Meet Our Team
Open Context is maintained and administered by the Alexandria Archive Institute, a not-for-profit organization. Our team includes information scientists, field researchers, librarians, and other academic professionals with domain expertise who work together on the following data publishing activities:
- Edit, review, and publish open access digital content, in collaboration with data authors.
- Optionally, organize peer-review of data.
- Preserve data with digital repositories, including Zenodo and the California Digital Library (Merritt system).
Editors in Chief
Sarah Whitcher Kansa
Sarah is the Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute, a California non-profit organization that develops Open Context. She has a Ph.D. in archaeology (University of Edinburgh) and has spent three decades conducting zooarchaeological research at sites in the Middle East and Europe. She was President of the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) from 2018-2023. She is Co-chair of the Publications Committee for the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) and serves on the Digital Technology Committee for the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). She participates on several grant-funded projects, most recently as a co-director for Advancing FAIR+CARE Practices in Cultural Heritage, which is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
For Open Context, Sarah provides overall project management for publications, works on data editing and review, manages collaborations with other publishers, and organizes peer-review of data publications.
Contact Sarah by email with questions about data publishing.
Eric Kansa
Eric is the Program Director for Open Context. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology, and archeological field experience in the Near East, Egypt, Italy and North America. His research interests explore research data informatics, research data policy, ethics, and professional context of the digital humanities.
Eric runs research and development for Open Context and manages the technical aspects of data publishing and archiving, including systems interoperability, data integration, and indexing. (Reach out to Eric!)
Editorial Board
- Kevin Garstki, Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
- Sebastian Heath, American Numismatic Society and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University
- Lori Jahnke, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University
- Morag Kersel, DePaul University
- Adam T. Rabinowitz, University of Texas, Austin
- Yorke Rowan, University of Chicago
- Alexia Smith, University of Connecticut
- Joshua Wells, Indiana University, South Bend
- Stephen Yerka, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Tribal Historic Preservation Office
Software and Design Team
- Eric C. Kansa, Project Director
- Phoebe France, Design Lead
- John Ward, Consulting Developer, enterprise search
- Raymond Yee, Consulting Developer, Python, Django, cloud deployment
Open Context Alumni
- Francis Deblauwe, Assistant Editor
- Jeremy Whitaker, Technology Consultant, New Product Development
- Sarah van Wart, Schema Mapping Developer, I-School MIMS student
- Mohit Gupta, Omeka plugin Developer, I-School MIMS student
- Noah Kersey, User-Experience, widgets Developer, I-School MIMS student
- Gopal Vaswani, Web-services, database Developer, I-School MIMS student
