Meet Our Team

Sarah Whitcher Kansa, RPA

I am Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute, a California non-profit organization that develops Open Context. I have a Ph.D. in archaeology (University of Edinburgh) and have spent more than 25 years conducting zooarchaeological research at sites in the Middle East and Europe. I served as Vice President for the International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ) from 2014-2018 and President from 2018-2023. I am the chair of the Digital Technology Committee for the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and served on the Publications Committee for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR). I participate on several grant-funded projects, most recently as a co-director on Advancing FAIR+CARE Practices in Cultural Heritage, funded by the IMLS.

For Open Context, I provide overall project management for publications, work on data editing and review, manage collaborations with other publishers, and organize peer-review.

Contact me by email with questions about data publishing.

Eric Kansa

I'm the Program Director for Open Context. I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology, and archeological field experience in the Near East, Egypt, Italy and North America. My research interests explore research data informatics, research data policy, ethics, and professional context of the digital humanities.

I run research and development for Open Context and manage the technical aspects of data publishing and archiving, including systems interoperability, data integration, and indexing. I blog at Heritage Bytes, and am on Twitter @ekansa. (Contact me!)