disruptive technology

Reproduction or revolution?

21/12/2014 Jeremy Huggett

Emma Bryce (2014) has recently written about her autistic brother’s interest in technology – something that is quite commonly associated with folk on the spectrum. I deliberately wound up a conference audience some years ago by characterising computer-usage amongst archaeologists as fetishistic, but I’m not about to claim that digital archaeologists are autistic. However, one phrase at the end of her article jumped out at me: that regardless of where we are, on or off the spectrum, we all use technology as a form of comfort and security.

“By its very structure, technology invites us to practice repetitive behaviours and keep familiar habits alive. It transports us to places we feel comfortable…”

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06/12/2014 Jeremy Huggett

Curiously, according to Bloomberg’s recent ‘The 85 Most Disruptive Ideas in Our History’, the microchip comes second to the first-place jet engine. And their justification seems stranger still – the way in which the jet shrunk the world is perhaps fair enough, though the claim that for the first time the entire surface of the planet was reachable is open to question. Tell that to the likes of Alcock and Brown (first non-stop transatlantic flight, 1919), Macready and Kelly (first non-stop transcontinental flight, 1923), Smith and Nelson (first round the world flight, 1924) (and see Famous Firsts in Aviation for more in this vein). And yet in almost the same breath it is noted that the jet engine technology has become remarkably static.

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Digital transformation?

02/12/2014 Jeremy Huggett

The digitisation of archaeology over the past twenty years or so could be said to be an unprecedented transformation of the subject. The move from field notebooks (or quite literally in some cases the backs of envelopes, receipts, bus tickets and the like) to site databases, the move from desktop recording and hand logging to digital data capture in the field, the move from local databases to distributed databanks, the introduction and development of CAD, GIS, 3D modelling, and a host of innovations such as agent-based modelling, reflectance transformation imaging, structure from motion, and increasingly refined and ‘intelligent’ search tools … all these would seem to support the idea of a digital transformation of the subject. The democratisation of technology appears to underline this – the fact that we have moved from a time when computers were in the hands of a few, usually academic, archaeologists to a situation in which everyone has a computer in their pocket, in their bag, and on their desk.

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