This article surveys the issues of integrity of digital information in the networked environment. The emphasis is on the content of specific digital objects as they are transferred and transformed and on the meanings of integrity in these contexts, rather than on broader questions related to the migration of a system of literature into electronic formats. The current state of the art in techniques used to maintain information integrity such as document digest algorithms and cryptographic signatures is also briefly surveyed.More and more information is being created, stored, and delivered in digital formats, particularly through the medium of computer communications networks. As this information becomes an increasingly critical part of the flow of scholarly communications and of the historical and cultural record of our society, there is a resurgence of interest and concern about the integrity of electronic information. Some concerns are about relatively technical or system-oriented questions about the accuracy, permanence, and authenticity of digital copies. Other concerns are more abstract and somewhat more subjective issues: About the extent to which digital information resources related to existing printed information can actually serve as a faithful substitute for this print literature, and the extent to which developing corpora of digital information may distort perceptions about the nature of the print literature base from which they have developed.A key characteristic of this second group of concerns is that many of them relate to the relationship between the older system of print publication and the new digital information environment, and to the transition of materials from one to the other. At the outer limits of current concerns about integrity one also finds a renewed emphasis on what are ultimately philosophical and cultural questions about the role of information as "evidence" of events, and the relationships between technology, information, reality, and history. nologies for capturing, storing, and delivering information over the past two centuries has continued to illuminate and to frame new questions in these fundamental areas, and this is certainly the case with today's digital technologies.This article surveys a specific subset of these issues that revolve around the integrity of individual digital objects (without regard to their broader context as a part of a system of literature and organizational tools for that literature); it also discusses various tools and techniques being proposed to address such integrity issues. While space limits require that I attempt to isolate integrity questions from their broader context, that broader context properly includes the complementary issue of access to digital information, and thus interacts in intricate ways with questions such as intellectual property law and public policy for digital information and the roles of libraries and publishers in society. While most appropriate in dealing with integrity questions at the lowest, most mechanical rather than...
Archaeological data and research results are essential to addressing such fundamental questions as the origins of human culture; the origin, waxing, and waning of civilizations and cities; the response of societies to long-term climate changes; and the systemic relationships implicated in human-induced changes in the environment. However, we lack the capacity for acquiring, managing, analyzing, and synthesizing the data sets needed to address important questions such as these. We propose investments in computational infrastructure that would transform archaeology’s ability to advance research on the field’s most compelling questions with an evidential base and inferential rigor that have heretofore been impossible. At the same time, new infrastructure would make archaeological data accessible to researchers in other disciplines. We offer recommendations regarding data management and availability, cyberinfrastructure tool building, and social and cultural changes in the discipline. We propose funding synthetic case studies that would demonstrate archaeology’s ability to contribute to transdisciplinary research on long-term social dynamics and serve as a context for developing computational tools and analytical workflows that will be necessary to attack these questions. The case studies would explore how emerging research in computer science could empower this research and would simultaneously provide productive challenges for computer science research.
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