Digital Archaeology and the New Media in 2012

It was about 5 years ago that I started this very blog to “keep our friends, families, donors, and colleagues up to date on our work both in the field and back in the office.” Here’s a link to that first post tucked away deep in the bowels of the Archive for the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. Our hope was that we could provide a window into the daily work, social relationships, and experiences of archaeological work to provide a context for the sometimes de-humanized empirical data produced from our time in the field.   

Since that time, most archaeological projects have developed some social or new media aspect to their work (or have chosen not to for reasons grounded in the discourse of social and new media rather than just naiveté or petty resistance).  With near ubiquitous mobile phone coverage it is now possible to use microblogging platforms like Twitter from almost every corner of the world. Twitter and its rather more reckless cousin Facebook have provided important places for the circulation of up-to-the-minute updates on projects and for the development of community among the researchers, volunteers, staff, supporters, and interested observers around the world. Projects have worked to produce guidelines to help folks new to blogging and social media negotiate the world of archaeological blogging. Conferences and conference panels, both virtual and real, have occurred discussing the virtues and potential pitfalls of blogging and archaeology. In general, projects have found new ways to use the internet to engage a longstanding fascination with archaeological work among a wide range of people and to feed the almost insatiable hunger among professional archaeologists for news from the trowels edge.

Our field staff and volunteers have become more tech savvy. For example, this year, our three trench supervisors – Brandon Olson, Dallas Deforest, and Aaron Barth – all have blogs. My two co-directors, David Pettegrew and Scott Moore, are experienced bloggers as well. I expect that we’ll continue to provide a platform for our students to blog on their experiences. This may be rather more foreign to them, but our Twitter hashtag for the season (#PKAP12) and our volunteers’ Facebook or Twitter accounts will provide them with their own communities and audiences for their reflections on their work. We (well, Scott Moore has) a YouTube channel. 

This summer, we’ll extend our social and new media reach into the field. Messiah College – one of our three co-sponsoring institutions – will provide the project with iPads for the students to use in the field, the museum, and the hotel. They should be able to publish photographs, video, and reflections directly from the field. Prof. Sam Fee from Washington and Jefferson College, has developed an application for us that we will test this summer to collect data from our trenches. We are very close to being able to publish our raw archaeological data from the side of our trenches in realtime. In an era where “transparency” is becoming a watchword for academic, political, and institutional integrity, we are very close to achieving complete transparency in archaeological data collection and analysis. Every step of the process could be made visible to an outside observer.

There are reasons, of course, to limit some of our transparency and these have little to do with issues of integrity and much more to do with issues of security around a site that has already suffered significant degradation at the hands of looters. Moreover, we have done little to provide tools for a wider audience to interrogate raw archaeological data “from the trowel’s edge”. The data rich immediacy of the trowel’s edge perspective rarely serves even an experience archaeologist as any more than a starting point for their own understanding of a trench. It is only in aggregation and comparison of stratigraphy, features, objects, and relationships that real archaeological knowledge emerges. 

So over five years, we’ve moved from the rush of providing a window into life and work of an archaeological project to the prospects of almost immediate data transparency.

Some Photos from the Working Group in Digital and New Media Showcase

When I started this blog several years ago, I regularly included more news-like updates about my day to day academic life (whether here in North Dakotaland or in Athens, Greece). At some point, the blog drifted more toward being a research journal. In the end, I don’t have a tremens personal or ideological commitment to one form of blogging or the others.

So, I’ll offer some photographs from last Tuesday’s Working Group in Digital and New Media event at the Firehall Theatre in Grand Forks.  The presentations were lively and the food was amazing (and generously provided by the Cyprus Research Fund).

The photos are by Ryan Stander.

The assembled masses

Prof. Crystal Alberts served as an able M.C.

One of Prof. Paul Worley’s characters from the Yucatan where he works with Prof. Joel Jonientz to produce Maya language animated films.

Prof. Travis Dessel, the newest Working Group member, discusses the use of volunteer computing to document Wildlife@home.

Graduate Student Jim Champion presents his marvelous melting sculptures

Prof. Tim Pasch and Prof. Mike Wittgraf make digital music together

The event saw over 50 people come out to see the fantastic digital and new media works of my colleagues, and we considered that a great crowd for the first effort to showcase the efforts of the Working Group in front of the wider university and local community.

