Tag: archaeological record

Data as Flux

Jeremy Huggett
The Earthboot device, by Martin Howse (2013)

Data is tricky stuff. It can appear to be self-evident but equally may be elusive. It can be material yet immaterial, tangible but ephemeral, objective yet biased, precise but inaccurate, detailed but broad-brush. It may be big or small, fast or slow, quantitative or qualitative. It may be easily misrepresented, misconceived, misunderstood, misread, misconstrued, misinterpreted. It can be distorted, altered, mangled, wrangled, and reshaped into something it never originally was according to different purposes and agendas. Data is slippery and perilous, but we often overlook its characteristics and peculiarities in the pursuit of interpretation and – hopefully! – knowledge. Looking over this blog, I’ve written a lot about data over the years. In the process, I’ve undoubtedly repeated myself, quite probably contradicted myself, sometimes confused myself, and that’s before considering any of my more formal publications on the subject! For instance, there’s the question of missing and unknown data, data associations, data metaphors, data reuse, data proxies, big data, and quite a lot more besides on data archiving etc.. Not only does this highlight how fundamental data are, but it perhaps underlines the value of a range of different perspectives about the character and nature of data.

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Digital Recall

Jeremy Huggett

Total RecallWe’ve all experienced that rush of recollection when we uncover some long-hidden or long-lost object from our past in the bottom of a drawer or box, triggering memories of encounters, activities, people, and places. We’re accustomed to the idea that we use evocative things as stored memories, deliberately or inadvertently, and as distributed extensions of our embodied memory (e.g. Heersmink 2018). Is it the same with digital objects? For example, van Dijck asks:

Are analog and digital objects interchangeable in the making, storing, and recalling of memories? Do digital objects change our inscription and remembrance of lived experience, and do they affect the memory process in our brains? (2007, xii).

Perhaps it’s a neurosis brought on by the contemplation of my excavation backlog, but I think there is a difference: that not all analog objects are equally interchangeable with digital equivalents in terms of their functioning as distributed memories, and that this difference is significant when we consider the archaeological narratives we are able to construct from our digital records. It may be that this perspective is coloured by the physical nature of my backlog from the 1980s and 1990s which for various reasons sits on the cusp of analog/digital recording. Although Ruth Tringham recalls how in the 1980s the digital recording of hitherto paper records was distrusted (Tringham 2010, 87), not least due to concerns about the fragility of the hardware and impermanence of the product, in my case it was rather more prosaic: as someone working with computers full-time in my day job I had no desire to turn my excavation experience into a busman’s holiday as the on-site computer technician. The downside was that I subsequently gave myself the monumental task of manually entering the record sheets into the database and scanning/digitising the plans and sections in the off-season. In retrospect, however, this provides the opportunity to consider the different affordances of the two sets of analog and digital records, a perception that is reinforced by the pre-pandemic experience of packing my office which incorporated two days of sorting and moving the physical archive and about five minutes transferring the digital files.

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Dark Data

Jeremy Huggett

There are quite a few metaphors associated with archaeological data, many of which relate to its apparent mystery. For example, Gavin Lucas has described the archaeological record as being “haunted by absences” created by decay and destruction (Lucas 2012, 178). In a similar vein, Alison Wylie has described archaeological data as “shadowy” and that archaeology is defined “by the challenges of working with gaps and absences in its primary data” (Wylie 2017, 204). In a special issue of the Science, Technology, & Human Values journal on ‘Data Shadows’, Leonelli et al. describe data in terms of its presence, but also in terms of its unavailability, inaccessibility, or its absence, defining absence as a descriptor of how “data are missing, incomplete, unreliable, ignored, unwanted, or untagged”  (Leonelli et al. 2017, 192). As Chris Chippendale described it,

Archaeology is plagued in many an instance with poorly defined variables (usually thought of as ‘data’) drawn from ill-understood populations, and with uncertain articulations between the entities whose logical relations we seek to understand. (2000, 611)

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Dipping in Data Lakes

Jeremy Huggett

We’re becoming increasingly accustomed to talk of Big Data in archaeology and at the same time beginning to see the resurgence of Artificial Intelligence in the shape of machine learning. And we’ve spent the last 20 years or so assembling mountains of data in digital repositories which are becoming big data resources for mining in the pursuit of machine learning training data. At the same time we are increasingly aware of the restrictions that those same repositories impose upon us – the use of pre-cooked ‘what/where/when’ queries, the need to (re)structure data in order to integrate different data sources and suppliers, and their largely siloed nature which limits cross-repository connections, for example. More generally, we are accustomed to the need to organise our data in specific ways in order to fit the structures imposed by database management systems, or indeed, to fit our data into the structures predefined by archaeological recording systems, both of which shape subsequent analysis. But what if it doesn’t need to be this way?

