Welcome everyone to the session, The Agile People Coach, an alternate career path for leaders and HR in the future workplace. We have our speaker with us, Maria, sorry, Pia Maria Thurian, Inspiration Director from Agile People. So welcome, Maria. Thank you so much, Carol. I'm very happy to be here and I'm going to share my screen with you. I will be talking today about the new and future role for HR and managers in the future of work, which I believe is the Agile People Coach. So what is an Agile People Coach? We'll be talking a little bit about that. So what is Agile People? Well, Agile People is a community with people who believe in a better way when it comes to how we run organizations in a complex world. We are all passionate about combining Agile and people to create conditions for a workplace where people feel happy and have what they need to perform in an optimal manner. How we view other people becomes very important here in Agile People. Douglas McGregor wrote this book in the end of the 1950s. It's called The Human Side of the Enterprise. And in this book, he talks about how we view other people, theory X and theory Y. And it's also about how the human mind works. So we can either view people as if they are X that they are lazy, unmotivated, they don't wanna take responsibility, or we can have a basic view of people as if they are Y. And then we believe that people want to be the best they can be. They want to contribute to create value for other people. And if they get the right conditions in our company system, they will also do that. So it all starts with how we view other people and what kind of structure we believe that we need to set them up for success. So how we view people affects how we structure our management processes. And this is important. If we turn to the future of work and look at some trends, we can see that artificial and intelligence and robotics will actually create more work for us in the future, not less. And there won't be a shortage of jobs, but there might be a shortage of skills, the right skills if we don't take the right steps now and unskill, re-skill people to be able to fill those jobs that will be available in the future of work because it's totally different roles. The majority of the workforce will not be employees in the future of works, they will be freelancing instead. And remote work becomes the norm. And it has already started and it's been spirited up by the pandemic of course as well. So in this complex reality that we are facing, we have to move from viewing the organization as a machine that can be controlled and managed to viewing it as a social system. People are not cogs in a machinery because people have feelings, dreams, challenges, thoughts and they cannot be controlled. People are not robots, they are complex adaptive systems that work from intrinsic motivation. And that means that we need to stop to see people as resources and view them as the living organisms as they are, who we need to treat differently to work optimally because everybody's different, we have different needs. I have written three books about these topics of agile HR, agile leadership and human motivation at work. And this is the first book that came out in 2017. The second book is a picture book with 220 illustrations that complement the messages from the first book. And then we also have the third book, the last one came out in September, 2020. And this one is a co-creation between myself and 35 agile people from around the world who have each written one chapter about one of the agile people principles that we work with. What are then the problems with traditional leadership and HR? Well, of course we believe that we can control reality and make a perfect plan when reality looks different. So the problem here is that the world is not predictable anymore and we need feedback regularly from reality to make the right choices along the way. And another problem is that we're focusing on the shareholder value when we should focus first on the customer value and the employee satisfaction. Happy employees serve customers and happy customers. We lay the foundation for profitable organization that can deliver value to the shareholders. But this is a consequence of the value creation happening between employees and customers. So profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live but we don't need to breathe. So we need profit to survive as a company but that's not the reason why we're on the company. The reason is to create value for some customer. Another problem is that our organizational system is not making it easy for us to perform and be happy in the system. Instead it's limiting us and putting obstacles in the way for great performance and letting people be themselves and perform from their abilities and skills and passions. Think about it, a good system can make a mediocre person fantastic and a bad system can make a high performer perform really bad. About control also a little bit about budgeting and controlling people. The definition here is the power to influence or direct people's behavior or the course of events. And in business terms it means controlling people and controlling the future. And this is the grand illusion that many managers have today that people can and must be managed and that the future is predictable and manageable. But we all know this is not true. So we have a lot of problems with annual budgets. It's a very time consuming process and the assumptions that we do in this process are very quickly outdated. It stimulates unethical behaviors and creates illusions of control but we know we don't have control. And decisions are made too early and often too high in the hierarchy. It guarantees that we have the planned costs but it doesn't guarantee that we have the planned revenues. And it can prevent other value-adding activities that we could engage in if we didn't have this fixed annual budget broken down to department budgets. A consequence of that is that we are setting fixed performance targets on departments and on the people who are responsible for different departments. And we are doing traditional performance ratings as a result to see how well did you achieve the goals that we set in the beginning of the year. And a year is much too long when the organizational reality changes quickly. We need to set much shorter goals. We are also focusing on judging the past when we should really be focusing on improvement for the future and feedback during the year. Also, does the boss know best? Maybe there are other people in the organization who knows better how I have performed. And it's connected to salary which leads to sandbagging and lower set goals. Also sub-optimizing effects from this exercise breed competition and not the necessary cooperation and collaboration that we need for sustainable performance. We are focusing here on all the wrong things just results, figures and numbers instead of the good behaviors that we need to increase to create successful organizations. Another problem is simply engagement. And this is the state of the global workplace that Gallup does regularly. It proves that many, many people are actually more or less indifferent at work. They are mostly waiting for lunch and very few are passionately engaged. And it's almost more people who are disengaged actively than engaged actively. Another problem is managers who are feeling a lack of psychological safety in our agile transformation programs. They might wonder what happens to me and my role when we go agile, what will become of me when everybody seems to be able to lead themselves and they don't need to be managed anymore because this is a part of self-leadership and increased people agility. This problem needs to be taken very seriously and can potentially ruin the whole change initiative. So the skills that took managers to the position they are in today are often not the skills that are needed to lead in a complex world and reality. So it's totally different skills that are needed for leaders as well. It's more about servant coaching leadership. But how do then managers go from traditional high power and status to servant and transformational leadership? Well, we need to make it possible for leaders to change in the system by changing the environment. And we need to inspire leaders to find that intrinsic motivation to do it and to help them attain an agile mindset. But these are two conflicting goals as it's only the leaders who can change the structures that would make it possible for themselves to have the mindset. So it's a catch 22 dilemma. So where do we go from here? What should we do instead? How shall we handle these problems? What will be leaders role when everyone manages themselves and they don't need to be told what to do or be judged in a nine box grid anymore? Well, we have changes for HR and we have changes for leaders. And we are going to start with the changes that are needed for HR. Instead of focusing on execution, order and control for the future of work, HR needs to focus on adaptability, innovation and speed and on their internal customers. And HR I believe should be part of leading the change because it's all about the people and HR, they are the people, people. If we can give the right conditions to people, they will take care of the rest. So we need to let go of trying to control them and instead work with supporting them. We don't need to do more things. We need to learn to stop how we are hindering people from giving their best efforts to the company by providing the wrong structures. And these structures that I talk about is many times controlled by HR. It's change management, leadership development, talent acquisition, performance management, you name it, all these deep structures that everybody is touched by. So if HR keeps holding on to the old ways of doing things that would keep the hierarchies in place, then we don't have the possibility to change in any part of the company. That's why they need to go first. And instead of using job descriptions to close people into boxes marked with labels, we need to focus on letting people be their best selves at work and start from the person when we create their job.  And often they have other skills that the organization could benefit from that we are missing out on if we are not open to tailor their role to some degree. So in Agile, we talk a lot about T-shaped competency. You need to have both breadth and depth. You can also call them generalized specialists or specialized generalists, which creates a lot of flexibility and adaptability to the organization, both on the individual level, but also on the team level where we have an increased flexibility when everyone can take on each other's tasks and for the whole organization, where we can make competency shifts possible and minimize the risk for bottlenecks in competence. Great tool for HR to use in the new world of work is the employee experience journey mapping where we start from personas and we think about the journey steps in the employee life cycle. What are the goals and needs? What are the touch points with the organization in every step here? What does the organization do? And what are the barriers and enablers that we can put in place to help people to perform and be happy? So we have some from to for a job professional that wants to move from being a charge, to becoming agile people coaches. And I think we don't have time to go through all of them, but I think you will get access to the slides afterwards so then you can read more about this. Agile leadership for the future of work, how does that look like? Well, here we move from managing people, telling them what to do because some people may have a lot of great ideas that we need to take into account. And the enabling performance person is the CEO, the chief enabling officer instead of the chief executive officer. But of course it's not just the CEO who needs to change. Everyone needs to work with a supportive and facilitating leadership that should be all about creating motivation towards common goals. So a good leader can create the conditions for performance and co-worker satisfaction by working on the system so that it's easy to perform and be happy. We say care for the people, but manage the system.  