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Paleoinformatics Vision

 

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The maxim, “know thyself” was imprinted on the doorpost of the Delphic Oracle, and continues to echo across the millennia. Studies of our past teach us how we came to be the way we are today, which is an important key to understanding ourselves and our future. Because much of the record of past human existence resides only in the material remains left by our ancestors, the discovery and analysis of this record presents extraordinary challenges -- but with these challenges come great opportunities. The discovery, recovery, analysis and interpretation of these materials require the integrated application of methods and theories from a wide range of disciplines to address key hypotheses about how we first became human, the origins of complex societies and similar fundamental questions. This situation both demands and provides an unparalleled setting for interdisciplinary research as well as a perfect training ground for graduate students in a wide range of areas including geomatics, computer science, paleoenvironmental studies, paleoanthropology, archaeology and classical architecture. In addition to their focus on understanding the past, a second integrating element in all these disciplines is that their measurement systems and data are increasingly computationally based. We believe it is clear that only sustained interdisciplinary graduate training can provide the next generation of scholars and researchers with mastery of the broad range of computationally-based approaches and tools that can be used to continue to expand our knowledge of the past. To this end we are developing a new curriculum in paleoinformatics.

Paleoinformatics is defined as the application of integrated information technologies in a comprehensive, multi-scalar approach to field data acquisition, processing, analysis, dissemination and archiving of information about the human and pre-human past. T

he situation is very much like that described for biological sciences in general in the recent National Academy study Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology (Wooley and Lin 2005).That report persuasively argues for a national initiative at the interface of computing (very broadly defined) and biology. In a similar “call to arms,” Snow et al (2006) argue for a cyber-infrastructure to deal with the massive, heterogeneous and dispersed digital data about the past. The last decades have seen massive growth in the application of new computational, digital measurement and analysis approaches that would be applicable to research on and understanding of the human and pre-human past (Zollikofer 2003, Huggett and Ross 2004) but they have not, as yet, had an equivalent impact on US graduate education. Paleoinformatics is defined here as covering the full range of current and emerging digital methodologies and the theoretical perspectives they support. Our use of the term parallels the “big tent” definition of bioinformatics viz “the term bioinformatics is used to encompass almost all computer applications in biological sciences” (Attwood and Parry-Smith 1999) and the approached used by the National Academy of Sciences which states “For simplicity this report uses ‘computing’ to refer to the broad domain encompassed collectively by such terms as computing, computation, modeling and simulation, computer science, computer engineering, informatics, information technology, scientific computing, and computational science” (Wooley and Lin 2005:1). Domain areas of paleoinformatics include paleo/bio-anthropology, archaeology, heritage management and classics as they are integrated with key elements of computer science and geoscience.