A bug's life (part one) - Wide open data

1 - Data (and eyes) wide open ... If tomorrow archaeology must be public, and I mean social and sustainable, it must acquire today the tools to support openess and cooperation. Archaeologists must begin to speak a new language, with a new alphabet. The alphabet of this language must be open data, but the language, like every language, must also have a grammar, and a syntax.  Otherwise, the data could be as open and available as possible, but people will interact with it just like users. Or customers of an archaeology reduced to a huge app store. to be continued ... *The original titles of this post and of the following 4 was ‘crickets and ants’ and referred to a short tale from Aesop. It was originally written after the first Italian congress of public archaeology, held in Florence on 29 and 30 October, 2012. These days were intense both for the number of speakers and posters and for the intense livetweet (hashtag: # pubarch). The English version is thus a little different from original, as some time has passed since the congress. During the congress I did not make any notes (the track of these days, in Italian, is carefully reported in the blog ‘generazione di archeologi’). I wrote down some reflections about the congress, as there were the first signs of a major mental shift in italian archaeology which one hopes will change things.  Public Archaeology is a long tradition in Northern Europe and America. Maybe we have the chance to do it in Italy.