Articles by Andrea Titolo

In the past decade, archaeology has witnessed a surge in digital data and methodologies made accessible through online repositories, databases, collaborative platforms like GitHub, and library collections. While this ‘digital revolution’ has lead to notable advancements in data accessibility and dissemination, it has also presented several challenges. These include developing effective data management strategies, defining scientific publication modalities, addressing ethical concerns regarding the protection of cultural heritage, and bridging the gap between rich and poor research institutions. Taking these challenges into account, this paper aims to outline best practices for data sharing, dissemination, and reproducibility in archaeology, underscoring their benefits to researchers and the wider public. Through a range of approaches and practical examples drawn from everyday research scenarios, we will demonstrate how these practices promote transparency and foster open science.

Distributed Version Control Systems are one of the common ways through which scientists collaborate and keep track of different versions of their work. Moreover, scientists, programmers, etc., have been using platforms such as GitHub to host and share their resources versioned through Git. While not as widely adopted as in other disciplines, Git has also been used in archaeological research. In fact, DVCS allow scholars to collaborate remotely and offer the transparency necessary to align with Open Science and reproducible research practices. However, Git is highly inefficient when versioning GIS data. Kart, described as «an open source DVCS for geospatial and tabular data built on git», is a software addressing the need for collaboration and finer incorporation of geospatial data, providing also an integration with QGIS. Kart and code-hosting websites offers unique resources for archaeologists, from collaboration to more efficient workflows. In this paper, an example of how the authors are using Kart, QGIS, and GitHub in the project ‘Governance Policies and Political Landscapes in the Southern Levant under the Neo-Assyrian Empire’ will be presented. With this case study, the authors hope to provide a solution to the current gap in the workflow of documentation and collaboration among archaeologists using GIS.