Well, you need to admit mistakes, you need to show vulnerability, ask a lot of questions. That's how we increase the pace of learning if you're a manager. We need everybody's brain to solve this problem. What do you think? I make mistakes too, okay.  And the gardener metaphor is perfect for agile leadership. And here we see the company as a garden with an overall purpose. We need to take care of the plants in this garden. And they all have different needs. Some like to grow in the shadows, some like more sunshine, some need lots of water, some grow slower, some grow faster, but we cannot scream to the plants to make them grow faster. The only thing we can do is to make sure that every plant has the conditions that they would like to grow in. So the agile leader is the gardener who takes care of the plants, trying at the same time to fulfill the purpose of the whole garden. And we also have a difference between the manager and the agile people coach. So this is the move that the manager needs to make for the future of work. Again, we don't have time to go into detail here. The roles of the agile people coach is a role where you use many different competences and you become more and more T-shaped depending on where you come from. And usually you come from a leader role, a line management role, an HR professional role, or an agile coach role. Here we focus more on people than on process. So this is the difference between the agile coach and the agile people coach. It's more focus on people, relationships, interactions between people and groups of people, interaction between teams, relationship management and communication. So these are the skills that an agile people coach needs to develop. If we look at the difference more in detail between the agile coach and the agile people coach, it's more about working in IT and tech. You may come from there, but now it's about supporting leaders on different levels. So it takes some other skills to do that. And the skills that we have defined for the agile people coach, or except for the common Lisa Adkins framework for agile coaching, we decided that the agile people coach also needs to be able to take more roles. And that's to understand the organization as a system. So emergent strategy and systems thinking, that's the navigator role. And the guide role is you might come from a leader position in some part of the organization or in the business where you have local expertise. For example, you may come from finance or legal or HR or IT, you have a lot of competence around a certain function or a certain part of the business value chain. Then you can take the guide role. But the most important role is the reflective observer where you step outside of the organizational system. You look at the system from outside and then you decide in what role can I make myself most useful when I step in again into the organization. So a leader can emerge from any department within an organization and they have deep leadership skills that have likely been in development for many years. They may come from a specialist role within a certain function or have a proficiency in various leadership frameworks or simply they possess a general broad leadership competence. So they have the ability to make hard decisions when no one else is willing to take on the responsibility or put a stake in the ground. And they are able to explore different strategies and consider a wide variety of factors when making decisions. Could be the competitive landscape, market trends, people's individual passions and competencies and the advantages and disadvantages for the organization as a whole. So seeing consequences in the whole system. The agile master contribute with agile and lean tools, methods, practices and principles. And this is someone who fully understands agile values and principles and has a firm grasp of the mindset of agility. They are not depending on any specific methods or tools but rather based on the values and principles they can successfully choose the tools and methods that might fit the situation at hand. So and if there are no exact tools they are able to either adapt something else or even to create something new from scratch. The HR professional has experience as an HR business partner or manager or a specialist. And they have a solid general understanding of what makes people motivated and are capable of having these hard conversations to inspire people to excel. They are also the only role in the organization who deal with negotiations with unions and have competence around labor law and societal regulations. The guide has deep knowledge about the specific place that you are in right now or about the specific topic that you are working with so they can take you on a journey to understand the process showing you the path through the particular surroundings and often teaching or facilitating by examples, stories and expertise. And the navigator is someone who is comfortable with the complexity and helps the team to step into the explorer mentality framing the issue formulating a hypothesis, designing a safe to fail experiment and learning quickly what is promising and what is not. And then the reflective observer last but not least. This is that space in the middle of things where rather than jumping to conclusions or reacting too quickly and possibly wrongly you can figure out what's going on with the team and how you can best help them in whatever scenario they are in. And the skills here that you need to cultivate to be a great reflective observer is that of self-awareness and self-regulation and in particular that of being able to observe without judging. So depending on the needs of your people you take a different role to support them and let's face it, nobody can be fantastic in all of these roles from the beginning. And this is where your lifelong learning journey begins. You always work on improving yourself and being able to play more and different roles but you have to start somewhere and maybe you start from a leadership role or from being the age of professional in your organization for many years or maybe you have worked as an agile coach or want to develop yourself moving on from there. We cannot do it alone. So to be able to remove limiting structures and change the culture and start collaborating towards a more agile future we need to join forces together. HR cannot do it alone, leaders cannot do it alone. We need everybody to start talking across boundaries of different kinds starting the conversation and nudging the system and the people and moving that common direction together. So when we work with agile we don't follow any recipes. I used to call it an anti-recipe. Agile never prescribes any best solutions or best practice that always work. Best practice is always post-practice today and only mediocre companies use best practice today because you will never be better than your competitors if you follow best practice. So that's where we work with principles as the basis the agile people principles. And you can use experiment with different tools to make the principles come alive of course. So how do we grow culture? Well we start by changing or removing limiting structures mainly from financed annual budgets linked to fixed performance targets and rewards that's where HR comes in as well. And we increase the supporting structures to make it easy to behave according to the agile mindset. These structures could be scrum or Kanban or OKRs or value stream mapping or other agile friendly structures that are not limiting to the extent that the traditional structures are. And then we start showing new behaviors that come from working with new ways new tools and following new principles and values. It's a very gradual change. It's a continuous learning journey. And then we repeat from one. So this is our agile people manifesto that we have created for you. And you can find it on agilepeoplemanifesto.org and you can see a small movie clip of what it looked like when we put it together in 2019. We were 19 persons from 15 different countries from all over the world who made this together. So that's to increase people agility. So with this, I'm just going to give you a last shout out. Start today. Follow the agile people principles and start your personal and organizational learning journey towards greater people and business agility. The sooner you start, the sooner you will reap the benefits from happy performing people working together towards a common vision. We invite you to join the agile people community and to get more information about that, you can visit agilepeople.com. Thank you very much. And now I will just open up for questions and answers. Let's see if we have any questions here. Thank you, Pia Maria. We have three questions. And I think there are a lot of people appreciating the presentation and the session in our chat group. So I will start with the questions. I'll go ahead. So the first question is from an anonymous attendee. Managers generally think of themselves and scrum masters as enforcers because they feel they know the best. If they have seen success in doing that in terms of rewards and growth, how will you make them think otherwise? Yes. How will you make somebody else think otherwise? It's not possible to make people think otherwise. It's only possible to be the change yourself. You cannot change anybody else. What you can do is to change how you are and how you act and what the questions are that you ask to the people around you. This is how you can nudge the people and the system around you. You cannot really change somebody else. And you cannot make people think differently. You can only nudge people to ask questions. And you can work with your innovators within the organization. And you can also talk about things that the managers think is important, like profits, for example, show evidence that this is profitable. Maybe not talk about agile so much because they have tendency to dislike the word agile and agility. Agility is maybe more accepted than the agile world because they think that, yeah, agile, that's something that the teams are doing. It doesn't concern us. Since managers have very, they have been in the past relying on power and status. So these are the drive, the drives, the basic needs that they have. And this is not needed for the future of work. A great deal of managers need to change their roles or be replaced by people who have a different mindset. If we are going to increase business agility. Thank you. Pia Maria, we have another question. So this is also