Education: Doctorate, Anthropology / Archaeology
Eric Kansa
I am lead developer of Open Context (www.opencontext.org), a system to publish primary field data from archaeology and related disciplines. Open Context provides comprehensive, open, and free access to field project and museum collection data pooled from many contributors. Open Context uses a folksonomy / community tagging system to enable users to establish meaningful links between items from multiple datasets even if they use very different recording and terminological systems.
Eric C. Kansa is cofounder and Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute and chief developer of "Open Context" (www.opencontext.org/database/browse.php), an online system for sharing primary field data for archaeology and other environmental and social sciences. This follows a position on the faculty of Harvard University, where he served as Lecturer and Undergraduate Tutor for the Department of Anthropology. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a BA in Cultural Anthropology and continued his education at Harvard University beginning in 1995. There, he earned his doctorate in 2001 and has focused his archaeological research on the interactions between ancient states and neighboring societies. His current efforts focus on open dissemination strategies, information architectures for the social sciences, and intellectual property frameworks for online scholarship. These efforts work towards enhancing the research value and creative potential of world cultural heritage. I am currently the volunteer head of the Society for American Archaeology's Digital Data Interest Group.
