Author: Jeremy Huggett

A Digital Detox for Digital Archaeology?

Jeremy Huggett
Digital Detox sign
Adapted from original image by davitydave (CC BY 2.0)

Digital detox has been very much in the news of late, with celebrities from film stars to pop singers to video bloggers attempting to digitally detox for a host of different reasons. Ten years ago, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times op-ed columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote about continuous partial attention – the consequence of our attempts to multitask when on the Internet or cellphone while watching television, typing an email or paper, and trying to hold a conversation with someone – he called it “the malady of modernity. We have gone from the Iron Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Age of Interruption”.

He was certainly not the first to draw attention to this – for example, in 1971 Herbert Simon, an American political scientist and Nobel Prize winner, wrote

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Simon 1971, 40-1).

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Open data and the transformation of archaeological knowledge

Jeremy Huggett

[To interrupt the blogging hiatus, here’s the introduction to a recently published paper …]

Open Access logoSince the mid-1990s the development of online access to archaeological information has been revolutionary. Easy availability of data has changed the starting point for archaeological enquiry and the openness, quantity, range and scope of online digital data has long since passed a tipping point when online access became useful, even essential. However, this transformative access to archaeological data has not itself been examined in a critical manner. Access is good, exploitation is an essential component of preservation, openness is desirable, comparability is a requirement, but what are the implications for archaeological research of this flow – some would say deluge – of information?

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Unconscious Bias

Jeremy Huggett
stencil
Modified from the original by grahamc99. CC-BY-2.0

My employer has decided to send all those of us involved in recruitment and promotion on Unconscious Bias training, in recognition that unconscious bias may affect our decisions in one way or another. Unconscious bias in our dealings with others may be triggered by both visible and invisible characteristics, including gender, age, skin colour, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, accent, education, class, professional group etc.. That started me thinking – what about unconscious bias in relation to digital archaeology?

‘Unconscious bias’ isn’t a term commonly encountered within archaeology, although Sara Perry and others have written compellingly about online sexism and abuse experienced in academia and archaeology (Perry 2014, Perry et al 2015, for example). ‘Bias’, on the other hand, is rather more frequently referred to, especially in the context of our relationship to data. Most of us are aware, for instance, that as archaeologists we bring a host of preconceptions, assumptions, as well as cultural, gender and other biases to bear on our interpretations, and recognising this, seek means to reduce if not avoid it altogether. Nevertheless, there may still be bias in the sites we select, the data we collect, and the interpretations we place upon them. But what happens when the digital intervenes?

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Shaping Boxes

Jeremy Huggett

Flight recorder black box
Flight data recorder black box:
image by Rameshng [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Bethany Nowviskie has written recently about black boxes:

“Nobody lives with conceptual black boxes and the allure of revelation more than the philologist or the scholarly editor. Unless it’s the historian—or the archaeologist—or the interpreter of the aesthetic dimension of arts and letters. Okay, nobody lives with black boxes more than the modern humanities scholar, and not only because of the ever-more-evident algorithmic and proprietary nature of our shared infrastructure for scholarly communication. She lives with black boxes for two further reasons: both because her subjects of inquiry are themselves products of systems obscured by time and loss (opaque or inaccessible, in part or in whole), and because she operates on datasets that, generally, come to her through the multiple, muddy layers of accident, selection, possessiveness, generosity, intellectual honesty, outright deception, and hard-to-parse interoperating subjectivities that we call a library.” (Nowviskie 2015 – her emphases)

Leaving aside the textual emphasis that is frequently the focus of digital humanities, these “multiple, muddy layers” certainly speaks to the archaeologist in me. The idea that digital archaeologists (and archaeologists using digital tools for that matter) work with black boxes has a long history – for instance, the black-boxing of archaeological multivariate quantitative analyses in the 1960s and 1970s was a not uncommon criticism at the time. During the intervening forty-odd years, however, it has become a topic that we rarely discuss. What are the black boxes we use? Where do they appear? Do we recognise them? What is their effect? Nowviskie talks of black boxes in terms of the subjects of enquiry – which as archaeologists we can certainly understand! – and the datasets about them, but, as she recognises, black boxing extends far beyond this.

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A Post-Digital Archaeology?

Jeremy Huggett

Given the current state of digital archaeology, is it more properly referred to as post-digital archaeology? What does this mean? There’s a lot of confusion about the term ‘post-digital’, not least because it’s often used by techno-boosters in the sense of “what next?”, assuming that since everything is now digital, we’re looking to the next ‘big thing’ – a presumption that is questionable to say the least.

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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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Robotic Archaeology

Jeremy Huggett
robot
© Alex Gonzalez for openphoto.net

In an intriguing juxtaposition of ancient and modern technologies, Evan Ackerman reports on the use of a robotic arm by Radu Iovita, Jonas Buchli, and Johannes Pfleging to undertake use-wear analysis of stone tools. The accompanying video shows the robot arm using a stone tool on different materials (hide, wood, stone) and, rather neatly, every 50 scrapes it automatically turns to a microscope to capture an image of the developing wear pattern on the stone tool. Ackerman’s source is a piece by Samuel Schlaefli which contains more background and information about the project. For instance, the robot arm is able to adapt the force it applies in response to the resistance it detects, and the ability to run the experiments 24 hours a day, potentially using multiple robotic arms working simultaneously, is said to enable the creation of massive databases and consequently accelerate the production of knowledge in archaeology and palaeoanthropology about use wear patterns on stone tools.

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See the Sort

Jeremy Huggett

What’s not to like about the idea of central European folk dance being used as a means of illustrating the operation of different sorting algorithms? That’s what the Algo-rythmics did a few years ago – my personal favourite has to be the Quick Sort (below) with the hats changing with the operands, but do check them out (all six are on their Youtube page).

Within the last ten days, we’ve been reminded about the invisibility of algorithms which govern much of our online activity. We’ve seen Google alter its search ranking algorithm to prioritise mobile-friendly sites in its search results, Facebook change its newsfeed algorithm to give greater precedence to posts from friends (who’d have thought it?!), and the French Senate vote to require search engines to reveal the workings of their search ranking algorithms to ensure they deliver fair and non-discriminatory results. There’s also been discussion of the role of trading algorithms in the 2010 ‘flash crash’ and stock market movements in the last month or so in the US …

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Toolkits for the Mind

Jeremy Huggett

In 1975 the computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote “The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.” Dijkstra was writing in relation to programming languages but the same might equally apply to the software products coded in those languages. In this, he recalls Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (although the pedant in me insists that this was actually by John Culkin).

The title for this post is shamelessly borrowed from an article by James Somers (2015) in which he seeks to argue that programming languages shape the way their users think:

“Software developers as a species tend to be convinced that programming languages have a grip on the mind strong enough to change the way you approach problems—even to change which problems you think to solve.”

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