anonymous attendee. Any organization which you know of who has agile people coaches, any case studies around it would be helpful? Yes, of course. We have many organizations with agile people courses. I have people all over the world. To see some of them, you can go to my website, agilepeople.com. These are all agile people coaches that you can see there. How do you encourage openness in teams? One tool that is really great to use, that we use a lot in agile people, is the psychological safety game. And that's a tool to be able to open up and have difficult dialogues about topics that you usually don't talk about in organizations. So you find the psychological safety game on agilepeople.com. If you don't have the direct address, you can register and then it will become visible for you from the games menu on agilepeople.com. But for that you need to register and then you see it under the games menu. That's a great tool to use for creating openness and psychological safety. Wow, that's a great resource. Thank you. I'm also going to head over there and have a look. The next question we have is from Sudarshan Sharma. How do you tackle resistance from senior management who believes in old school principles of people management and don't want to adapt to agile HR? Well, you continue to ask questions, but we don't waste too much energy on senior managers who are not willing to change. They are the laggards, they will not change. You work with the people who are positive. You work with your innovators. You work with your early adopters. You convince them, you support them more than trying to convince old traditional managers who have no intention to change whatsoever because you are wasting your time trying to do that. The next question is from Chitrathana. Listening is an important attribute for a coach. How can traditional managers be trained to listen more than speak, guide rather than be direct? Send them to the Agile People Coach Course in Agile People. That's what we learn there. How to ask questions rather than controlling and micro-managing and giving orders. So it's a totally different leadership style. So it starts with an organization's leadership programs really. That's where it starts. How do you train your leaders to become Agile People Coaches instead of being traditional micro-managing, controlling managers? So I think it's a three-step process. It's awareness about what is happening in the world. How do we as an organization need to change to reap the benefits of what's happening in this world all the time adapting to change and customers change needs? And then it's training and then it's coaching. So it's a three-step process, this one. Awareness, training and coaching. Thank you. The next question we have is from Balaji. Can I assume that the need for Agile People Coach is because of the nature of the future work which current HR cannot handle? Probably, yes. Because the structures that HR is used to working with are very much conserving the pyramid. And these processes, succession management, career planning, career ladders, positions, climbing the organizational ladder, et cetera. All these processes, talent management, they are made for more or less keeping the pyramid in place to keeping the current structures in place and making sure that that stays that way. So it's very difficult for HR to rethink and understand that they need to change because this is what they learned in HR University when they learned how to become HR managers. Thank you. The next question is from an anonymous attendee. The issue is with mindset. The moment Agile coaches or anyone else starts moving into Agile People Coach role, senior management or senior architects think of them as people managers and start putting on comments like, Agile doesn't need managers. How to deal with that mindset? Yes. Agile doesn't need formal traditional managers. I agree with that actually. But nobody wants to be managed. Everybody wants a coach. So we need coaches, facilitators, servant leaders, but we don't need formal managers. I agree with that. Okay. Thank you. The next question we have from biology. Do Agile People Coach improve employee experience also? Yes, definitely. That's the actual purpose of Agile People. The Agile People Coach main responsibility is to improve the employee experience through the employee life cycle so that every employee can be happy, performing, being taken seriously, listened to, being seen, being heard. Given the tools they need to be able to perform and be happy. So that's very much in focus for Agile People. Do you see its anonymous attendee? Do you see Scrum Masters moving towards Agile People Coaching or would it be an hindrance for them? No, that's a very natural path to follow from being a Scrum Master or regular Agile Coach really to becoming an Agile People Coach and for that you need more people skills. You may need experience from leading people or from helping and coaching leaders leading people. This is the experience that you may need to develop and more about psychology, relationships, sociology, and understanding human nature and neuroscience and brain, never leadership and things like this. This is the skills that you need to develop and that's what you're learning the Agile People Coach course. The next question we have is how to make a mediocre team, a high-performing team by influencing without authority? Yes. So how does a mediocre team become high-performing? Well, it's also by coaching really. It's by asking the right questions and helping the team using the different Agile People Coach roles. So you can be a mentor, a facilitator, or a coach or whatever guide or navigator or HR professional or leader depending on the needs of the team. So a good coach can then understand what the team needs. How can I nudge them? What questions can I ask? How can I support them? Maybe I can support them in a more mentor-like role or a more teaching role or a more facilitating role depending on what are their challenges. So we need to observe, we need to communicate a lot and understand the needs of the team and then we can guide them towards high performance. That's the goal really for every Agile Coach and also for Agile People Coaches. The next question we have is from Hemalata. When teams are across cultures where one culture is more dominative and hindering self-management of the team, how do we then foster autonomous teams? Dominant cultures hindering self-management of the team. I don't think it's different than the answer from my previous question, really. When you are across cultures, well, some cultures are easier to work with because they are more mature. I usually call it, they have a more mature way of... They have an easier time taking ownership and leading themselves, self-organizing, because there are different levels of self-organizing. You can self-organize, you can self-manage, and you can also self-direct in a very mature team where you also see that you can set your own goals and help to create the strategy and direction for the whole organization. So it's always that you are affected by, of course, company culture. Also, country culture will affect you. The team culture will affect you, but there are usually many, many different cultures in a company, and each team has their own culture. So what you can do is to work from where you are. You start from where you are as a team. And then you move from there continuously improving, continuously learning, continuously running small experiments, failing, succeeding, learning from mistakes. This is how you go about it for any team really. Thank you. I think we'll take the last question because we have three minutes left. There are two questions which I can maybe combine. There are from anonymous attendees. So they're talking about performance assessment. So they're saying that even if somebody is a coach, they're always a feeling that that person is their boss. So how does that change in Agile people's coach? Yes, we don't do. I am not an advocate of performance assessment. You should never judge somebody else. So remove performance reviews or performance ratings and work instead with intrinsic motivation and OKRs and other ways of working with compensation than performance assessment. We should never judge other people. That's my view. And I think one last we can ask is that somebody from a product background can that person become Agile people's coach? Definitely. Yes. Of course. Why not? It's about the skills that you need to develop to become a good Agile people coach. It's people skills, psychology, relationship management, self-awareness, understanding yourself, helping other people to grow, also understanding other people better. So starts with self-awareness. How do we handle non-performance? This is an interesting one. Yes, thank you. That's the last one. I really wanted to answer that one. Well, if there is no performance whatsoever, even if we replant this flower in the organizational system in the garden, we need to understand why. That's the first step. Why is this person not performing? Depending on the answer, we might be able to give them the chance somewhere else in our organization. If there is no place in our organization where this person can perform, then we need to help them out of this system and into some other system somewhere else. Thank you. Thank you so much, Pia Maria, for such an insightful session. So much to learn and so many takeaways. Thank you.


The ARF Wednesday lecture, thank you for coming. Sorry about last week. The speaker who was going to come, I don't even know why, but couldn't come. Something came up, so he is speaking in two weeks, I believe, with 30. He was sick. OK, sinus infection, that sounds painful. So we're going to hear from him again soon. But today, we're very, very lucky, and I'm thrilled to announce Dr. Sarah Kanza, who hopefully all of you have met at some point. She now works with ARF, all of us here, and you probably can interact with her on various different occasions. Very important participant now. But she also works for, she says open contest, but I thought it was Alexandria. I'll explain that. OK. Alexandra started in 07. She got her PhD from Edinburgh working on faunal remains from in Turkey, or Jordan, Turkey, and then has continued on now working in Italy. So she has worked in a series of projects and is very engaged in archeozoology, but also involved in open context and open research, open data access for people of archeological material for scholars to work with. So many things. And they come together in, I think, her title, overcoming specialist silos, which is also very important for us as we want to try and blend and bring data together to ask more interpretive and more nuanced questions. So I'm going to turn it over to Sarah, and I hope that you all enjoy her presentation very much and get a warm welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Christine. Thanks for having me. So I'll just explain what I am now half time at ARF, and I also run a nonprofit organization half time, which is called the Alexandria Archive Institute, which is founded in 2001. And over the years, we ended up developing an open access data publishing system, which is called Open Context. And we recently actually melded the names together. So now Open Context is also the nonprofit organization. And so it was just what we were becoming known for more than this really