 

The Realities of Archaeological Data from Small Projects

Over the weekend, I devoted some thought to a call for papers for a joint colloquium at next years Archaeological Institute of America/American Philological Association meeting. The colloquium is entitled: “Managing Archaeological Data in the Digital Age: Best Practices and Realities” and it sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology of Greece Interest Group and the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communications. That’s a mouthful.

David Pettegrew and I were nudged to propose a paper that looks at some of the unique challenges facing small projects like our Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus.  Our project was new in 2003, documented an archaeological assemblage that was largely independent of earlier work at the site or in the region, and lacked substantial institutional support for custom application development or cyber-infrastructure. In these areas, I suspect, that our project was similar to many smaller archaeological projects in the Mediterranean and my hope is that we should be able to generalize from our case study in three key areas.

First, whereas larger projects can create elaborate, bespoke applications and interfaces to collect and disseminate archaeological data, small projects tend to use more off-the-shelf components for data capture, organization, and analysis. As a result, there is the possibility that small project data get tied up more easily in proprietary software formats and require a greater degree of post-processing to produce archival collections. Small projects can often find themselves in situations where they have privileged immediate utility over  commitment to complex, platform agnostic best practices.

Second, large projects have led the way in creating highly-visible, longterm digital archives for their data. Small projects, in contrast, rarely have the resources to invest in longterm data storage and maintenance. Many small and mid-sized universities continue to lack the necessary in-house cyber-infrastructure and the number and diversity of potential external solutions – from both private foundation initiatives and major research centers and universities – present a bewildering array of options. The key concerns for our small project is ease in data transfer, long-term integrity of the archive, and accessibility. The archive has to be a place where other scholars know to seek out archaeological data from small projects as the future value of smaller datasets will often come from its availability for larger comparative or synthetic studies. The more other scholars place smaller project datasets in a broader context, the more significant that results of small-scale intensive fieldwork become. Where small projects should archive their data and how existing institutions can support these practices in ways to make small project data visible and useful remain open issues without simple answers.

Finally, over the past 20 years there are persistent conversations regarding the value of data standards in archaeology. The responses to these conversations are predictable. Some projects value the utility of their own data formats, terminologies, and ontologies arguing that all data serves best to contribute to existing archives and to enjoy compatibility with longstanding, often local, practices. Our small project, in contrast, tended to produce data that answered a particular, limited set of research questions and lacked any obvious and practical obligation to longstanding data conventions. As a result, we employed a vocabulary that was consistent with a larger project on the island – the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project and an established American excavation – Corinth Excavations. Our point is not to recommend that all projects conform to this particular standard, but rather to point out that our project conformed to these two standards in an effort to make our data more accessible for comparison and more immediately comprehensible to scholars not familiar with our particular procedures and methods.

The future will judge the value of the data produced by small project by its persistent utility.

Digital Humanities and Professional Advancement

This afternoon I’m getting together with some of my colleagues from the arts, social sciences, and humanities to discuss the place of digital humanities in professional advancement both on campus and in our disciplines more broadly. The meeting will occur under the auspices of the Working Group in Digital and New Media and be the first attempt to use the standing of our group on campus to address pressing concerns facing scholars working in digital and new media. The goal is to identify key issues that impact all of our positions on campus and to produce a white paper for administrators, the university senate, and colleagues over the winter months.  We hope to pay particular attention to potential limitation in existing tenure, retention, and promotion policies that could discourage or inhibit the advancement of scholars active in the digital humanities. Since our group includes members from across campus our focus will naturally be broad.

Assembling a sensible list of concerns facing scholars who work primary in the digital realm is difficult. The issues range from the very basic – like very limited understanding of the differences between digital and print projects – to the more complex: inconsistent infrastructural support, uncertain attitudes toward collaboration, and the lack of established metrics to evaluate scholars who work heavily in the digital realm.  We do not have a plan or a list of priorities for the meeting (in part, the goal of the meeting is to establish a list of priorities as we move forward), but I’ll offer my own list of things that should be on the agenda.

