The GNewArchaeology workshop is part of a cultural project promoted and organized by the students from the University of Ferrara – Department of Biologia ed Evoluzione and funded by the Cultural Fund of the University of Ferrara, Italy.
The name GNewArchaeology is a word-pun based upon two ideas, the New Archaeology of L.R.Binford and the free GNU/Linux OS in order to bring up the innovative nature of one and the infinite potential offer to the archaeological research of the other.
The union between archaeological research and informatics technology had a relatively recent story. One of the first conference Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology took place in 1973, while the first issue of the journalArcheologia e Calcolatori was published in 1990, which recently merge as theArchaeological Computing Newsletter supplements, active since 1985.
If at the beginning the interest was principally turned to the quantitative analysis, nowadays the research field ranges from the statistic to the spatial analysis, from the 3D reconstruction to the predictive model and so on… Such a richness of data requires inevitably adapted tools for the storing and the analysis.
The workshop is on the track of projects and communities that are becoming more and more numerous. International initiative such as the Science Commons, invite the whole research world to reflect on the importance of this thematic. For Italy, in the archaeological area, we must quote the annual congress ArcheoFOSS, which has reached its 6th edition, the IOSA project and ArcheOS, GNU/Linux distribution, developed by Arc-Team, explicitly dedicated to the archaeological research.
The goal of the workshop is to create, with presentations, tutorials and round tables, opportunities for meeting and debates about topics regarding the use and dissemination of free and open source software aimed at the public institutions and particularly at archaeological research processes.
Mornings will be devoted to introductive sessions to free software culture, with some explanations about the bases of the software. The software required to attend the tutorials will be communicate with the publication of the schedule. For whom who will find difficulty for the installation, an assistance will be offer during a special session of the workshop.
Relations, debates, screenings of documentaries and distributions of informative materials will be organized in collaboration with local Linux User Group
Afternoons will focus on more technical approach with talks, round-table discussions and tutorials about topics regarding FLOSS aimed at archaeological research processes.
The objective is to bring the discussion beyond the limit of single faculty and structures of the University of Ferrara, for a real exercise of multidisciplinary and common knowledge.
October 13th – 14th, 2011
Department of Biologia ed Evoluzione of the University of Ferrara:
Palazzo di Bagno – Corso Ercole I d’Este, 32 – Ferrara – Italy