wordy Alexandria Archive Institute, which isn't in Alexandria, and it was causing a lot of confusion. So anyway, I'm now promoting the sort of open context side of things. So this is Open Context. The system itself was launched in 2006, and it's an independent nonprofit organization based here, actually, in Berkeley. And we originally got funding from the Hewlett Foundation to demonstrate how one might bring together data on the web. And this was back in 2003 when Google was even just starting to become a thing. And so it was really early on, and Hewlett was funding open educational resources. And it was just whatever by luck, we ended up going to them. And they were like, this is something that we would like to see done. And we'd like to see what you can do in terms of bringing archaeological data together. So we, I'm talking of Eric Kansa, who's my husband, is the co-founder of this effort. And we've worked together now for 15 years on this. We both got PhDs in anthropology and archaeology and had spent a lot of time, as you all have and will be doing, collecting lots and lots of data to analyze for our dissertation research. And we were both really frustrated that at the end, most of that never saw the light of day. It got sort of summarized or whatever, but we were never able to share it. And being fresh out of grad school, we were like, maybe we should try to do something about this. And that's where the idea started for this open context thing that was launched a few years later with help from Hewlett. Fortunately, we're now seeing increasing attention paid to sort of data archiving. And so these efforts are getting supported more by different granting agencies. So we've expanded our support. We're mostly grant funded. Increasingly, now we're getting funding from data management plans that people are writing into their grants, which is great. I think probably like 90% of what we published in open context now is coming from the funded grant projects. We now, open context now has over 100 data publications. And I'm going to go through some examples of what data publications look like and our approach to publishing data. And it includes over 1.5 million items. And again, I'll explain why there's so many. It has to do with the approach to sharing data that we take. And this includes a whole lot of images and media. And part of that is because actually when we first started, it was like the days of Flickr. And we first started out thinking, ooh, wouldn't it be great if we did this thing where it could be all like crowdsourced and people could tag things. And there could be a lot of images and everyone could share their stuff. And then we realized over time that people actually were more interested in having something that was more like a formal publication and not so much of this sort of loose data sharing, but actually something that looks more like something that you can actually share and maybe get counted towards your tenure and promotion and that kind of thing. And so I'm going to start out this talk by giving you some examples of the data publications. We have an open context and a lot of this is informed by my work as a zooarchaeologist. So if you go to open context, you'll see that there's a whole lot of zooarch data in it. Part of that is because zooarchaeology is a very sort of data heavy field and we collect lots of data that can actually have the potential to be integrated. And so it was a good sort of low hanging fruit to start with, but it's also because I had a lot of connections in that area if I'm having worked in zooarchaeology and so I'm going to talk about what we've learned about data publishing from zooarchaeology, but then I'm also going to move on to talk about some zooarchaeological studies that have informed our understanding of data reuse after the data is published. So just really briefly about open context, again, it's been developed iteratively over 10 years so we didn't build something that was static, but it's something that we're trying to improve as we get feedback from people over the years. We really focus on linking out so we try to link to other systems that are data sharing as well because we realize that we can't do everything so we're working on doing our part well and then linking across to other systems that are approaching data sharing in a different way so we can together start sharing data across the web. Everything, it's built in all open code, all the data is open so we are careful about making sure that people can actually share the data that they're sharing. We can't do everything so we are sort of picky about that, about what we publish to clear it with everyone that it's okay that it's open access. And we are back in, I think, 2011 and 2012, the NSF and then the NEH, the NSF Archeology and NEH Office of Digital Humanities. They both now list open context as one of the suggested places that people might go to to fulfill their grant data management requirement. We have actually, we archive with the California Digital Library here and then elsewhere across the world. We have mirroring at the German Archeological Institute and other places in order to keep the data safe. And over the past few years we've received a few awards in recognition of this work and so this stuff is really starting to be sort of recognized more as important in our field and so we got a digital curation award actually for a paper that we gave about some of this work and the AIA gave us their outstanding work and or outstanding contributions to Digital Archeology Award in 2016. And in 2013 actually the Obama White House, the good White House, recognized Eric Khanza for his work as a champion of change and open science and had him go out there and talk, which was pretty awesome. He didn't get to meet President Obama, unfortunately. So obviously, so open context is involved with data and data's a hot topic and it's a subject of lots of investment in the worlds of government, business and big science. And the economists even recently said that it's the most important resource in the world now. But today I'm gonna talk about how data fits rather awkwardly in our day to day practices in archeology. I'll give a few overview about why data is often hard for us to deal with and how with open context we're exploring ways to make data less awkward and more effective for archeology. And then I'm also gonna discuss my own work with our archeology and coping with how to effectively share specialist data. So I'm gonna discuss two main sides to this. The challenges associated with motivating good practices among data creators and then the related challenges in encouraging data to be reused. So we're all familiar with the phrase publish or perish. Academic researchers are obviously under a lot of pressure to publish in the right venues with the right kind of impact. And the kinds of publications that count for getting a job from a promotion for tenure are all very limited. Of course this leads to some perverse incentives in archeology. We're rewarded for certain kinds of publications but these kinds of publications typically present only a very tiny portion of the research documentation that we create. Since archeological research and especially excavation can be destructive we need to find ways to motivate our peers to be more comprehensive in sharing their research results. So motivating data sharing is an important issue for cultural heritage and stewardship. This isn't just a problem in archeology. Lots of other sciences have trouble motivating more comprehensive data sharing. In response to the Obama administration, in response the Obama administration began requiring grant seekers to provide data management plans as you all know. This was a good first step but it's not enough. Data management plans often don't get much attention perhaps increasingly so. And the publisher perish pressures continue so digital repositories tend to bend over backwards to make things easier for data creators even if that creates long-term difficulty for data re-users. So the goal of most digital repositories is to make it as easy and as painless as possible for researchers to deposit content. That way they can keep costs down and not frighten away researchers who have other publication pressures. But the problem is that's sort of a garbage in, garbage out kind of issue that if digital repositories only try to make things easier for depositors, re-users may suffer. And we worked with a study called Dipper led by our colleague Ishelle Faniel who is with OCLC which is a library research group and Elizabeth Yackel who's a dean at University of Michigan High School. And this study explored some of these issues and reusing data stored in digital repositories. And I'm gonna talk about that research a little later. So sorry for the vegetarians but not surprisingly metadata and data quality issues represent big challenges. A messy and poorly documented data set may require lots of work to fix, understand and clean up for reuse. So to meet some of the incentive challenges to not only share data but also to share understandable and clean data, we're exploring a model of data sharing as publication. We hope to encourage similar effort and rewards in the dissemination of data as in more conventional publication. We want researchers to invest effort in making good data and we want researchers to see recognition and rewards for that effort. So this shows our sort of elaborated open context data publishing workflow where we have added these areas of documentation, review and editing and annotation. And so we work with people's data sets to actually make sure that they are cleaned up and that they make sense and that they're sort of, they're annotated with things that can link them out to other data on the web to make them more useful for re-users. