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.
Tag: big data
Inadvertent Algorithms
As the end of 2014 approaches, Facebook has unleashed its new “Year in Review” app, purporting to show the highlights of your year. In my case, it did little other than demonstrate a more or less complete lack of Facebook activity on my part other than some conference photos a colleague had posted to my wall; in Eric Meyer’s case, it presented him with a picture of his daughter who had died earlier in the year. In a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece, he describes this as ‘Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty’: it wasn’t deliberate on the part of Facebook (who have now apologised), and for many people it worked well as evidenced by the numbers who opted to include it on their timelines, but it lacked an opt-in facility and there was an absence of what Meyer calls ‘empathetic design’. Om Malik picks up on this, pointing to the way Facebook now has an ‘Empathy Team’ apparently intended to make designers understand what it is like to be a user (sorry, a person), although Facebook’s ability to highlight what people see as important is driven by crude data such as the number of ‘likes’ and comments without any understanding of the underlying meanings which are present.
Big Data and Distance
One of the features of the availability of increasing amounts of archaeological data online is that it frequently arrives without an accompanying awareness of context. Far from being a problem, this is often seen as an advantage in relation to ‘big data’ – indeed, Chris Anderson has claimed that context can be established later once statistical algorithms have found correlations in large datasets that might not otherwise be revealed.
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