1. Institutional Support. The greatest problem facing digital humanities (and I include digital history and archaeology in this group) is the lack of institutional support. On the one hand, with any new approach to organizing and producing knowledge, a lag between institutional adaptation and the development of the field is to be expected. On the other hand, the humanities have traditionally received only modest funding for research. This has become particularly problematic for digital humanists since much of their work relies upon (relatively) expensive technologies (hardware and software), access to specialists, and resources for developing new collections of research material. In the hard and applied sciences, start up grants would help to defray these costs and these are often funded from “indirect costs” produced from grants awarded to more established scholars. There are fewer resources for such start up funds in the digital humanities (although they are not entirely absent), in part, because there are very few indirect costs produced from traditional humanities research. In order to generate a pool of funds to support digital humanities start-up costs, the institution must make the initial investment. And for the institution to make this investment, they must see the potential for a return.

The primary problem with the lack of start up funding in the digital humanities is that it delays the production of scholarship by new faculty or faculty new to the digital humanities. As a result, new faculty in the digital humanities must spend time securing resources and building infrastructure for their own research and this delays the ability of faculty to be competitive for external grants, for example, and to produce material for their own internal advancement.

To have a successful group of scholars in the digital humanities, a greater investment in sustaining infrastructure and in early career support for faculty with digital research needs.

2. Collaboration. Synergy is one of the newest watchwords at the University of North Dakota. From what I can gather, it refers to collaboration on campus that produces more energy than it expends. Fortunately, the digital humanities has long relied upon dynamic synergies to meld traditional concerns of scholars in literature, history, and archaeology with digital technology. This combination has then produced new approaches to long-standing problems and opened up new venues for scholarly and creative inquiry. Collaboration, however, has not always squared with traditional scholarly approaches in the humanities. Co-authored research, grants, and co-directed projects often stand at odds with traditions of solitary scholarly work, and this has challenged departments as they seek to evaluate new collaborative ventures in the humanities.

As scholars engaged in collaborative synergies, we have a responsibility to educate our colleagues as to the nature and challenges of collaborative scholarship in the humanities. In doing this, we have the opportunity to create new paradigms of collaboration that are less dependent upon this generated in the hard and applied sciences. In particular, we can advocate approaches that downplay the key role of a single “primary investigator” and demonstrate how scholars can contribute to projects in ways that deserve equal credit.  Moreover, we can advocate for policies on campus that both reward and facilitate collaboration in scholarship and teaching across departments, programs, and colleges, as well as on the national and international level.

3. Publishing Problems. Perhaps the most practical issue facing scholars in the digital humanities is the impact of digital scholarship on traditional modes of publishing. In a simplest sense,digital humanists regularly produce scholarly and creative works (video, databases, electronic texts, et c.) that are incompatible with or fall outside the traditional limits of print scholarship. More importantly, perhaps, they are often asked to develop their own means of dissemination, review, and preservation of these scholarly work (and at institutions that lack a substantial digital infrastructure the problems of dissemination and preservation of digital work are particularly acute).

More importantly for individual scholars, the criteria for evaluating digital scholarship and creative work remains in the state of flux. Digital, peer-review journals are now sufficiently well regarded outlets for born digital and new and multimedia publications. Unfortunately these kinds of publications are only suitable for a tiny fraction of the output from digital scholars who increasingly work in media and genres that do not necessarily have a tradition of peer review or do not measure their impact through traditional methods of citation tracking.

As with all emerging academic areas, scholars in the digital arts and humanities have a responsibility to educate their colleagues and institutions about the challenge they face and the opportunities that their work provides. Producing a ‘white paper’ from the Working Group in Digital and New Media will be a local step toward making the University of North Dakota a better home for scholars in these exciting new fields.

Working Group in Digital and New Media Annual Report

People who read this blog know that I have a super abundance of ideas. In fact, I have a category for ideas (it’s my idea box).

My idea for offering massive open online courses here at the University of North Dakota did not come to pass.

My scheme for a “teaching sabbatical” where faculty are released from other responsibilities to just focus on teaching vanished into the ether.

My plan for block-by-block local history may be stillborn. There is no new media portal for archaeologists (yet).

Archaeology of North Dakota man-camps is simmering (and the grant writing is underway), so it still has some life to it.