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about how open context differs from most digital repositories. So it extracts data from contributed data sets and uses those extracted data to add to a single common big database. So in contrast, most repositories store uploaded databases as individual files described by some metadata. So there are advantages and disadvantages to these two approaches. Open context approach is much more expensive and time consuming because we have lots, we have to put lots of effort into cleaning data, extracting data and fixing problems in the data so to be published online. In contrast, most repositories are more focused on metadata rather than on the content of the files. So in most repositories, in order to see what's inside a data set, you have to download the data set and open it up with the right software. However, because open context extracts data into a common big database, we do overall reduce some problems with complexity. Each contributed data set can be searched and queried through a common set of software tools and services. So you don't have to build a new system for each database. So I should also note that open context only has a common system of organizing data. It retains the data author's own system description so that each data set can have its own typology and descriptive information, et cetera. And so this is kind of initially more expensive because it puts a lot of work on the ingest, but in the end, it is cheaper because re-users aren't confused and not able to use a data set and they don't have to do all that kind of cleanup on the other end. So open context puts extracted data into a common database because so much relevant archeological information is often scattered across many different data files in a given project. So here's a coin from Domus Tepe, which is a mostly Neolithic site in Turkey, but which had a late Roman coin hoard on part of the site. And the data about this coin came from four different data files. There was a relational database that's stored the context information. There was a spreadsheet that stored the photo log. There was another relational database that stored thousands of small finds records that this was part of. And then there was another spreadsheet created by a numismatist with more specialized descriptions of the coin. So basically the complete record of this coin was scattered across many data files and open context publishing workflow brought all of this scattered information together into a more cohesive whole, which simplifies access and analysis. Rather than in a traditional archive, you'd have to go and download all four of those different things, find the coin across all those four different things, and piece it together that way. So it simplifies the research process in that way. So if you wanna read more about these sort of comparisons, there's this somewhat dated article, but from 2015, which is really clearly well written by Beth Sheehan that compares, in this case, TDR and open context, but it's sort of a more generalized, more traditional archive with the open context approach. So basically, as this data sharing is publishing set up, we have tried to make it like a publisher where we have editors, and then we have an editorial board of experts who can review the different data sets for consistency and quality and that kind of thing. So we do go through a peer view process that makes sure that the data sets are sound. And just a word on intellectual property. You typically use data in somewhat different ways than you use text that you read and one important use of data is to combine different data sets from different sources. But in order to do that, you need to have legal permissions. Furthermore, open licensing simplifies preservation of data. With copyright permissions granted by open licenses, we can and we do archive data with multiple repositories in the US and overseas. So all data publications and open context have open copyright licenses, which is usually the Creative Commons attribution license, which essentially gives explicit legal permission to use the data and media as long as you cite the creator. And we fully recognize that not all archeological content should be published this way. There can be ethical problems with open licenses, especially in context with histories of colonialism. So we explicitly ask that research is engaged in community archeology so they can understand how to ethically participate in open access and open licensing. So now I'm gonna move on to a few examples of publication types in open context. So other than adhering closely to our data publishing and intellectual property guidelines, we take a broad approach to what kinds of data we publish. So we realize you can't just build something and expect people to just follow that model. So we don't require full excavation data sets. We realize that people have different motivations in sharing their data. And we've really tried to work with the data creators to meet their needs. And so for that reason, we have a whole sort of wide diversity of data publications in open context. And I'm just gonna show you, this is sort of our different types that we can cluster them into. And these types are increasing actually, I'll mention at the end of the talk. So the standalone publication is where an individual or team wants to put their entire project on the web as a standalone data publication. Which basically they end up, they collect in the field, everything they collect in the field ends up in open context. And one example of this is the site where I work in Italy called Poggi Givitante Murlo. And they have, as you can see here, they've got all these different types of finds that they're over time putting into open context and linking together. This is from 52 years of excavation. So it includes old field notes and things that were just on paper that they've over the years scanned and entered digitally into their infield database and then are putting in open context. This is an example of a record of an ivory object from Poggi Givitante. And it's linked to images, mapping data, context data, authorship, et cetera. So open context provides that common infrastructure for publishing and linking all of these different sorts of content within the project. So on the bigger data side of things, we also have several projects that are multi-year efforts at integrating data across broad spatial or temporal ranges. And so just an example of this is the DINA project, which is the Digital Index of North American Archaeology. And this is an ongoing, really big project with, it's funded by the NSF and it's with colleagues at University of Tennessee Knoxville, Dave Anderson and Josh Wells who's at Indiana University South Bend. And we're basically working with the SHIPOs with the State Historic Preservation Offices to get the site file data from every state put into this common infrastructure so that you can search across state boundaries and you can do sort of this bigger picture research across the US rather than having to go state to state to state to find that information. The idea is that everything is, the site locations are all approximated on a grid for a 16 kilometer by 16 kilometer grid so there's no site locations released. They are linked through their Smithsonian trinomial number for site ID. And so the idea is that over time open context, it's published in open context and that acts as sort of a gazetteer where each site has like a peg and resources from across the web that refer to those sites can all be found based on being linked to that Smithsonian trinomial number. And so it's hoping to improve access to information about all these sites from across the web over time. So this is a very long term project. The dots in California are because we have a collaboration with the Hearst Museum where Hearst objects that have Smithsonian trinomials are plotted onto the map. And if you need to, you can find out that that's there but then you have to go to Hearst to see the object for now. So it's sort of an example of how we might link museum objects with this system. And this DINA data has actually already been used in some interesting research where they used, there was an exploration of sea level rise impacts on coastal archeological sites. And it got a lot of press because I think very few people realize just how many archeological sites there are in the U.S. And this is tens of thousands of sites that are threatened by rising sea levels over time. So then we have, increasingly we have people who are coming to us to help fulfill their grant data management plans. And this is one example of a PhD student at Harvard, Max Price, who had research on cementum analysis of peat teeth. And he just shared that data that was related to his PhD research. And so what's nice is you get your citation which has a DOI for the project. But then every single item in the project has its own citation too. So every single pig tooth, every single fragment has its own webpage that has a unique citation. So you can point specifically back to this item if you wanna talk about it in another publication. You don't have to say, go to this archive, open this bridge, you look for bone number, whatever. So it's a much more disambiguated way of doing research. Also it's nice is each project and open contest can have its own customized banner and look. So it kinda looks like your own webpage. So Max actually had a colleague, I think in Turkey who did these watercolors and he added those as his banner, which I thought was kinda nice. It adds a little bit of your own personal creativity to this site. That being quite so clinical. This is Lizzie Wright, who is based in the UK and she did a biometrical database of oryx and domestic cattle measurements for her PhD. And then what's fun is that you can search all of hers, but then you can also get all cattle measurements and wild cattle measurements from wherever else in open context there's actually data from. And ideally from elsewhere on the web too, eventually. We also support archival research. This is showing a bunch of drawings, excavation and conservation data about the Spanx. The monument is changing all the time. It has challenges with tourism and pollution. So this is a good way to help understand how the monument is changing over time. This is part of ongoing publishing work that we're doing with Mark Laner's group on publishing huge amounts of excavation data from the Giza Plateau. And the next data set is actually a Paleo Botany data set from excavation of one of the more domestic contexts at Giza by Claire Mallison. So then we also have people who wanna publish a data set that contains data that is related to a publication of theirs. So basically a smaller data set that they're linking to from a publication. And so this is an example of a publication that was in antiquity that put a link to the data set that was published in open context. And so readers can go back and they can look at the primary data set and then they can reproduce the claims made in the paper rather than just sharing like a summary data table. This is a larger volume that does a similar thing but it's more like an edited volume. So basically they have a print volume about archaeology of Mesoamerican animals and several of the chapters had data that they wanted to share. So in open context we set it up also like an edited volume. There's a main page and then there's sub pages for all the chapters that have their data sets that are related to chapters in the print volume. And then finally we have supplementing monographs. And so when there's just too much data to put in print this happened for the Petra Great Temple Excavations which just had a ton of images and data that couldn't make it into the printed monograph. And so what we did was we published all the data in open context and then the data creator, Martha Jukowski, she asked for links to certain things that she wanted to refer to in the publication. And so we gave her a huge list of all these links and she's now linked up her print publication to individual items like these nice drawings and stuff that couldn't necessarily make it all into the volume. So another category is emerging actually where people are wanting to make these sort of community created databases where they sort of set up a page and then ask people to contribute certain things so that they can build out their data with their community. So for example, we have this osteometric databases, South American Camelids. We have a new one now on Chinese Petrography which actually has instructions in English and Chinese and people can download a spreadsheet that has it in boths and then you enter your information and you submit it back in. So this is something that we're really interested to see how this pans out. It takes a lot longer because you're asking for lots and lots of people to share their data and it takes a long time for people to get their data organized. So