Search succession – Canmore (left) and Trove (right)
We seem to be living in interesting times here in the UK, at least as far as changes to major archaeological digital infrastructures providing access to national historic environment records and associated archive data are concerned. The Archaeology Data Service has radically updated ArchSearch with a new interface; in Scotland, the well-established Canmore has been replaced by the new Trove website; in England, the launch of a new Heritage Gateway is due by the end of the year. Novelty can be very unsettling and risky, especially when it involves the replacement of a long-established, familiar, and reliable, digital system. And of course, unwanted novelty can give rise to resistance and complaint. So how is that working out?
Detail from Woman at a Window, by Casper David Friedrich (1822)
We understand knowledge construction to be social and combinatorial: we build on the knowledge of others, we create knowledge from data collected by ourselves and others, and so on. Although we pay a lot of attention to the processes behind the collection, recording, and archiving of our data, and are concerned about ensuring its findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability into the future, we pay much less attention to the technological mediation between ourselves and those same data. How do the search interfaces which we customarily employ in our archaeological data portals influence our use of them, and consequently affect the knowledge we create through them? How do they both enable and constrain us? And what are the implications for future interface designs?
As if to underline the lack of attention to interfaces, it’s often difficult to trace their history and development. It’s not something that infrastructure providers tend to be particularly interested in, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t capture interfaces which use dynamically scripted pages, which writes off the visual history of the first ten years or more of development of the Archaeology Data Service’s ArchSearch interface, for example. The focus is, perhaps inevitably, on maintaining the interfaces we do have and looking forward to developing the next ones, but with relatively little sense of their history. Interfaces are all too often treated as transparent, transient – almost disposable – windows on the data they provide access to.
Sometimes words or phrases are coined that seem very apposite in that they appear to capture the essence of a thing or concept and quickly become a shorthand for the phenomenon. ‘Digital twin’ is one such term, increasingly appearing in both popular and academic use with its meaning seemingly self-evident. The idea of a ‘digital twin’ carries connotations of a replica, a duplicate, a facsimile, the digital equivalent of a material entity, and conveniently summons up the impression of a virtual exact copy of something that exists in the real world.
For example, there was a great deal of publicity surrounding the latest 3D digital scan of the Titanic, created from 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 digital images and 4K video footage, and having a resolution capable of reading the serial number on one of the propellors. The term ‘digital twin’ was bandied around in the news coverage, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it simply means a high-resolution digital model of a physical object although the Ars Technica article hints at the possibility of using it in simulations to better understand the breakup and sinking of the ship. The impression gained is that a digital twin can simply be seen as a digital duplicate of a real-world object, and the casual use of the term would seem to imply little more than that. By this definition, photogrammetric models of excavated archaeological sections and surfaces would presumably qualify as digital twins of the original material encountered during the excavation, for instance.
Buttons figure large in the world around us. Just in the last year we’ve seen everything from presidents boasting about the size of their nuclear buttons to Apple being faced with a class action over the failure of their new ‘improved’ butterfly keys to Amazon’s Dash buttons being barred in Germany for not providing information about price prior to being pressed. In archaeology, we’ve become accustomed to buttons and button-presses generating data, performing analyses, and presenting results, ranging across the digital instruments we employ and the software tools we rely on. So, to pick a random example, “researchers will be able to compare ceramics across thousands of sites with a click of the button.” (Smith et al 2014, 245).
Rachel Plotnick has recently discussed the place of buttons in our cultural imaginary:
… push a button and something magical begins. A sound erupts that seems never to have existed before. A bomb explodes. A vote registers. A machine animates, whirling and processing. A trivial touch of the finger sets these forces in motion. The user is all powerful, sending the signal that turns on a television, a mobile phone, a microwave. She makes everything go. Whether or not she understands how the machine works, she determines the fate of the universe. (Plotnick 2018, xiv).
If a visualisation is to be perceived as realistic, is it increasingly required to respond to the viewer’s actions? Is static visualisation becoming old hat? Has interactivity become a necessary part of engendering perception, action, and emotion in our response to a visualisation? And what do we mean by interactivity?
Of course, interactivity may take various forms. For instance, it may entail navigation facilities: an ability to change the viewpoint, to move through the visualisation. It may also entail manipulation facilities: the ability to modify the visualisation, to move and re-organise elements. But what are we actually interacting with?
Evidently we see a visual representation or simulation of an environment so we are interacting with that simulation. But this implies a single interface, between us as the physical embodied viewer/actor and the visualisation. Indeed, Virtual Reality is characterised as the transparent invisible interface which is all-encompassing and three-dimensional; the user is surrounded by an immersive, total simulation in which the interface both disappears and becomes the experienced simulation at one and the same time (Pold 2005). But is this true?
Social media have been the focus of much attention in recent weeks over their unwillingness/tardiness in applying their own rules. Whether it’s Twitter refusing to consider Trump’s aggressive verbal threats against North Korea to be in violation of their harassment policy, or YouTube belatedly removing a video by Logan Paul showing a suicide victim (Matsakis 2018, Meyer 2018), or US and UK government attempts to hold Facebook and Twitter to account over ‘fake news’ (e.g. Hern 2017a, 2017b), there is a growing recognition that not only are ‘we’ the data for these social media behemoths, but that these platforms are optimised for this kind of abuse (Wachter-Boettcher 2017, Bridle 2017).
As archaeologists, we spend a great deal of time and effort looking at interfaces, be they between soil horizons or between cultural horizons, for instance. We pay rather less attention to the digital interfaces through which we access and analyse our evidence. And yet it is important that we do consider the nature of the negotiations that take place through the mediation of those interfaces. As Johanna Drucker has argued:
No single innovation has transformed communication as radically in the last half century as the GUI. In a very real, practical sense we carry on most of our personal and professional business through interfaces. Knowing how interface structures our relation to knowledge and behavior is essential. (Drucker 2014, vi, emphasis in original).
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 …
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.”
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++.
