About

BiDiAr – Bibliography of Digital Archaeology is an open-access bibliographic database of the literature on digital methods and tools in archaeology. It collects and organises the references of the field and adds structured metadata to them. It also links them through their citation network, so readers can follow how digital archaeology took shape over time: which works became foundational, who cited whom, and how topics and research communities changed.

A citation-based bibliography

BiDiAr is built from the reference lists of scholarly publications. Every source article is linked to the works it cites. Every cited work becomes a structured, deduplicated record, with its authors and editors disambiguated and, where possible, completed with full names and ORCID iDs. A work cited by several sources is always a single record. This means the bibliography grows as one connected network, not as a set of separate lists.

The founding source is Archeologia e Calcolatori (AeC). This peer-reviewed, open access journal was established in 1990 by Mauro Cristofani and Riccardo Francovich and is published by CNR-ISPC with All'Insegna del Giglio. For more than thirty-five years AeC has been an international observatory on computing applied to archaeology. Its reference lists, volume after volume, record what the community read, discussed and built upon. The current release covers the whole journal (vol. 1–37, 1990–2026): over 20,000 works, 21,000 persons and organisations, and 25,000 citation links. The AeC Supplements and Groma. Documenting Archaeology will be added next, using the same identifiers and conventions.

Metadata schema

Records follow the BiDiAr resource template for Omeka S, which combines three standard vocabularies: Dublin Core Terms, BIBO and FOAF. Works and persons have stable internal identifiers (W…, P…) that are never reused or renumbered. Authors and editors are kept in a single table of persons, and their role is given by the property of the work (dcterms:creator, bibo:editor). Citations are recorded in one direction only (bibo:cites), and the platform derives cited by from them. Each work also comes as a formatted bibliographic citation (dcterms:bibliographicCitation).

How the data are built

The sources are processed issue by issue, in chronological order. First, the reference lists are extracted from the articles. Next, an LLM-assisted workflow turns them into structured metadata. Each new record is then checked against the whole dataset to find duplicates. Uncertain matches are never merged automatically: a person reviews the ambiguous cases, and documented rules settle the clear ones.

Open data

The whole dataset is openly available and released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0:

Context

BiDiAr is published with Omeka S in CHLOE – Cultural Heritage Linked Open data Environment and is integrated into the DHeLO infrastructure. It was developed at CNR-ISPC (Institute of Heritage Science) within H2IOSC (Humanities and Cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud). This PNRR project federates the Italian nodes of the European research infrastructures CLARIN, DARIAH, E-RIHS and OPERAS.

Team

  • ORCID iD Alessandra Caravale (CNR-ISPC) – supervision and review
  • ORCID iD Antonio D'Eredità (CNR-ISPC) – data entry; Zotero library management
  • ORCID iD Giacomo Mancuso (CNR-ISPC) – system design; metadata schema definition; site management; data stewardship
  • ORCID iD Paola Moscati (CNR-ISPC) – supervision and review
  • ORCID iD Nicolò Paraciani (CNR-ISPC) – technical infrastructure management

How to cite

Caravale, A., D'Eredità, A. Mancuso G., Moscati, P., Paraciani, N. (2026). BiDiAr – Bibliography of Digital Archaeology. [Interactive Resource] https://bidiar.cnr.it 

 

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