for now they just wait and get promoted in this way and share things like downloadable spreadsheets for people to do data entry. Other ways that we've tried to address the need out there is by offering to do development when people need something special. So for instance, this project had images that they wanted to be zoomable because they have a really high resolution and they have details that you can't see just in one image. And so they actually came up with extra funding so that Eric could build in a zoomable feature and now that's there and all other projects can use it because it's part of OpenCondex now. We also responded to a need for 3D models and so another project is doing a sort of a test to see how we might link a print publication with the 3D models online. And they also came up with funding to build in this open source rendering for 3D which allows you to change the lighting and new measurements and everything right there in OpenCondex. You don't have to download anything special to be able to look at it. And that's nice to get again because other projects can use it now that it's built. So we're really trying to respond to the need out there and it makes it very diverse but also pretty dynamic. All right, so now I'm gonna move on to the Zork part. So far I've focused on the data creators and how we're trying to use a model of data sharing as publishing to encourage data creators to share more and better data. But for publishing them an impact, the data needs to see actual reuse by a wider community. So now I'm gonna look at the challenges we face in reusing archeological data and I'd like to focus on specialist data and describe issues in our current research practices and how to improve them so that data sharing and reuse can better contribute to our efforts to understand the archeological past. So I'm a Zarcheologist and I have lots of expertise in this area. I've worked not only in the Near East but also actually here at a project at Yerba Buena Island and in the east coast of the US and also in Europe. Comparatively speaking, Zarcheologists are often engaged in multi-site comparative research. And so we have a greater interest in sharing, reusing and integrating multiple data sets. And so to understand the intersection of data creation and reuse needs, we have undertaken several research projects over the past five years or so. And what I'm gonna talk about is gonna range from my own reflections on personal experiences as a specialist, as a data publisher and as a data reuser. And then I'll move on to talk more about a much more formalized study called the Secret Life of Data Project, which involves workplace ethnography and other qualitative research methods. So as I mentioned, as it turns out, Zarcheology is sort of the low-hanging fruit for collecting information about this topic. But Zarcheologists in particular and specialists in general create very useful data that benefits the entire project, but their data often gets siloized and is never fully integrated into the interpretation of the project. And this is for many reasons, often because specialists are operating, they're working at very different timelines than the actual excavation. We often use recording methodologies and strategies that are different from the project or from other specialists. And again, yeah, we usually, we often create really useful data, but it just never makes its way back to the project. So I'm currently working at the site of Morello, Poggi Cibitate, which is in Italy, just south of Siena. It's an amazing area, really a fun place to work. And it's been excavated for more than 50 years with three different directors, the first of which was an art historian. And so as you can understand this, you can imagine there's very different excavation strategies employed over the decades. And surprisingly, for an Etruscan site, they have like tens of thousands or even 100,000 bones that they recovered over this time. So it's actually an amazingly huge assemblage for this time period. And so when I came into the project eight years ago, they just had boxes and boxes and bags and bags of bones from all these years that and some were, you know, that big. I mean, 400 bones in one bag if from one context from 1972. And then now they're excavating and they're bringing these tiny little bags back per context, so you know, three bones and stuff like that. So it's obviously there's very different, there's a comparison issue here with the different contexts. And that's something I was trying to find ways of dealing with. Surprisingly, there are actually some really great research results coming out of this project. I work there every summer and I can only analyze in the field. So that's helping to be able to actually communicate with the project team about what's happening. And because I'm analyzing the old stuff and the new stuff, some stuff is coming to light from what they found before that's helping inform their excavation practices now. One of the issues is that we, from the old bones, we have found a whole bunch of newborn baby bones and they had no idea that this was something that was gonna be popping up. And so now they've sort of changed their excavation strategies to try to be a little more careful about excavating bones to try to get more understanding of where these baby bones are occurring. Because in the past, they were just taken out with all the rest of the bones. So the site is Etruscan. It's mostly from Orientalizing Period which is about seventh century BC and wasn't occupied for very long, like 100, 150 years. So we have basically remains from three different areas. The residents had a lot of remains that indicated that it was some kind of elite area. The tripartite building, we don't know what it was and so it's a ritual area. No, I don't know. It's not well understood and there's not a lot of material from there. The workshop is this huge workshop that has tons and tons of industrial waste and remains and so they were doing some kind of industrial activity there. And what I found is actually amazingly after even over 50 years of different types of excavation strategies, there are some differences across these different areas. And one is in the occurrence of wild animals. So we have some pretty cool wild animals coming up like wolf. There was even an oryx, a wild cow. There's lots and lots of wild boar, all sorts of other animals, in addition to the regular pigs, sheep and cattle that you get. And so anyway, but what we're seeing is that there are differences in the occurrence of these wild animals at the site where there's sort of more scary, sort of formidable animals are occurring in the residents and the smaller animals are occurring in the workshop, perhaps for pelts, I don't know. The ones in the residents, the wolf actually was the left and right mandibles that were together in a context. So they were obviously articulated and maybe were part of a skin. So there's some neat stuff going on there. I think even more remarkable is that early on I started noticing that there seemed to be a portion inside preference, especially among pigs that where there was a predominance of right-sided like forelimb bones, especially the ulna occurring in the residents, the more elite area and the left-sided predominance in the workshop. And this is something that I thought was pretty exciting because people without expertise digging all over those across those five decades would never be able to create this pattern. This is not like they, if you were just picking out large bones and that kind of thing, that would be a pattern that humans could create. But nobody would even know what a left or right ulna looked like unless they had training. And so this is an actually real pattern that's happening across the site. Excitingly, now that we can map it because there's enough data in open context. So this is the residents and this is the workshop. And we're looking now at the right ulna. So you can see that there are right ulnas in both areas. But when you look at the left, you see that there is almost all the lefts are occurring in the workshop area. And this is about 178 data records. So it's a pretty big sample. We also see some differences in rights and lefts with the wild animals occurring in these two areas. Same thing, with more lefts in the workshop and more rights in the residents. And so whether this is something, were they doing carcass distribution? Was there a market? Clearly there was some selection of the right side that was going into the residents area. For what reason, I can't say, but this wasn't just random distribution of carcasses across the site. They were halved and then one half was going one place and the other half was going the other place. So there was prior analysis on this assemblage. This is Mike McKinnon, who is a Canadians archeologist who's worked all over Italy and elsewhere. And he had come to Merlot early on, early on in my time, a few years before I did. And he had looked at just maybe 1,000 bones really quickly just to give him an idea of what they had. And so I thought it would be really nice to be able to incorporate his analysis into this because it's nicer to have two analysts, I think, are better than just one because we can provide some checks and balances to each other. So I contacted him and he was able to actually provide his data to me, which was in written little tables and he transcribed them for me or he digitized them and sent them. So here's just an example of our differences. This is one context. And we could see from comparing our identifications, I got the bones and I identified them as well. And so he was over identifying cattle and I was putting them more into large mammal. We both had dog, we both had tortoise, we both had bird. He had more pigs than I did and then he put sheep and goat into sheep goat and I actually split out my sheep. So these are not huge differences. What it showed is that we have an over-representation of cattle and pigs and I think one of the things that in an under-representation of deer and it's because Mike wasn't at the site for very long because I've been there eight years. I now understand that there's these really large red deer at the site, but it took time like looking at the assemblage to see this and I just clustered them into large mammal, whereas he put them in cattle. So it's just something about once you have more time and expertise with the collection, you start to see these kinds of differences. But for, we did a joint publication on it and it was really good for us to know these differences in particular like he was counting loose teeth. This is why he had more pigs than I did. He counted every single loose tooth as a separate specimen, whereas I put more time into trying to put jaws back together and there were lots of things that belong to the same jaw that clearly came from one animal. But again, it's just that the expedience that he was there for a short time and he just wanted to give them a little overview. So, but this is good to know when we're putting data together. More recently, we sort of formalized this with Hannah Lau who worked on the same assemblage that I did in Turkey. So for 15 years, I was involved in an excavation in Turkey called Domus Tepe, which is in southeastern Turkey. And it's a late Neolithic Halaf site. And I analyzed probably more than 10,000 bones from the site and then