout]

• A RMarkdown file (.rmd) that contains all the code utilised to compile the database used for the research presented here and the visualisations used throughout the presentation [A updated version will be available soon with code for further analysis]

• A pdf that explains how to access and download data from the ADS archive 'The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain: an online resource' https://doi.org/10.5284/1030449

• A R file (.R) - 'rrsp_join.R' - that provides code for importing and combining data tables from the ADS archive 'The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain: an online resource' https://doi.org/10.5284/1030449