Sometimes, everyone once-in-a-while, an idea that I helped to cultivate does come to fruition.  This past week saw the publication of our Working Group in Digital and New Media 2011 Annual Report. The report documents the project undertaken by a group of faculty here at UND in conjunction with the Working Group in Digital and New Media. This is the second fully functioning year of the Working Group’s existence. The Working Group received an initial infusion of cash based on a White Paper submitted to the University President in response to a call for new collaborative ideas on campus. Since that time, the Working Group has receive no additional funding from the University, but has continued to provide space for and to foster innovation and collaboration in the digital realm.  So check out the report below. I prepared the text (based on small reports from the various contributing faculty) and Joel Jonientz prepared the design:

View this document on Scribd

For the 2010 annual report go here.

A Cool, Busy Week

This is the time of the semester when my calendar fills up with events, meetings, and activities. In some years, this has been a relentless drag from meeting to meeting. This year, however, there are some really cool things going on. So, here’s a inducement to check out the activities this week.

First, the Department of Art and Design (and others!) are hosting their Arts and Culture Conference on campus. The theme is: Politics and the Graphic Image.

The headliners of this conference are the members of the WW3 collective. The group, founded by Peter Kuper and Sethe Tobocman, has produced a politically charged comic World War 3 Illustrated since 1978.  The conference includes discussions with these two artists as well as fellow contributor Sabrina Jones. They have gallery shows at both the Hughes Fine Arts center and at the Third Street Gallery (downtown). The WW3 folks will talk about their work in a round table format Tuesday at 3 in the Ballroom of the Union!

Tuesday, October 25
Seth Tobocman – Artist’s Lecture
9:30am, Hughes Fine Arts Center Room 227

Sabrina Jones – Artist’s Lecture
12:30pm, Gillette Hall Room 303

WW3 Panel featuring Peter Kuper, Seth Tobocman and Sabrina Jones
3:00pm, UND Memorial Union, River Valley Room

Wednesday, October 26
Peter Kuper – Artist Lecture
11:30am – Hughes Fine Arts Center Room 227

2002 Pulitzer Prize Winning Cartoonist Clay Bennet In Conversation,
3:00pm, Hughes Fine Arts Center
Josephine Campbell Recital Hall

This Wednesday at noon, the Working Group in Digital and New will host working group member, Mike Wittgraf, who will talk about Music and Computer/Human Interaction: Interface and Improvisation in the Working Group lab. Mike is an international master of computer mediated music of all kinds. He’s going to present some of his work on our fabulous sound system and talk about the technology and theory behind the next wave of music and computer/human interaction.

Be sure to check out the Music Department’s trumpet recital on Thursday night where Mike will premier his work Gold Digger (for four trumpets and a computer).

 

Workshops, Conferences, and Lectures

The next few weeks will be busy ones here at the University of the Northern Plains.

On Friday and Saturday, the University of North Dakota will host the International Anchoritic Society Conference at the Memorial Union on campus.  I’ll be giving a paper at 10:45 in the Badlands room titled “Liminal Time and Liminal Space in the Middle Byzantine Hagiography of Greece and the Aegean“. The title is rather more ambitious than the paper!

Next Friday, September 23rd, at noon in the Working Group in Digital and New Media Lab inimitable Tim Pasch and I are teaming up to produce a short workshop on Digitizing Your Workflow. (I really wanted to call it Digitizing Yo Workflo, but people might not get it.)  The workshop will be particularly geared toward graduate students in the humanities and social sciences and introduce some useful digital tools that will help them streamline their workflow.

Finally, on September 28th, I’m giving a lecture in the OLLI lecture series here on campus that will provide an overview of the island of Cyprus and my work there. Unfortunately, as far as I understand it, this lecture will not be open to the public, which is a bit of a bummer, but maybe there will be a way to stream it live or record it.

 

Hacking the Academy

This past week University of Michigan’s Digital Culture Book imprint published the edited version of the Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt project Hacking the Academy.  For anyone interested in the fertile intersection of digital culture and university life, the book is a must-read. Moreover, its unique format and production process represents one of the best examples of an emerging model of academic writing. The content for the book prepared from contributions via blogs, twitter, email and other digital media in a single week. (Longshot magazine has followed a similar model to produce a complete magazine in 48 hours.)

So as per my usual practice, I won’t indulge in a full review but offer three largely unrelated comments:

1. As cool as the concept of aggregating a book over one week is, I struggle in some ways to understand why it is important for academic publishing and writing to engage in such an experiment. Cohen and Scheinfeldt suggest that having a single week to compose on a particular topic served “to better focus [contributors] attention and energy.” I suppose this is a valid point. And I do know colleagues who continue to hold to undergraduate mantra of “working better under pressure”.

