Author: Jeremy Huggett

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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Reproducing practice

Jeremy Huggett

One theme that came out of the recent CAA 2015 conference in Siena last week circled around the unstated issue of whether the role of digital technology was to support or substitute current (traditional) archaeological practice. This featured particularly strongly in the day-long session organised by James Taylor and Nicolò Dell’Unto, ‘Towards a Theory of Practice in Applied Digital Field Methods’.

Proof I made it to the top of the Torre del Mangia
Siena from the Torre del Mangia

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Canonical Software

Jeremy Huggett

Lists are all the rage – and not just the traditional rundowns at New Year. In 2014 Paul Ford suggested that it might be possible to propose a software canon consisting of great works of deeply influential software that changed the nature of what followed. He suggested five: the office suite Microsoft Office, the image editor Photoshop, the videogame Pac-Man, the operating system Unix, and the text editor Emacs.

Earlier, in 2013, Matthew Kirschenbaum had come up with ten: like Ford, he listed Photoshop but there was no room for Microsoft Office (instead WordStar and VisiCalc) – and no Pac-Man (Maze War, Adventure, and Minecraft were the games in his list). There was no operating system, but he did include Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.

Engaging in this kind of debate is generally best done over a few drinks, but in their absence, what would be the software canon for archaeologists?

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Real-time Digital Archaeology?

Jeremy Huggett

Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that make the Internet work and vice-president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, warned last month (for example, here, here and here) about an information black hole into which digitised material is lost as we lose access to the programs which are needed to view them. Somewhat ironically, Google’s own priorities recently seem to have been to increasingly withdraw from information projects which preserved the past – killing off archives, slowing down digitisation activities, removing the Timeline and increasingly prioritising newness over older more established sources in search results (Baio 2015).

Responses to the reporting of Cerf’s warnings were mixed. Some seemed relatively complacent: after all, we’re already preserving data and information in libraries and archives, aren’t we, while using open file formats will mean that bit rot is not a problem? In the process, many seemed to overlook part of Cerf’s argument – that there was a need to preserve old software and hardware so that we retain the ability to read files in their original formats: what he characterised as ‘digital vellum’.

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Mastering Mystery

Jeremy Huggett

A couple of articles have appeared in recent days which in different ways suggest that digital technology is too easy. Samuel Arbesman writes about how it is important to be able to see under the hood of the tools we use; Brian Millar suggests that simplicity of design takes away the satisfaction and confidence gained through mastery of the technology. In different ways, both link understanding with our ability to see past glossy interfaces designed to keep us at arms length from the guts of the process. Arbesman’s reminiscences about typing games programs from magazines into a VIC-20 and gaining an appreciation of coding and debugging certainly makes me nostalgic – in my case it was working with my younger brother’s Commodore-64 which led directly to working as a research student on machines ranging from ICL and VAX mainframes, North Star Horizons and Sirius PCs running CP/M, to the original IBM PCs and MS-DOS, and using them (and more recent models!) to construct archaeological programs in FORTRAN, C and C++.

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Filter bubbles

Jeremy Huggett

In an earlier post I wrote about the importance of understanding the legibility, agency and negotiability of archaeological data as we increasingly depend on online data delivery as the basis for the archaeologies we write and especially as those archaeologies show signs of being partly written by the delivery systems themselves.

A simple illustration of this is the idea of filter bubbles. This term was coined in 2011 by Eli Pariser to describe the way in which search algorithms selectively return results depending on their knowledge of the person who asked the question. It’s an idea previously flagged by, amongst others, Jaron Lanier who wrote about ‘agents of alienation’ in 1995, but it came to the fore through the recognition of the personalisation of Google results and Facebook feeds (and is the counter-selling point of the alternative search engine, DuckDuckGo, for example). So can we see this happening with archaeological data? Perhaps not to the extent described by Pariser, Lanier and others, but still …

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Big Data Analytics

Jeremy Huggett

It was only a matter of time before a ‘big data’ company latched onto archaeology for commercial purposes. Reported in a New Scientist article last week (with an unfortunate focus on ‘treasure’), a UK data analytics start-up called Democrata is incorporating archaeological data into a system to allow engineering and construction firms to predict the likelihood of encountering archaeological remains. This, of course, is what local authority archaeologists do, along with environmental impact assessments undertaken by commercial archaeology units. But this isn’t (yet) an argument about a potential threat to archaeological jobs.

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