Sharing Data is Hard!—But Worth It

I developed one of those finish-the-sentence chants to teach my young son to share with other kids. “Sharing is . . . ,” I say, raising my voice to prompt him, and he shouts “. . . good!” Of course, we all know that sharing is . . . hard! But willingly or not, sharing is the new ethic for a new century, one that archaeologists, regardless of age, must adapt to for so many reasons described in Kansa and Whitcher Kansa’s article. It is like preschool all over again for archaeologists, and our authors are those patient teachers urging us to share with each other. This time it is our most precious toys we must lend: our data.

But if data publication is to have a promising future, then advocates like Kansa and Whitcher Kansa must reflect deeply on the cultures of academic sharing. Sharing is cultural, after all, and like all culture, it is mostly learned, and hardly innate. The willingness to distribute the materials that make up the backstage of final publications—the gray literature, the spreadsheets, the images, the really-good-but-rejected grant application—is a habit that emerges through specific disciplinary formations, practices that are learned from mentors and peers early in one’s career.

So I believe our authors are still trying to decipher archaeology’s far from homogeneous attitudes toward sharing. Case in point is the way they mistakenly typecast their audience as academics pressured to manufacture only traditional print-run publications in the highest ranked journals. Scholars supposedly have no time for projects like data sharing that bring little credit from university promotion committees. This is partly true, of course. But this type-cast scholar, a highly rational hamster, wheel-peddling her way to tenure, is somewhat of a straw man. Academics—like this author, who is writing an un-refereed response in the first issue of a fledgling journal—make contributions to knowledge that are rarely acknowledged in their promotion cases.

In order to get at the crux of this issue, one should not ask why archaeologists don’t share, but rather, why (and when) do they share? Any pretense of altruism should be discarded immediately; studies on sharing, cooperation, and collaboration demonstrate that when people give, they implicitly expect reciprocity, maybe not from the immediate receiver, but from some other source at a later time. Data is therefore a type of capital (sensu Bourdieu) that is displayed and exchanged in ways that boost the reputation of scholars and their projects. If one has BIG data sets, their display leaves admirers awe-struck and competitors envious. Or the discovery of a singularized datum that is reported in the media—an inscription or a monumental sculpture—boosts a scholar’s reputation in the public eye. Archaeologists obviously surrender their capital when it is strategically beneficial for them or their projects. But the calculated timing of such events is potentially revealing for data-sharing advocates. More research is needed to identify the co-occurring circumstances and pressures that give rise to these moments of sharing.

A few of my early mentors warned me not to share data before “final” publication. I remember us scrambling when a supposed adversary was visiting. Lock the door, hide the keys, deflect questions. I was told that if we hid the materials until the last possible minute, we could then retain control over its interpretation. That data is still not published (the adversary’s is). But now I do share, for so many reasons, beyond the fact that it earns me capital. I believe the authors are correct that sharing data in open-access platforms is a public good, especially for those working at public institutions or with public funding. I also share for practical reasons: my office in Berkeley sits above the Hayward Fault and when the Big One happens, all of my notes, books, and data may be buried under nine floors of office debris. It helps me sleep easier at night knowing that not all will be lost. But I also share—and this is where the authors need to take note—because I want to prove to the world that I can dig up something old, label, photograph, and draw it, and then share it with the world very fast, proving that I am, indeed, an archaeologist, perhaps even a competent one. I can’t be the only researcher out there with this anxiety to prove myself worthy, an anxiety that data-sharing gurus help to alleviate.

A final thought for our authors that returns to my earlier comment on data as capital: data-sharing needs to be cool, it has to be hip, it must be sexy. Data sharing needs to be so cool, in fact, that we can overhear somebody at conferences yelling, “What? I can’t download the data for your paper?” Facebook and other social media websites have taught us that people share their information because they wish to feel like they belong to exclusive communities, real or imagined, physical or digital, of like-minded people. Rebranding data sharing as a practice in which only the highest caliber, most cutting-edge scholars are participating will attract a new generation of contributors. One may counter-argue with good reason that these changes would sacrifice the techy look needed to build trust with agencies like the NSF and NEH. But once a site has a good platform built (which many of them do), a professional reputation, and standard protocols, our authors need to consider the perennial need of contributors to feel like they belong to the coolest club in archaeology.