data-archaeology.md

About

This file collects information on data archaeology, data rescue and related matters.

Definitions

• According to Wikipedia, "Data archaeology refers to the art and science of recovering computer data encoded and/or encrypted in now obsolete media or formats. Data archaeology can also refer to recovering information from damaged electronic formats after natural or man made disasters.".

Here, I will be using the term in a broader sense of recovering data from natural or historic records of past events, e.g. through Astronomical chronology or forensic astronomy.

Examples

• Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs — combines hints from the Bible with solar eclipse calculations and text from an Egyptian stele
• Measurement of the Earth's rotation: 720 BC to AD 2015
  • reuses astronomical data recorded on Babylonian clay tables
• Bronze age chronology calibrated by volcano eruption
• 1970s and ‘Patient 0’ HIV-1 genomes illuminate early HIV/AIDS history in North America
  • reused blood samples to sequence patient genomes to analyze the spread of HIV
  • similar story on Spanish flu, by overlapping investigators
• Human Sera Collected between 1979 and 2010 Possess Blocking-Antibody Titers to Pandemic GII.4 Noroviruses Isolated over Three Decades
• The meteorological data gathered by Billy Barr
• Wikipedia's oldest articles
• Old Weather
• Digital technology helps decipher hidden passages on two pages masked with brown paper
• NASA confirms amateur astronomer has discovered a lost satellite
  • NASA version
  • Longer story
  • another case where citizen astronomers take temporary control over an abandoned NASA satellite
• "century-old glass astronomy plates had revealed a new problem: Some of the more obscure greenhouse gases — especially chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a class of man-made substances used in refrigerators and spray cans — had proliferated wildly in recent years"
  • a very detailed and inspiring essay on climate change, where this bit on astronomy plates is just a tiny side note
• Reanalyzing environmental lidar data for archaeology: Mesoamerican applications and implications
  • see also LiDAR and the Archaeology Revolution
• Nova observed 48 BC by Chinese astronomers

  • "We present the discovery of an emission nebula in the Galactic globular cluster M 22 (NGC 6656) in observations made with the integral-field spectrograph MUSE. We extract the spectrum of the nebula and use the radial velocity determined from the emission lines to confirm that the nebula is part of NGC 6656. Emission-line ratios are used to determine the electron temperature and density. It is estimated to have a mass of 1 to 17×10−5 solar masses. This mass and the emission-line ratios indicate that the nebula is a nova remnant. Its position coincides with the reported location of a 'guest star', an ancient Chinese term for transients, observed in May 48 BCE. With this discovery, this nova may be one of the oldest confirmed extrasolar events recorded in human history."

    • several other supernovae have also been documented centuries ago, with the Supernova of 1054 being a prominent example
• Astronomers say Monet's 'Sunset' masterpiece was painted at 4:53PM on February 5th, 1883
• The Eldgjá eruption: timing, long-range impacts and influence on the Christianisation of Iceland
  • uses ice cores, tree rings and medieval scripts, among other sources
  • some background
• Prehistoric solar radiation anomalies: Tree rings reveal globally coherent signature of cosmogenic radiocarbon events in 774 and 993 CE

  • "Here we measure the 14C content in 484 individual tree rings formed in the periods 770–780 and 990–1000 CE. Distinct 14C excursions starting in the boreal summer of 774 and the boreal spring of 993 ensure the precise dating of 44 tree-ring records from five continents. We also identify a meridional decline of 11-year mean atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations across both hemispheres. Corroborated by historical eye-witness accounts of red auroras, our results suggest a global exposure to strong solar proton radiation."

• Deciphering scripts in ancient languages using deep learning
  • news piece
  • background on the conference
  • code

Missing pieces

• Lots of paper documents of the Secret Service of Eastern Germany have been physically shredded to pieces around the time that the Berlin Wall came down and virtually reassambled afterwards. There are multiple resources on this online but I have not gone through them systematically yet.
• I remember from the time of my PhD (2004-ish) a story that some physically broken phonograph records were read by way of scanning them with laser technology and then reassembling them virtually. As far as I can tell, these are different from laser turntables. Don't have further details at hand, though.
  • It seems that such a system is in operation at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, as mentioned by Kevin Kielbasa in a meeting between the UVA School of Data Science and the Museum of Art on 6 March 2020

See also

• Lots of examples in the AGU 2017 Fall session Dark Data Revived! Data Rescue: New Discoveries with Old Data
• Map geolocation in the British Library's Mechanical Curator collection
  • overview
    • example map
• Cuneiform tablets from Bassetki reveal location of ancient royal city of Mardaman
• XARXES: connecting the lives of our ancestors by mining and semantically annotating hand-written historic documents
• Heatwave unveils ancient settlements in Wales
  • if it does so this time, maybe earlier heatwaves did so as well — question is where to find suitable data
• Death by skiing accident resolved after 64 years through social networks and DNA analysis (Background, Wikidata)
• At SciDataCon 2018, I was told that some museum in Knysna had a painting from the 1800s (or so) depicting a coelacanth
• Rich thread about Kristallnacht documentation
• Verlorenes Wissen (1/2) - mit Harald Lesch: Sonnenpillen und der Superbeton der Antike
  • about innovations from the past that got lost in history
• America’s archaeology data keeps disappearing – even though the law says the government is supposed to preserve it
  • background
• Beringian paleoecology inferred from permafrost-preserved fungal DNA
• Wikipedia's History of discoveries
• Some witchy history and a very smart woman in data science — seen via https://twitter.com/ammienoot/status/1176248290754605057
• 2,000-year-old Herculaneum Scrolls from Institut de France studied at Diamond Light Source
• Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case of Phineas Gage
  • e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mapping-Connectivity-Damage-in-the-Case-of-Phineas-Gage-pone.0037454.s007.ogv
• Finding Extinction Where You Least Expect It – In the Special Collections Library