Characterful Data
Anwen Cooper, Victoria Donnelly, Chris Green, Letty ten Harkel
Abstract
Our project was a ‘Big Data’ project in that it used all available digital sources on English archaeology. This chapter introduces our data and the notion that data are characterful, which is to say that they are shaped and influenced by the ways they are created, curated, and used. We outline our approach to making data compatible, and some of the influences on how evidence is preserved and then discovered and recovered. We aimed to experiment with the data, rather than provide any final or definitive interpretation of them. Sources of information on this scale are susceptible to many interpretations and approaches. However, we also hope to have brought out crucial aspects of the archaeological evidence from England and followed many of the main topic areas currently of interest. We end with an evaluation of our working practices and some influences on our results.