The subtle difference

Final slide from the presentation of Gareth Beale
summarises it all.

Isto participated in the the second annual conference of the Centre for Digital Heritage collaboration in Århus, titled Digital Heritage 3D on 3D knowledge production and representation. The two day event was closed a bit earlier today and there is a good reason to congratulate the colleagues at Århus University for excellent work for putting together a small enough (to let everyone talk to each other) high quality meeting.

A number of important points were made during the presentations from a good number of people around Europe. Some common themes to mention was that it is apparent that now when there is a broad array of relatively inexpensive 3D technologies available, the focus of interest is shifting to questions like 3D workflows, infrastructures and (social) everyday life of sharing and working with data. Gareth Beale (York) summarised the infrastructural aspect of this issue in his slide that asks (for a good reason) where we are at the moment regarding the infrastructures and their use.

Isto's paper "The subtle difference between knowledge and 3D knowledge" discussed the differences of knowledge and 3D knowledge with a specific focus on the contextual and technological frames of knowledge production using 3D technologies. When people are doing "3D" it is important to be explicit what is actually being done, what tools, techniques and algorithms are used and in which kind of a context the 'thing' is being produced and consumed. Depending on these factors and the frame of doing 3D in terms of its purposes all have implications to the outcome.

Upcoming: ARKDIS at the Information Access Seminar, UC Berkeley School of Information

"...RELEVANT, USABLE, AND ACCESSIBLE TO ALL...". ON DOCUMENTATION IDEALS FOR EXTRA-ACADEMIC RESEARCH, THE CASE OF DEVELOPMENT-LED ARCHAEOLOGY

Information Access Seminar

Friday, April 10, 2015, 3:10 pm - 5:00 pm

107 South Hall, UC Berkeley

In several disciplines, such as medicine and engineering, significant parts of the knowledge production take place outside academic research. Another such discipline is archaeology. Most archaeological surveys are conducted as development-led archaeology prior to land development. The documentation of such surveys is surrounded by legislation and guidelines. In this seminar we will take a closer look at the documentation ideals in those regulations. Additionally we will discuss how those ideals are interpreted by authorities in archaeology, notably academic archaeologists, museum professionals, and government professionals. From a distance, and with some humor, these ideals and interpretations may be likened to an administrative meltdown and they present an enigmatic challenge for the professionals who try to do the actual documentation. The seminar will focus on the case of archaeology, but the discussion will also be extended to the general circumstances for documentation and communication of extra-academic research today.

Bio: 

Lisa Börjesson, M.A., is a second-year doctoral student from Uppsala University in Sweden. During Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 she is a visiting student researcher at School of Information. Her research is a part of the research project Archaeological Information in the Digital Society (ARKDIS).

ARKDIS at GL16, Washington D.C. 8-9th December 2014

ARKDIS represented at Sixteenth International Conference on Grey Literature: Grey Literature Lobby - Engines and Requesters for Change at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

The GL16 conference covered the topics 'Public Awareness of Grey Literature', 'Publishing and Licensing Grey Literature', Open Access to Research Data' and 'Managing Change in Grey Literature'. The ARKDIS doctoral student Lisa Börjesson contributed by presenting her dissertation research concerning the understanding of professional reports in archaeology. Perhaps the most relevant conference contribution supporting the ARKDIS research in this area came from the research program Environmental Information: Use and Influence at Dalhousie University (CAN). In a conference paper researchers Bertrum H. MacDonald, James D. Ross, Suzette S. Soomi, and Peter G. Wells state "Advocates of grey literature may believe this genre is undervalued or misunderstood, but lobbying for grey literature in the absence of understanding the contexts in which it is or can be used will likely fail unless information activity in those setting is understood."  (GL16 program book, ISSN 1385-2308, p. 32). The ARKDIS research regarding the settings where archaeology grey literature take shape will arguably contribute to a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of grey literature in Swedish archaeology. 

ARKDIS at “Digital Heritage 2014 – Communities in Action”

Digital Heritage is an annual conference organized by the Center for Digital Heritage. This year’s theme “Communities in Action” explored the concept of community in digital heritage research and practices. Catherine Clarke, professor in English at the University of Southampton delivered a keynote on the different points of departure different communities have when engaging in a heritage experience. Based on her work  developing digital heritage applications for British communities with differing spatial relations to their material heritage, professor Clarke argues heritage is as much about difference and discontinuity, as it is about continuity.

The conference contributions covered a wide range of approaches to digital applications in heritage management and dissemination; besides a number of talks on on various visual interpretations of the past an entire section of the conference was dedicated to auralizations – interpretations of the sound of the past. 

ARKDIS was represented by Ph.D. student Lisa Börjesson and her colleague Olle Sköld, also from the department of ALM at Uppsala University. Börjesson and Sköld presented a short paper on ontologies of digital games as heritage.

What is going on in digital archaeology?