On the other hand, it seems like academia remains a bastion of the “slow food” type of writing. Unlike journalism or the even more rapid world of the blogosphere, the research, writing, and publication of academic writing tends to be a reflective and deliberate process. It’s not that I don’t think academia can benefit from the kind of instant gratification produced by such scholarly “fast food” (after all, I do blog!), but I do wonder whether this model of production should culminate in a print publication.

In fact, most of the posts in this short book are thought-provoking, but light on references, hard evidence, and “next level” thinking. In other words, the book captures the kind of early stage thinking found in the academic blogosphere. Making research projects visible at an early stage is useful for innumerable reasons (it brands an idea, it makes it possible to get critique early in a project’s life, the act of articulating an idea many times helps to refine it, et c.), but the difference between the initial articulation of ideas and the “final” product remains a distinct character of scholarly writing.

If I were envisioning a project like Hacking the Academy, I might have asked the authors whose contributions were accepted to envelope their initial contribution in a more formal reflective essay that both takes into account the original context of the contribution, and also places it in a more refined context.

2. The essays offer well-worn, but still exciting ideas about using technology to change the way that the academic culture does things. The contributors attacks on traditional forms of scholarly publication (particularly the profit driven practices associated with some academic journals) were effective and well-reasoned.  As they expanded their critique to academic culture more broadly, however, a certain kind of naiveté seemed to creep into their writing.

The contributors seemed reluctant to engage the elephant on campus: TRUTH.  Many of my colleagues are reluctant to engage with the process driven and transparent practices of digital scholarship because they see anything short of peer-reviewed, formal, academic publications as being short on access to TRUTH.  The contributors to Hacking the Academy attempt to make clear that the origins of academic publication in a world where print was an expensive and exclusive commodity created certain procedures like peer review designed to ensure the quality of material committed to print. Today, however, the peer review process for many of my colleagues represents the line between the proliferation of half-baked, ill-informed, unTRUE ideas and the glistening utopia of TRUE knowledge. Despite the powerful influence of the postmodern critique, attitudes that see the traditional scholarly process as the imprimatur of true knowledge continue to carry sway in the academy. So attacks on traditional scholarly publishing as profit-driven, slow, exclusive, and bastions of secret agendas and vested interests, overlook the most common rhetorical position occupied by its supporters. The contributors to Hacking the Academy might not buy this argument, but they still need to find a response to it.

