Digging Digitally: Creating a More Dynamic Archaeological Field Journal Archive

FAIN: HD-51378-11

Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI 48824-3407)
Jon Michael Frey (Project Director: March 2011 to August 2013)

The development and testing of a digital field journal for use in archaeological investigations with a particular focus on adapting existing software for use on portable electronic devices.

As the daily record of observations, the field journal always has been central to the archaeological process. Yet in recent decades, these important texts have been ignored in the rush to create digital artifact archives. This project, which builds upon software designed to manage the field books at the Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia, will correct this oversight by enabling a community of scholars to use scans of the hand written texts to link electronically the disparate forms of evidence that make up the archaeological record. Also, this project will determine the best equipment and practices to allow archaeologists to utilize a digital notebook archive in their research. The result will be an inexpensive, multi-platform, and open source system that can be adapted by other scholars to simplify and enhance research in any field of humanities research that depends upon hand written documents as a primary source of evidence.