Isto and Daniel are at the moment at the annual Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods conference (CAA 2014) in Paris. The conference gathered this time around 400 archaeologists and archaeology interested researchers and practitioners from other disciplines to discuss on-going practical work and some glimpses of the state-of-the-art of digital, computational and informational aspects of archaeology. In addition to the long-time favourite topics of the conference, GIS and 3D, this year there was a rather notable presence of the papers relating to the historical and theoretical issues of archaeological computing (commemorating the work of late Jean-Claude Gardin) and another track on agent-based modelling. Open and linked data were also present both in the titles and the contents of many papers.

Isto presented a stakeholder analysis of archaeological archiving in Sweden titled Process and appropriation in the digitalisation of archaeological archives and archiving practices. The abstract of the presentation is below:

In contrast to the considerable investments in creating technologies, infrastructures and standards for digitalisation, preservation and dissemination of archaeological heritage, there is still only little indepth research on the consequences, opportunities and implications of digitalisation to archaeological work, the emergence of archaeological knowledge and how it is used by diverse stakeholder groups from ordinary citizens to researchers, museum professionals, landowners and property developers. Apart from the excavating or prospecting archaeologist with a personal experience of a particular site, the principal source of information for other stakeholders is the 'archaeological archive'. There are on-going national and international (e.g. ARCHES-project and the archives workgroup of European Archaeologiae Consilium) initiatives to standardise archiving practices in archaeology and a relative long albeit somewhat slender line of theoretical and practice oriented research on the topic (e.g., Merriman and Swain, 1999; Swain, 2006; Brown, 2011; Lucas, 2010). What is lacking, but would support the practical work and to contextualise earlier theoretical openings, is a broader empirical understanding of the everyday premises of how archaeological archives are managed in practice and how archiving is and is not related to the development of archaeological information systems, databases and archaeological information management practices.

The presentation reports of a Swedish interview study that explicates and maps the work practices and perspectives of the primary stakeholders of archaeological archives. The analysis of the interview records show that there are multiple technical, legislative, conceptual and structural problems that complicate the building, management and use of archaeological archives. Privatisation of archaeological fieldwork, the diversity of involved actors, and often diverging practical and statutory requiments and responsibilities of preserving different types of materials. Further, the digitisation and growth of the amount documentation material has brought demands for effective means of capturing and preserving new forms of data, but also a need to reconsider the concepts of “archaeological archive” and ”archaeological data”, and their functions in archaeology and the society as a whole. The analysis shows that the different actors appropriate (as e.g., in Ramiller and Chiasson, 2008; Twidale et al., 2008) rather than share or even translate the ideas of archaeological information process, archaeological data and archives from a widely different premises to fit their urgent priorities. The findings have several both theoretical and practical implication to the mapping of the digitalising archaeological information processes from the perspectives of different stakeholder groups, standardisation and documentation of current practices and clearer definition of responsibilities, explicit allocation of budgets for archival tasks and the explicit acknowledgement of the diversity of how archaeological information is produced, archived and used.

3D and/or data management at CHNT18

The 18th incarnation of the Conference on Cultural heritage and new technology (CHNT18), earlier in its prehistory known as workshop Archäologie und Computer had several tracks, but somehow it seemed that the two main themes that have been prevailing for the last 15 or so years are still going strong: 3D and data management. In some sense we are still discussing about how to create impressive (both technically and visually) models and representations of archaeological entities and presenting yet another open and "open"  (relational) database solutions for the documentation of archaeological data of which the latter ones tend to be geared either toward heritage management or documentation needs of individual projects or institutions. Apart from ARCHES project and ARIADNE infrastructure related session, there is very little concrete talk about preservation.

Even if there might be some reason to be a bit cynic, the field is progressing. The use of 3D for research purposes, quick capture and processing of data for specific rather than "this might be somehow useful" -purposes, and development of data management for actual (albeit sometimes narrow) needs of researchers and heritage managers are something that wasn't discussed too much for some years ago. Also the whole focus on research infrastructures and the acknowledgement of (at least in principle) the benefits of open and well-documented data is something that is quite laudable even if many obstacles are still on the way to a large scale deployment of interoperable infrastructures. Further, a significant aspect is the interest and initiative of major regional and national authorities on these initiatives instead of individual geeks (as was the case for a decade ago) interested in such metaphysical things as data and information management. The fact is that an infrastructure is not sustainable without a backing of the responsible authorities, either directly as their owners or committed sponsors of broader international and/or community efforts.

The ARKDIS project participated the event with a poster and a presentation by Isto on the aspects of determining documentation and authenticity of archaeological entities on the basis of a study of how archaeologists interpret a ball-point pen as if it would be an archaeological object.

ARKDIS at CHNT conference in Vienna

ARKDIS-project will be presented on Tuesday Nov 12, 2013 at the CHNT conference in Vienna by Isto with a poster on the project and a presentation of a case study of a potential method  for documentation of the features and interpretations of archaeological objects, features and structures. Presentation materials can be found at istohuvila.se