As a "grand challenge" for digital archaeology, I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures, and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence. This is exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation "at the trowel's edge", in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity "from the field to the screen" in a variety of archaeological situations. I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. It has a potential value in helping to establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agencyoriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.
This paper reports on research of scholarly research practices and requirements conducted in the context of the Preparing DARIAH European e-Infrastructures project, with a view to ensuring current and future fitness for purpose of the planned digital infrastructure, services and tools. It summarises the findings of earlier research, primarily from the field of human information behaviour as applied in scholarly work, it presents a conceptual perspective informed by cultural-historical activity theory, it introduces briefly a formal conceptual model for scholarly research activity compliant with CIDOC CRM, it describes the plan of work and methodology of an empirical research project based on open-questionnaire interviews with arts and humanities researchers, and presents illustrative examples of segmentation, tagging and initial conceptual analysis of the empirical evidence. Finally, it presents plans for future work, consisting, firstly, of a comprehensive re-analysis of interview segments within the framework of the scholarly research activity model, and, secondly, of the integration of this analysis with the extended digital curation process model we presented in earlier work.
This paper presents Jean-Claude Gardin's distinctive approach to archaeological data, representation and knowledge in the context of his early engagement with semiotics and structural semantics and his grounding in fields as diverse as documentation, classification theory, material culture studies, argumentation theory and the philosophy of the human sciences. Pointing at Gardin's ambivalence vis-à-vis the promises of automated classification and machine reasoning in archaeology, it shows that his approach goes beyond a normative, positivist conception of archaeological research, recognizing the contextual, theory-laden nature of archaeological data constitution, the priority of focusing on actual archaeological interpretation practices and the complementarity between narrative and formal representations of archaeological reasoning. It connects his early development of archaeological descriptive and typological metalanguages with his later elaboration of a theoretically informed approach to archaeological argumentation, analysis and publication, situates his logicist programme as a relevant contribution to the development of an archaeological Btheory of practice^, grounded on reflexivity and modesty vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge and the limits of scientism, and highlights aspects of Gardin's work that point to potentially fruitful directions for contemporary research and practice in the field of archaeological informatics and digital humanities communication.
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