How We Made This and What It Is

Research

We talked to archaeologist Amber Arnold and consulted websites and videos. Our main sources included PBS News, COST, and Internet Archaeologist.

Problem

From our research and discussions with Amber, we identified two main issues:

1. Old storage media are deteriorating, putting important archaeological data at risk.
2. Data on these media can’t easily be shared or searched.

Would you rather search through piles of notebooks or just type in a search box?

Some numbers

• Over the last two centuries, it is estimated that more than half of archaeological records have been lost.
• Currently, there are over 5 petabytes of archaeological records not in a database — that’s over 40,000 average smartphones worth of data.
• Most records exist on paper, hard drives, and floppy disks.
• Floppy disks hold only 1.44 MB, less than an average photo.
• Floppy disks and hard drives last only 10–20 years under ideal conditions.

Solution

The key part of our solution is rescuing data from decaying drives and moving it to the cloud, which is a safe, maintained home for important information.

Things to watch out for:

• Ethical and legal constraints
• CARE principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics)
• PII (Personally Identifying Information)

Plan

Here’s our flowchart outlining how we move data from old media to the cloud:

(Flowchart image or diagram can go here later)

Prototype

We have a full page about the prototype: Prototype