Typeless Information Modelling to Avoid Category Bias in Archaeological Descriptions
César González-Pérez · DIGITAL.CSIC (Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)) · 2012
The description of an archaeological entity is a process that often begins with the classification of the entity into one of a set of available categories; once the category is known, the description process itself may begin. This approach, albeit powerful and intuitive, is prone to causing category bias, since the category system at use has probably been created under the influence of ontic, epistemic and pragmatic conditions that are different to those of the current situation. Category bias, in turn, produces alterations in the information being generated that are very difficult to correct and, sometimes, even to detect. In this work we propose a category-less approach to th e description of archaeological entities that avoids classification as an a priori mechanism, using instead the entity’s properties as units of description. Under this approach, category bias is avoided, information is equa lly obtained, and categorisation can still be employed on the data as an a posteriori mechanism to explore information patterns.