DIY and digital archaeology: what are you doing to participate?

Morgan, Colleen; Eve, Stuart

doi:10.1080/00438243.2012.741810

Cited by 83 publications

(46 citation statements)

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“…In juxtaposition with positivist accounts of "scientific process" which views archaeology as one of the natural sciences [174], the account of archaeological fieldwork in Çatalhöyük and other examples of contemporary practice which I presented in this paper highlights the need to refine our conceptualizations of archaeological practice so that they account for its purposeful, discursive nature, in line with earlier work on scholarly activity conceptual modeling inspired by cultural-historical activity theory. This view resonates with Margaret Conkey and Joan Gero's call "to increase the visibility of human agency in knowledge production, becoming more conscious of, and making more public the choices that accumulate into what is known about the past" and "to organize archaeological field projects in less hierarchical fashions, avoiding the situation of a single unchallengeable authority who pronounces judgments from the top" [175], adopted by Morgan and Eve in their "radically transparent" practice of sharing current interpretations and interim excavation reports as a vindication of a politically and theoretically informed interpretive digital archaeology [86].…”

Section: Accounting For Archaeological Curation Practice and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Web communication, in their view, opens possibilities for unanticipated interpretations of archaeological data, leveraging the "social, serendipity model for information discovery" [86]. Such a do-it-yourself archaeology seems already to be taking shape through the growing number of archaeological projects making use of Web 2.0 and social media capabilities [87], tapping on the promise of open sharing, peer review and reuse of archaeological data -a form of "data sharing as publishing" -afforded by the online networked environment [88].…”

Section: Archaeological Fieldwork As Pervasive Curation: a Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Noisy, multilingual and multiauthored, and sadly often unarchivable or incompatible with traditional means of archaeological publication, there is so much colour and life in our digital village that it defies boundaries and descriptions […] As digital archaeologists, we email each other, enter our data into databases, upload photographs and try to understand, organise and preserve our digital traces [86].…”

Section: Archaeological Fieldwork As Pervasive Curation: a Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

Dallas

2015

Open Archaeology

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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.

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Section: Accounting For Archaeological Curation Practice and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Archaeological Fieldwork As Pervasive Curation: a Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Archaeological Fieldwork As Pervasive Curation: a Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

Dallas

2015

Open Archaeology

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“…Leveraging a close collaboration with the Archaeological Data Service, the journal is succeeding in encouraging a data + publication model and other independent initiatives, e.g. L-P Archaeology's Prescott Street Project are self-consciously promoting a, "reflexive, open and participatory" archaeology (Dallas 2015;Morgan and Eve 2012;Sanchez 2013). Our publication project builds on this model, combining the release of the project's stratigraphic database for the area with the synthetic publication.…”

Section: Digital Media and Archaeological Scholarshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpretation at the Controller’s Edge: Designing Graphical User Interfaces for the digital publication of the excavations at Gabii (Italy)

Opitz¹,

Johnson²

2017

Preprint

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This paper discusses the authors' approach to designing an interface for the Gabii Project's digital volumes that attempts to fuse elements of traditional synthetic publications and site reports with rich digital datasets. Archaeology, and classical archaeology in particular, has long engaged with questions of the formation and lived experience of towns and cities. Such studies might draw on evidence of local topography, the arrangement of the built environment, and the placement of architectural details, monuments and inscriptions (e.g. Johnson and Millett 2012). Fundamental to the continued development of these studies is the growing body of evidence emerging from new excavations. Digital techniques for recording evidence "on the ground," notably SFM (structure from motion aka close range photogrammetry) for the creation of detailed 3D models and for scene-level modeling in 3D have advanced rapidly in recent years. These parallel developments have opened the door for approaches to the study of the creation and experience of urban space driven by a combination of scene-level reconstruction models (van Roode et al. 2012, Paliou et al. 2011, Paliou 2013 explicitly combined with detailed SFM or scanning based 3D models representing stratigraphic evidence. It is essential to understand the subtle but crucial impact of the design of the user interface on the interpretation of these models. In this paper we focus on the impact of design choices for the user interface, and make connections between design choices and the broader discourse in archaeological theory surrounding the practice of the creation and consumption of archaeological knowledge. As a case in point we take the prototype interface being developed within the Gabii Project for the publication of the Tincu House. In discussing our own evolving practices in engagement with the archaeological record created at Gabii, we highlight some of the challenges of undertaking theoretically-situated user interface design, and their implications for the publication and study of archaeological materials.

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“…This is what Frontiers in Digital Archaeology is about. I echo (Morgan and Eve, 2012;p. 523) the statement that "we are all digital archaeologists. "…”

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confidence: 99%

Digital Archeology Is Here (and Has Been for a While)

Costopoulos

2016

Front. Digit. Humanit.

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Keywords: archeology, opinion, history of archeology, digital archeology, computers in archeology, computational archeologyArchaeology is now fully in a period of experimenting with the computer and gradually adopting it as one of its major tools for research (Whallon, 1972; p. 29).[The volume] is an examination of how approaches to archaeology, both methodological and theoretical, need to intelligently utilize the world of Information and Communication Technology and how this can redefine the potential of archaeology in the twenty-first century (Evans and Daly, 2006; p. 4).The creation of a large databank is to begin soon (Whallon, 1972; p. 41).I want to stop talking about digital archeology. I want to continue doing archeology digitally. This is what Frontiers in Digital Archaeology is about. I echo (Morgan and Eve, 2012; p. 523) the statement that "we are all digital archaeologists. " This statement wants to be radical but is in fact a mundane recognition of a state of normality that has existed for at least 20 years and has described a significant segment of the archeological community for at least 40 years.Evidence of the reality of digital archeology is all around us in the discipline's data collection and curation (Roosevelt et al., 2015), analysis [mainly through GIS, see Conolly and Lake (2006) (2006) and work that builds on it]. Perhaps, the best evidence is the growing prominence of archeology blogs in driving the dissemination and interpretation of results (see Colleen Morgan's middlesavagery or John Hawks' weblog for notable examples in very different regions of the discipline).In this first editorial, I would like to lay the groundwork for the journal as a place primarily to do archeology digitally, rather than as a place to discuss digital archeology. In the social sciences and humanities, we have an unfortunate tendency to make approaches and tools into objects of study (literally, we essentialize them) and to organize the conversation around them.There are meaningful and even heavy conversations about the implications in other fields of the use of new digital tools. We will have those conversations in this journal. But those conversations in other fields have tended to facilitate rather than impede the setting up of things, such as Genbank 1 and arXiv.2 Those conversations have been immensely productive, but they have been more focused and results oriented than I feel they have been so far in archeology. I must admit that I am a bit embarrassed at the public expense involved in the numerous rather sterile meetings in which I have participated about the digital turn in archeology and the setting up of public archives, community GIS, etc., for what so far I consider very little result. The carbon footprint of some of these meetings must have been stupendous. All the right people were at the table (I mean that sincerely), all the right things were said, all the right anxieties were aired out, and all the right authorities were cited. But I do not think the expense so far has been justified by the...

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DIY and digital archaeology: what are you doing to participate?

Cited by 83 publications

References 15 publications

Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

Interpretation at the Controller’s Edge: Designing Graphical User Interfaces for the digital publication of the excavations at Gabii (Italy)

Digital Archeology Is Here (and Has Been for a While)

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