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Digital Place, Cognitive Space

Jeremy Huggett
CC0 Adapted from photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

To what extent does our use of digital devices to capture and process archaeological data affect our perceptions of what was there? Mark Altaweel (2018) has recently asked a similar question in relation to GPS technologies – how do these affect our understanding and experience of place? He suggests that they diminish our sense of place and experiences that we might otherwise have as we navigate according to their recommendations. Certainly, satnavs are notorious for taking our navigational cognitive load upon themselves and consequently leading drivers who are insufficiently aware of their surroundings into undesirable, even dangerous situations. We might think that the human cognitive load that is thereby freed up by such devices ought to be capable of being diverted into more useful, more extensive, areas – we literally have the space to think about bigger and deeper things as a consequence of their application. This kind of argument frequently arises in relation to the value of automation, for instance, and can be seen in the kinds of discussions surrounding the use of structure-from-motion photogrammetric recording on archaeological excavations, for example. But is this supposed release of cognitive space an unalloyed good? Or is this a case of the technologies distancing us from the physicality of the archaeological material and space in front of us?

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Archaeology of the Datanthropocene

Jeremy Huggett
Original by Clarence Alford CC0 via Pixabay

Some time ago, David Berry introduced the term ‘infrasomatization’ (Berry 2016) which he defines as the production of constitutive infrastructures; specifically the way that digital algorithms are deployed and change existing infrastructures, and how they alter rationalities by introducing computational interdependencies and structural brittleness into our systems (Berry 2018). In the process, he has just coined another new term: the Datanthropocene, the data-intensive society. This is closely linked to ‘big data’ approaches, data-intensive science, and he suggests that it “creates new economic structures but also new social realities and data-intensive subjectivities and hence new problems for society to negotiate”.

Of course, debates continue about the Anthropocene, not least whether or not it can even be defined as a specific epoch – does it start with the atomic era, for instance, or maybe even with the introduction of agriculture, or is it primarily associated with human-created climate change, pollution and extinctions?

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Deep-fried archaeological data

Jeremy Huggett
deepfriedmarsbar
Deep fried Mars bar

I’ve borrowed the idea of ‘deep-fried data’ from the title of a presentation by Maciej Cegłowski to the Collections as Data conference at the Library of Congress last month. As an archaeologist living and working in Scotland for 26 years, the idea of deep-fried data spoke to me, not least of course because of Scotland’s culinary reputation for deep-frying anything and everything. Deep-fried Mars bars, deep-fried Crème eggs, deep-fried butter balls in Irn Bru batter, deep-fried pizza, deep-fried steak pies, and so it goes on (see some more not entirely serious examples).

Hardened arteries aside, what does deep-fried data mean, and how is this relevant to the archaeological situation? In fact, you don’t have to look too hard to see that cooking is often used as a metaphor for our relationship with and use of data.

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Preservation by record

Jeremy Huggett

Preservation by record is very much in the news at the moment in relation to attempts by ISIS to destroy cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria in places like Nineveh, Nimrud, Hatra, and the present threat to Palmyra. In some instances, the archaeological response has entailed excavations, in others it has been to begin to use crowd-sourced imagery to digitally reconstruct the heritage that has already been destroyed, or to use satellite and aerial imagery to map unrecorded and endangered sites.

Laser scanning
Laser scanning at Merv
(original by CyArk, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Emma Cunliffe, from the Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project, has suggested that “in some extreme, and particularly devastating, cases, the records may be the only thing left of a culture, in which case we owe it to them to preserve something, anything”. Hard to argue with that, and the article goes on to suggest that one approach to preservation of these sites is the use of archaeological technology to record monuments in high resolution in those areas which are still accessible (Foyle 2015).

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