6 ppl attended
Announcements:
- The dates and topics for the Digital Classicists Seminars are out (online talks): https://digital-classicist.bbaw.de/
- We have blog posts now on our website
- Zack Batiste will enable automatic posting of a blog post to our Mastodon
CAA2027
- CAA extended the deadline for papers and workshops to October 16th
- The next CAA conference will take place in Santiago, Chile in May 2027: https://2027.caaconference.org
- None of the participants to this meeting will join. It is too expensive for our departments.
- Some of us are instead going to Kiel Conference 2027.
SIG SSLA Maintainathon 2027
- the latest blog post about the Maintainathon 2027 is live: https://sslarch.github.io/blog/gearing-up-for-2027-maintainathon/
- we need to reach out to our networks to expand the number of people who will join
- we also need to work on the website to tease apart different parts but also give credit where credit is due (for contributors)
- A new idea could be to offer a small mentorship program, implemented as a list of people who would be open to help other users during the week
- Zack Batiste will organise a separate meeting to work together on the preparation for the Maintainathon
Discussion about the direction of open science for qualitative methods
Intro: Sophie Schmidt followed a talk at German Archaeological Theory Meeting about some of the adverse effects of open science for our discipline
- Point raised: the open science movement has been pushed by stakeholders that pursue an own agenda. E.g. political and military actors have an interest in open science because they can get access to data for free without spending money on collection or without raising red flags
- This raises an ethical issue, which is: while nobody objects to the importance of transparency in terms of data/software publication, given that there is a dark side to it, where are the limits (if any) of open science?
- Secondly, it also puts a pressure onto the system because with open science favored, certain methods of research (qualitative especially) tend to lose importance.
It is a good thing that reproducible work is supported, no doubt about that. But will there be space for qualitative, less reproducible approaches?
There is to be said that much archaeological data is by its own nature not reproducible (excavations can’t be re-excavated). We work with single data points that, while they can be categorized, offer little reproducibility.
- A point raised during the conversation: beyond the possibility to reproduce statistical results, reproducibility can look different: consistency of findings and new results that support known evidence are being privileged to single studies that provide inconsistent conclusions, printed catalogues are a way of data sharing for typologies, … .
Some concerns can be raised: in situations where institutions cannot be trusted (for example nation states), and their relationships with the attribution of funding is fuzzy (nation states have a hand in deciding where the money goes), is the value of open science worth the risks of seeing science directed unwillingly?
Where are the limits between Quantitative VS Qualitative, Subjective VS Objective, etc? There is an important aspect to be considered which is: who is controlling narratives?
- Here the discussion goes much broader than open science. It has to do with power relationships, and the trust that everybody is going to “play the game” in the same way.
To the point of fully open science: at what level are we held accountable for open science practices? How much data needs to be published under the principles of open science? E.g. should we publish excavation notebooks? Should we publish everything that we ever produced as scientists, including documents that may contain opinions, hot takes, known errors, etc?
- point made: even in open science, we are not publishing sensitive information (detailed site locations, Indigenous information, etc.) and an overload of un-structured information may not be helpful to other scientists.
Interesting relevant books:
- Data Feminism: https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/
- Algorithms of Resistance: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5721/Algorithms-of-ResistanceThe-Everyday-Fight-against
Related: Event on data commons and in particular diversity of data commons https://ethicaldatainitiative.org/2026/08/11/bringing-ethics-to-the-global-research-commons-the-edi-stakeholder-forum-at-the-rda-p27/
- Agenda for their next forum meeting: https://ethicaldatainitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Agenda_EDI-Stakeholder-Forum_RDA-P27-Pre-event_05-10-26_FINAL-1-1.pdf