3. While I remain largely sympathetic to the contributors to this volume, I was also disappointed not to see more considerations of the limits of digital tools to reform the academy. After all, scholars who insisted on double-blind peer review and the stodgy ways associated with traditional academic publishing, did so as part of a democratizing process that was remarkably similar to that advocated by today’s digital scholars. There are, of course, issues confronting the “digital-turn”. Preservation, archiving, and curation of digital objects remains problematic.  It remains unclear whether the coming digital information utopia will be fully realized on a global scale. The skills necessary to navigate the flood of data, applications, and tools remain daunting even to scholars who keep their fingers on the digital pulse. Finally, the tools necessary to generate and distribute digital collections remain exclusive and – as anyone who has taught a digital history course knows – expensive. While electrons are free, the tools needed to organize them into useful patterns remain dear.

~~~~

These critiques, however, should not take away from the through-provoking character of this book. The contributions are short, pithy, and a fun to read. The contributors found interesting and effective ways to include comments generated via Twitter or email. And the book will likely stand as a testimony to a moment in time in the academy’s confrontation with our digital future.

Archaeology as Remix

This past week, I romped through Mark Amerika’s newest book Remixthebook (Minneapolis 2011). As with his previous non-fiction-ish offerings, this book defied categorizing and description. I was mostly a meditation on his creative process taking as a point of departure his creative work as a performance VJ, as an author, and as a critic. He focused primarily on the links between creativity and the work of remixing our lived worlds. His argument, laced through a complex, poetic text, is that to be alive, creative, and conscious is to exist in a constant flow of spontaneous, post-production remixing. As his definition of creativity expands and his understanding of remixing grows more ragged, the lived, creative, and performative become a blur and increasingly stand in for reality.

As archaeologists, we are in a constant state of remixing. Even the most basic archaeological arguments require us to move between times (the present and the past, relative and absolute dates, stratigraphy and periodization), move between media (ceramics, architecture, lithics, texts, digital data, images, maps, plans), move between voices (the art historian, the historian, the scientist, the critic, and the skeptic), and move between genres (narrative, analysis, catalogue, data). Our work flow is punctuated by the constant shifting between software, media (of different shapes, sizes, genre, forms), and our own creative output.  Archaeological work is a process of constantly performing and remixing bits (both in the traditional sense and increasingly the digital sense) into new objects that present themselves for remixing.

1. This next week, Amy Papalexandrou has asked me to help her produce a 20 page synthetic, interpretative text for an exhibit catalog for an upcoming exhibit at the Princeton Art Museum -City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. Our short paper will look at the Late Antique to Medieval city and remix over 30 years of archaeological work, the physical objects present at Princeton, and our most recent research at the site (which is itself the remixing of finds, notebooks, architecture, past-texts, and archaeological method to perform new arguments and new syntheses). In our somewhat-harried correspondence, we took as points of departure an inscription, a short-video I narrated on site, and our most recent research. It goes without saying that the previous scholarship on the site forms a persistent backing track for our remix.

More importantly, we are writing a text that is designed for an informed and interest public, rather than a professional group of scholars, students, or researchers. So while our source material will – more or less – be the same as any other production of our site, our audience will be a bit different. The remix has context and responds to its environment.

2. I’ve been working with a small group of students to produce a public, digital history exhibit on the 50th Anniversary of the Chester Fritz Library (which is the main library on campus here). The students are busy pulling together photographs, texts, documents, and other objects from the university archives. They are also working on how to integrate these objects across a range of digital media – a blog, a Twitter feed, an Omeka.net page, and a Flickr account – and to narrate using these objects across these various spaces.  While the source base for our remix is not so different from that confronting any scholar looking to produce historical analysis, the output of our work is quite different. We are intentionally distributing our remix across multiple media and thinking actively how our remixes (as a team and as individuals) will be unique to our audience.

In the context of our work with the library, we’re following Amerika’s lead by using the context of remix to join the work of the “authors” with the work of the audience.  By preserving (re-producing?) some of the fragmented state of the original media (individual texts, documents, objects), we attempt to entice people to remix our material in new ways. We’ve performed the initial act of selection and become partners in the conversation.

3. In an effort to think more radically about the notion of remixing, I’ve begun a conversation with Tim Pasch – a computer guru type in Communications at the University of North Dakota. We both have an interest in sound and he records his own, highly-textured digital music. In the course of these conversations, he mentioned software that could translate digital images to sounds. This makes sense, of course, a digital image is a just a gaggle of digital data that could be read by any interface to produce output.  The data behind a digital image could be rendered as text, images, sound or almost any medium imaginable via suitable software.

As we chatted about this, I offered to send him raster images from my project in Cyprus and invited him to use images which show the distribution of pottery, the survey grid, or topography and to render them as sounds. We’ve even discusses the potential for capturing sonic landscapes using both microphones, but more radically – capturing images with an explicit eye toward transforming them into sounds. Remixing the landscape would, then, extend beyond simply filtering digital data collected from the landscape and incorporate using the software filters as a lens for primary data collection.

Methods, Questions, and Digital Archaeology