she came in, there were a lot more left. She wanted to do her PhD and so she analyzed another 10,000 bones. And I wanted her to be able to use my data so that she could have a larger assemblage to work with, but we had this issue again of inter-analyst variation and how do you actually combine data analyzed by two different people. And so she undertook a study where she found some bones that neither of us had analyzed from the site and she brought me down to LA and we both analyzed the same assemblage and then we compared our results. And in the end, we realized that we had about a 6% error rate where we actually identified things totally differently from each other. And then about a 20% rate of sort of basically the precision of our identification. So I would be more precise in saying, oh, this is a sheep and she would say it's a sheep or goat or she would say it's a medium sized mammal or something like that. So because of her, she had less experience with the zorarchaeology in general, I guess she was being a little more careful about that, which is fine. So this study highlighted the need to be explicit and transparent in our analysis. We ended up recommending that projects make time for small interanalyst studies like this as a way to identify interanalyst variation in their data. Researchers routinely calibrate their scientific instruments to gauge accuracy and measurement, but we largely don't do this in zorarchaeology as we typically don't calibrate our identifications of specimens. We also discussed issues of data documentation and we encouraged the writing of a paradata document to accompany a data set, which describes in detail the context, the analysis, the methods used, and any other information that will help a future user understand that data set better. And this adds more time to our work, but it's critically important for reuse. We kind of see it as like, what if the whole excavation team was abducted by aliens? What would be left? And how would we understand what they'd collected, the data they collected, and how they were doing their analysis because they're gone? I mean, some day we're all gonna be gone and our data will be left. And how will other people use our data?  So, I'm gonna skip through this study because I'm running out of time. It sort of said the same type of thing. Just to highlight that, we did a study where we produced a paradata document with some other colleagues, Levin, Atitsha, and Justin Leftow were using an old data set like an orphan data set that never ran out. As we produced a three-page document that explained stuff like, you can't read this at all. Anyway, that we basically took out certain bones because of this and that and that reason. We combined these two categories for this and this reason. So we basically justified our lumping and splitting decisions. And it took lots and lots of documentation. This is something you could never share in a regular publication. No one would ever know the choices you made. And so it makes your data not reusable. Furthermore, when we communicate our data, we usually do it in summary tables. And so no one can use that at all.  It's just to present the study being done. So if you could point back to the primary data set and describe how you got to these numbers, it would make for much more reproducible and transparent research. And that study was published, sorry, in the Journal of Archaeological Medicine and Theory that you can go see. And then we did a, we actually analyzed the data set, the old orphan data set and came up with some research results. So we also undertook a study, which I actually, I think we report on this in a talk we gave here at ARF a few years ago. That was a large scale data sharing and integration project that explored the origins of farming. And this was funded by the Encyclopedia of Life and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And we brought a bunch of zoologists working in Turkey together to try to integrate their data sets. And so that we could observe where the challenges were with data integration. And essentially, what happened is that we had some fields that were really easy to align and then fields that were really hard to align and the ones that were difficult to align were actually quite surprising. So things like measurements, tooth wear and fusion data are things that as a zoologist, you would think would be pretty standardized that people would collect similar information. But what happened was people, for instance, everyone used the Angola von Dendrisha's guide to measuring animal bones. That was just sort of the standard everyone had over time adopted for reporting measurements, but it was in the way that they modeled their data that it became really difficult. Everyone used Excel. Nobody used a database. So we all had our spreadsheets modeled differently. And so someone would have, you know, the element listed and then a whole bunch, all von Dendrisha's measurement possibilities as field headers. And then they plug in the measurements along the way that applied to that bone. Some people would put a field that said measurement one and then they'd list the name of the measurement and then next to that put the measurement. So those kinds of things are incredibly hard to link up across spreadsheets without like remodeling the entire spreadsheet. So in the end, we actually, even though this is like maybe the most standard that Zawark recording gets, that was something that hung us up in terms of our comparability of the assemblages. Tooth wear had a similar problem where everyone followed this recording strategy that's proposed by Sebastian Payne for Sheep and Goat Teeth. It's widely used, but again, the vast differences in how different people modeled and recorded that data made it just totally unmeshable. So in the same thing happened with fusion data where people use standard terms, but then they'd add on little notes and stuff that made it really difficult to tell without just glomming them all into like really broad categories. So basically this under the hood exposure helped us lead to better documentation practices that we realized that we saw each other's data and went, oh my gosh, our data can never be compared and maybe I should start doing something more like yours or people had no idea they'd never looked at each other's data sets and seen how other people had modeled their data. So this is really informative and I hope it will move us toward improving our collection practices. So finally, just to conclude, our current project now is called the Secret Life of Data Project and it is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and it's a three year project that is basically going out to four different excavation sites across the world and doing ethnographic and interviews and that kind of thing to try to collect information on how issues in the creation of data are impacting the reuse of data downstream. So it's a combination of interviews, field observations, re-user interviews of data re-users that aren't part of the projects and then analysis of the databases that these excavations are creating. And what we're trying to do is improve this area where data creation really does not overlap at all with data reuse and so there's a very small area where they have commonalities. So our observation and interviews on these projects indicated that there were no clear guidelines for how specialists should integrate their data sets with the project database. Specialist analysis often occurs over several years as I said and in off-site locations and those specialist studies and data sets are commonly siloed, bodies of inconsistently managed data and documentation. The siloing often divorces zoarchaeological data for instance from excavation context and impedes interpretation. So greater professionalism within project data management may include the project's expectations for sharing data within and outside of the project, a timeline for specialists to complete their analysis and plans for any data or conventional publications based on the data from the project. And from this study we're also recommending that projects discuss how to integrate specialist data with the primary excavation data set which includes conversations about how to give faunal specimens unique numbers so that makes sense within the broader project. For example, file formats to be used, detailed documentation about paradata such as sampling strategies and identification methods and data archiving and preservation plans. So that is we generally need to improve communications between specialists and other project participants so that specialist data contributions more meaningfully contribute to a broader understanding. So this work is continuing. We're just finishing our field observations like this fall and then we're finishing up a re-user interviews. And so we're continuing also to explore the importance of consistency and identify our management and this also comes from our work with open context where we get a lot of data sets that have no identifiers that are unique and so someone will give us a spreadsheet and they'll have a whole bunch of data in it but when you go to try to work with it and sort it you realize that there are overlapping specimens, there's just no identifiers that identify each individual item and this could lead to a lot of confusion in the future with data reuse. But our research is also showing that data management is not just a technical concern that it involves humans who are involved in all aspects of archeological data documentation and reuse. And so it's important to keep talking to people and not just focus simply on what technology solution is gonna work here. Oh and then finally, we have a cat and we go away for a month every summer and so a lot of people like to conclude with pictures of sunsets or animals. So this is spooky and he needs someone to live with him a month every summer and we live in North Berkeley so if any of you are interested in how sitting in June, July time, come talk to me. He's lovely, very fluffy. Thank you. Sorry. Two minutes. June. Hey man, wow. There's just so many things that hit on this that I would love to. We're gonna go for coffee. We'll go for coffee. But for the first question, which is the one you brought up really early about the incentivizing of this, right? Like trying to, you know, scumbags like me trying to get tenure, right? Trying to figure out where. Yeah. Get the house. But trying to figure out how this, like how's that working for folks publishing as, you know, like to put it in there. I would love to know this. So now that you have tenure and you are on those committees. Well no really, so it's on people who are on those committees. And also if the people who are going up for it have enough guts to ask for it, it's on the work outside of the space. So I, you know, this is not, I would like to encourage this but I realize it's very hard to change systems that are kind of set. But yeah, we have some colleagues who have said I really fought hard for my digital contributions to be acknowledged. And I got totally shot down. Or I fought really hard for it and they actually changed. So it takes sticking your neck out and trying. But that's terrifying, right? When you're going, when you're trying to get promoted. Which is why I think if the people who have been promoted and are now doing the review if they could