Open Context and Carleton University Prize for Archaeological Visualization

Increasingly, archaeology data are being made available openly on the web. But what do these data show? How can we interrogate them? How can we visualize them? How can we re-use data visualizations?

We’d like to know. This is why we have created the Open Context and Carleton University Prize for Archaeological Visualization and we invite you to build, make, hack, the Open Context data and API for fun and prizes.

Who Can Enter?

Anyone! Wherever you are in the world, we invite you to participate. All entries will be publicly accessible and promoted via a context gallery on the Open Context website.

Sponsors

The prize competition is sponsored by the following:

• The Alexandria Archive Institute (the nonprofit that runs Open Context)
• The Digital Archaeology at Carleton University Project, led by Shawn Graham

Categories

We have prizes for the following categories of entries:

• Individual entry: project developed by a single individual
• Team entry: project developed by a collaborative group (2-3 people)
• Individual student entry: project developed by a single student
• Student team entry: project developed by a team of (2-3) students

Prizes

All prizes are awarded in the form of cash awards or gift vouchers of equivalent value. Depending on the award type, please note currency:

• Best individual entry: $US200
• Best team entry (teams of 2 or 3): $US300 (split accordingly)
• Best student entry: $C200
• Best student team entry (teams of 2 or 3): $C300 (split accordingly)

We will also note “Honorable Mentions” for each award category.

Entry Requirements

We want this prize competition to raise awareness of open data and reproducible research methods by highlighting some great examples of digital data in practice. To meet these goals, specific project entry requirements include the following:

• The visualization should be publicly accessible/viewable, live on the open Web
• The source code should be made available via Github or similar public software repository
• The project needs to incorporate and/or create open source code, under licensing approved by the Free Software Foundation.
• The source code must be well-commented and documented
• The visualization must make use of the Open Context API; other data sources may also be utilized in addition to Open Context
• A readme file should be provided (as .txt or .md or .rtf), which will include:
  • Instructions for reproducing the visualization from scratch must be included
  • Interesting observations about the data that the visualization makes possible
  • Documentation of your process and methods (that is to say, ‘paradata’ as per theLondon Charter, section 4)

All entries have to meet the minimum requirements described in ‘Entry Requirements’ to be considered.

Entries are submitted by filling a Web form (http://goo.gl/forms/stmnS73qCznv1n4v1) that will ask you for your particulars and the URL to your ‘live’ entry and the URL to your code repository. You will also be required to attest that the entry is your own creation.