Amidst the beginning of the semester din, I did capture enough time to settled in and read a new book: E. Kansa, S. Witcher Kansa, and Ethan Watrall eds., Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration. (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (UCLA) 2011).  The book is a product of a session at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in 2008 and is the first volume in the new Cotsen Digital Archaeology Series. It is published with a Creative Common BY-SA license (By Attribution, Share Alike).  The volume is available for free here.

This book may well become a landmark volume in the history of archaeology and the bundle of technologies that we associated with Web 2.0.  The volume spans a range of topics from core infrastructure, to technical and theoretical concerns, collaborative research environments, and realistic perspectives on sustainability.  Each of the topics considers the significance of Web 2.0 technologies in advancing the way in which archaeologists organize, produce, and share data on the web.  The credentials of the participants in this volume speak for themselves and their body of technical work is cutting edge.  More than taking a leap into the future, the book captures a precise moment in the history of the discipline’s long-term engagement with technology.

The greatest strength of this book is that it is steeped in the practical realities of archaeological data sharing.  For the contributors, data sharing is not merely the exchange of raw data (databases, spreadsheets, GIS and CAD arrays, or whatever), but the full range of conversations that Web 2.0 (variously defined) technologies has made possible. User-generated archaeological information has changed the way that archaeologists conduct research.

At the same time, the contributors to this volume remained profoundly realistic. No one imagined a situation where all data is stored in some great archive but rather in a distributed way across numerous different archives on the web.  The different organization of data, the limited ability to centralize resources, and the institutional structure of the discipline present significant obstacles to any single method imagined to accommodate the mass of pre-existing and born-digital archaeological data.  In the place of the fantasy of a single repository, comes more sophisticated ways to syndicate, integrate, and query (and search) for archaeological data across the web like those provided by the Alexandria Archive’s Open Context and Michigan State’s iAKS.

The web has radically changed concepts of visibility, collaboration, and scholarly performance so it is now possible to consider projects like the online UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology to be equal (if not superior) to traditional print publications. Blog, social media, and other collaborative spaces have become important avenues for certain types of archaeological conversations. (It was flattering to see my blog mentioned in Sarah Witcher Kansa’s and Francie Deblauwe’s article on middle space in scholarly communication in zooarchaeology (it would have been even cooler had they spelled my name right!)).

While much of the book went over well-trod ground among those who follow trends in the digital humanities, the scope, accessibility, and intensely reasonable perspectives offered by the authors made the book particularly compelling. There was little in the way of naive sensationalism or even the utopian tech-evangelism that is sometimes found in these kinds of volumes. The limits of funding, issues of sustainability, and the need to protect certain kinds of sensitive data appear as serious considerations without simple answers. While this is a reality among scholars discussing digital archaeology and history, it rarely seems to be so fully articulated and recognized in the texts that these scholars produce imagining the digital futures of our disciplines.

The greatest limitation of this text comes not from the technological side, but rather from the intellectual or academic side.  An issue that I have raised on my blog before stems from reflecting on the interpretative agendas advanced by many Mediterranean archaeologists.  While the idea exists that it could be possible to collect data from numerous projects, across a vast area, and crunch it into a broad reaching, novel synthetic perspective, I think that it remains an open question whether there is a substantial scholarly interest in this kind of research. Vast, quantitative studies of even single regions – from single data sets – remain relatively rare in our field. And, there are significant questions whether the quality of data produced even in the most carefully monitored projects reach a sufficient standard to allow for complex generalizations across regions.

Moreover, more qualitative analysis – which does not rely necessarily upon the raw data of excavation or survey, but on published objects – is becoming better served by the greater accessibility and visibility of standard print publications via various journal databases and projects like Google books.  (And it is worth noting that standard issues like naming of various vessel types, places, or even contexts (across multiple languages) are not any more easily resolved in databases than in more traditional publications).

In my world, most academic archaeologists design their field research to collect data that answers a particular question. Their research question, then, absorbs their energy, structures their data, and shapes their interpretative and publication strategies. In fact, the absence of useful data is often the reality that prompts fieldwork. At the same time, the inadequacy of other projects’ data is the conceit that makes one’s own data stand apart. This is not to say that comparative analysis does not occur between projects or that we don’t search for comparative “type-fossils”, but rather that this work tends never to be a major research priority. In fact, in Mediterranean archaeology tends to approach comparative analysis from the attitude that “our data” is unique and meaningful in and of itself, and other data “merely” provides it with context. (I do understand that this is not the same process for professional archaeologists or CRM types. There is obvious and tremendous value to the various digital projects described in the volume that sought to open up the vast body of “grey literature” to a wider professional audience.)

The issues facing large scale data distribution schemes isn’t, then, a technological one, but rather a more profoundly methodological one. Archaeologists simply are not asking the kinds of questions (yet) that queries across vast swaths of intensively produced data would support. So, the lack of support for the massive data repositories, comes as much from the intellectual limitations of our discipline as from institutional, professional, or technological concerns.

This being said, I do recognize that changes in technology does shift the conceptual footing of the discipline, but the nature of archaeology as a craft (as opposed to a more rigorously standardized science or profession) remains a major limitation to how scholars think about data.