start to think more about how are we going to value these things? And assess them. That would be amazing. So. See that's the kind of thing. We're doing the thing now where we're trying to figure out how does your community-based scholarship be legible? And what are the things you say when you're coming up? Those are documents that have been crafted by groups of scholars. So maybe there's. Yeah, so like Archaeological Institute of America is coming up with the recommendations for this. I think historical society, age, whatever, they came up with. There are definitely guidelines out there and it needs to be for the people bringing forth their work, but also for the people who are reviewing it, who maybe have no idea how to review this stuff. Because I wonder if that's part of it is that people look at it and go, I don't know how to review this. And so forget it. So if there are people who have tools to actually understand how to assess the quality of these contributions, that would help. So yeah, we need more guidance. We need more articles to have that stuff. Yeah. Well, as part of this last project, we hope to come out with some guidelines like that for different people at different stages to be able to assess digital contributions. But it seems like the best stepping with places like SAA and the AAAs and the AA is having recommendations for how you should deal with that alongside the NSF and the NEH having an necessity that you don't have to deal with that. I mean, that should be a stepping off point right there for faculty. So we're wondering that value. SAA should have a committee. Absolutely. And this gets fed into so we're all speaking the same language. So you don't have to require to need to have a grant. And having a grant is part of your tenure package then. Yeah. And also, it's a systematic way to do it. Well, and the people reviewing those grants also need tools for how to review those things. Like I think data management plans, as far as I understand it, and the ones I've seen as a reviewer, are all over the place. And how are you supposed to know how to assess those if you don't have any experience with it? And so it would be nice if there were examples of, I mean, they're going to be diverse, because every project is really diverse. But there've got to be some baselines that you're not going to, oh, data management is not putting it in my file cabinet. So there's, yeah. I'm wondering about, don't you guys presumably have metrics on how much visitation use your site is getting? And I'm wondering if the granular nature of the open context approach is it showing more use than, say, the grouping of other websites? Like just big files. Yeah. So one issue is that we don't track use metrics, because we don't want to keep people anonymous. They're use anonymous. So we are not following users like that. We go through, like, Gulu-Solar citations. So if you search for open context in Google Scholar, you can see how many places are actually citing things from the context. But we haven't looked at it in terms of individual items or whole projects yet. But that's a good idea to see if people are more interested in this granular citation rather than projects as a whole. Well, that's the kind of information that can be said to the new committees, and the committees, if you say that you know what's happening. Right. And I think maybe the digital data management interest group of the SAA probably needs to get it organized, take a request to the SAA board, for example. They're in the setting up. Yeah, it's a good idea. And task forces. All the time. I've never seen a document like that. A task force to assess the task force. Somebody has to set up a task force this week, and one next week, and one next week. So requesting a task force to start looking at it. Because I think where we are is at a transitional period. I was just talking to somebody on the phone this morning about an evaluation of somebody for a major dean ship, an archaeologist. Why would an archaeologist be a good person to have as a dean beside our multidisciplinary? And how do people who are generations actually, and even younger generations, be the ones that actually says the field is changing, the evaluation is changing, personal cases are changing. You've got to sort of get people in there for that, right? Yeah, definitely. I think it's a transitional place, and so we're still sort of one foot in the old, and some people are getting one foot in the new. I think so too, and I think there's a value to both the carrots and the sticks. So the stick of the NSF saying you have to have data management has made people wake up and go, oh, I have to think about my data. Which is why we've seen an uptake in the people coming to us with actual funding. Because it's finally starting to happen. That requirement came into place, and it took a few years. And now they're like, OK, I'm ready, and I've got $1,000 or whatever. But the carrot of having here your metrics is a great, that's a great incentive to why put your data up there. Because look at all these people that are using it. And yeah, and then you can report that. So we'll look into that. I think it's an interesting issue to bring up in a couple of weeks, when we have France-Corto, the head of NSF here, to talk about broader impacts. Because this is broader impacts. It's a broader impact. So their notion of having broader impacts and data management are not separate at all. So that's where you can fulfill both of those, if they're smarter than that.  It's out there, and it's being used. And it's great, but it's hard to measure, even then. Thank you for your presentation. I believe in New York is personally, some of the issues with that collection are actually in terms of these preferences, even people breaking the kind of the same data. And especially like your comment on the calibration techniques of data collection, for example. And I was wondering, do you think there's something more particular to the story, that you focus on many species? As for my, for example, in paracelotomy. I wonder if this is something that is particular or in paracelotomy, for example, to also focus on calibrating techniques, for example, in whether we have specific population in terms of biological sex, age, or other items in medical profile, and how the cooler the fields of archaeology go about that. I think it's easier for zoarchaeology because we have a taxonomy, and it's Latin names for a species, and everyone uses them. That's really easy. You don't have that in ceramics or other fields, lithics. But so it's really good to use archaeology as a start, to see how we might do this. But I think, for instance, if you work in someone's lab and you learn their technique of analyzing lithics, you've calibrated with them, right? Because you've trained with them. But those approaches aren't necessarily formalized. And so maybe they've published papers and stuff, but there's no sort of standard that they've published that people can turn to. Part of that is that people hate standards sometimes, and no one wants to adhere to someone else's. But if we start to share those more formally, I think we will start to converge on good approaches. But it takes opening up the hood and looking under and seeing all the mess, and that's really hard to share. It's hard to do that, to be worth your colleagues, and then seeing what emerges as best practices. Share your mess, open your underwear drawer. Sorry. I'm just curious of any examples of archaeological data published in your pop-up drawer. So we don't have any there right now, but we have two in the pipeline that aren't ready yet. So they will be coming. But it's a hard one. I mean, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but the way that you report your data is in these sort of more summaries type tables, right? I mean, that's how you have to do it, right? By bag or whatever. It's published in raw data, it's an appendix. Okay, but it's, what I mean is you're doing it by percentage, right, in a sample. So it's not individual item by individual item, so it's a little bit of a difference. Okay. Well, I think you mentioned- Never law. Right. Never law. You mentioned Clem, my son from Giza, and I think she's gonna enter the different species of plant type she has. Yes, I just cleaned her data, and it was very clean. And she did that. She entered the different species. We've linked them all now to a species list in the web, and hopefully people can start linking across projects now. I didn't get into that today, but the whole idea of linked open data is how we try to get data out of them in context, and to find related data across the web. So yeah, her stuff will be coming really soon. Like, it's ready to go, so. Yeah, because I would love to see examples before other people participate, so. You can email me if you want to, so I can let you know, and you can maybe look at it, give us feedback if you wanna have a look, because we always appreciate what people have to say about how the data looks, and how we can improve it. Thank you. Thank you. Did you have a question, or are you? A standard feedback. So yeah, only if they've given it to us, like for that Chinese Petrography database that's coming up now, we're just putting it online now. He provided a template for how people should submit their data. We would like people to share their ontologies of their naming systems, so that when you publish them in a place like open context, it makes them more formal, and so someone can say, I'm using so-and-so's ontology, here's what I mean when I say black top burnishware, or whatever, some kind of terminology, so it makes it more formal. But no, that's coming, that's sort of gonna happen as people submit their data. We have one project that is looking at, it's Kate Brunson, who's at Harvard, I think, she's looking at Chinese oracle bones, and she's also published her system for zoning the bones, so like a scapula would have all these different zones, and that way she can say exactly where the markings, the burnings and the drillings and stuff are happening on these oracle bones. And that's in Chinese and English, and so someone can talk about this marking on zone D, and it's this kind of marking, she's given an authoritative page that describes that zone and that type of marking, which is really cool, because it means she's helping sort of develop the standard that could be used by others. So that's the way that we're hoping that'll happen, but we don't have any library of those things yet, unfortunately. I'm thinking about that. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. And they're actively working with material culture analysis, but you're playing around it being very difficult for people to follow standards, and it's very difficult to have people come into that space. And we catalog. Right, and that's Dak's approach, right, is that you re-catalog. Yeah, so, but for instance, their approach, like we actually have some collaborative work going on with them, and we're hoping that we could like pull in their approach or whatever point to it as one of the resources that people could use. So yeah, but that's another approach of integrating content that is related across an area that you can kind of draw a line around. But it wouldn't work for all lithic specialists, say, across the world, because it's too diverse. Anyway, stop. Thanks for staying. Thanks. Thanks.