Peter N. Peregrine, Rob Brennan, Thomas Currie, Kevin Feeney, Pieter François, Peter Turchin, and Harvey Whitehouse

Paper #: 2017-07-023

Abstract.  Archaeologists are both blessed and cursed by the information now available through the Internet.  We are blessed by the pure abundance of articles, images, and data that we can discover with a simple search, but we are also cursed by the difficult process of parsing those discoveries down to those of scholarly quality that relate to our specific interests.  As an example of how new advances in computer science address these problems we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist researchers from any discipline in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources.  We provide an example of Dacura in practice as the software employed to populate and manage the massive Seshat databank of historical and archaeological information.

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