Research article seminar "Information Policy for Sustainable Digitization in Archaeology? – A Critical Analysis"

Wednesday November 26th, 14:15-16.00, room 3/0015, Department of ALM, Uppsala university.

The article is an ongoing collaboration between M.A. Lisa Börjesson (Uppsala University), associate professor Isto Huvila (Åbo akademi/Uppsala University) and associate professor Bodil Petersson (Linneaus University) within ARKDIS (Archaeological Information in the Digital Society).

Article abstract

The introduction of digital data capturing and management technologies have changed information practices in archaeology. Digital information is more integrated than ever in each archaeologists’ daily work. Initiatives and institutions on international, national and regional levels like Archaeology Data Service (ADS) in the UK, the Swedish National Data Service (SND) and the Swedish National Heritage Board’s Digital Archaeological Processes (DAP) project aim at assisting individual archaeologists’ and research institutions’ digital archiving and digital curation. But what is the state of information policy in archaeology today? Do Swedish archaeology has an up-to-date, consistent and anticipatory policy guiding decision-making concerning archaeological information? As knowledge production in archaeology heavily depends on documentation and information dissemination, and on retrieval of past documentation the question of an appropriate information policy is profoundly intertwined with the possibilities for archaeology knowledge production. Furthermore, as archaeology is either partly publicly funded (as is generally the case with academic research archaeology in Europe) or regulated by publicly funded bodies (as is the case with all surveys to some degree), the funding societies have a great economic interest in coordinated and efficient information practices in archaeology. In this article we analyse information policy and discuss how policy plays out in three different contexts in Swedish archaeology: the contract archaeology sector, the museum sector and the archive sector. Throughout the analysis we make international comparisons as we strive to highlight the international relevance of the discussion of information policy development for sustainable digitization in archaeology. The aim of this article is to raise the question of how information policy for archaeology can develop to support consistency and sustainability in the information practices currently developing.

If you wish to read the text prior to the seminar, please contact Lisa. See you there!

Archaeological information in the social media

Isto's article Engagement has its consequences: the emergence of the representations of archaeology in social media about the representation and communication of archaeology in the social media was recently published in the journal Archäologishe Informationen. Even if social media is often seen mainly as an instrument for outreach from the archaeologists to the public, it is a two- way channel of communication and a context for participation and negotiation that consists of an information infrastructure, content and participants. The article discusses the consequences and implications of the bidirectionality of social media. The discussion is based on an empirical study of the representations and reappropriations of archaeology in four different social media services (Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, Pinterest). The analysis shows how the popular and scholarly archaeological information is appropriated in the social media services and how the efforts to engage people lead to a double bind of engagement. People engage archaeologists but also other members of the public to participate in an exchange of knowledge and negotiation of the nature and relevance of archaeology. The findings of the study shed light on the emerging patterns of how the use of social media can affect not only the popular ideas of archaeology and the contexts of its relevance, but also archaeological knowledge (i.e. what is known and what is desirable to be known), its documentary representations and the essence of the archaeological work itself.

The full text of the article is freely available at http://dx.doi.org/10.11588/ai.2013.0.15382

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.

Arkdis workshop on Digital Agendas at Linnaeus University

During the 3 and 4 of June 2014 the Arkdis research group met in Växjö, Sweden, to discuss how digital agendas at different levels affect the digitization process of archaeology. Invited presenters during the workshop were Annelie Ekelin, Linnaeus University, Annelie Krell, Region Skåne, Karl Magnus Lenntorp, Region Skåne, Maria Casagrande, Skånes Hembygdsförbund, and Björn Magnusson Staaf, Lund University. The presentations held were on topics such as digital agendas on a European, national and regional/local level, on how digital approaches are supported by regional authorities and on how the support is realized in different projects and presentations. One thing that was elucidated during the workshop was that agendas affect the outcomes in both predicted and unpredicted ways. As a result of this workshop our research group is now preparing for a written debate on the topic of digital agendas and archaeology/cultural heritage.

Archiving archaeology: Preliminary observations from a stakeholder study

The question of archiving, preserving and providing access to the outcomes of archaeological investigations has received more and more interest during the past decade. Considerable investments have been made in creating technologies, infrastructures and standards for digitalisation, preservation and dissemination of archaeological heritage. In contrast to the technical and infrastructural work, there is very little in-depth empirical 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 of archaeological archives.

To gather empirical evidence, I conducted a study of the Swedish stakeholders of archaeological archiving has been conducted under the auspices of the ARKDIS project. A preliminary analysis of the interview records (N=16) of professionals working with archaeological archiving show that there are multiple technical, legislative, conceptual and structural problems that complicate the building, management and use of archaeological archives. The interviewees were chosen on the basis of a combination of selective sampling and snowballing (letting informants to indicate new possible informants).

Perhaps the most pressing problem discussed by all interviewees was the complexity of how  archaeological archiving is organised in Sweden. Archaeological heritage management and fieldwork involves a large number of actors and especially when it come to the management of digital information and primary research data, the responsibilities between different actors including the National Heritage Board, county administrative boards, archaeology contractors and the national and regional museums are not clearly defined. In practice, many actors keep large archives of data and documents and are waiting for someone to tell them what to do with them. A simpler process with clearer responsibilities would undoubtedly make a significant contribution to improving the general situation.

The complexity of the process has another consequence. At the moment, many actors are forced to work in relative silos. It is difficult to know what other stakeholders are doing with the produced documentation and what would be their actual information needs. From this perspective, it would be important to take carefully into account the needs of contractors, different types of researchers, research data curators, regional and national heritage administrators, archivists, finds managers and other stakeholders in the society when revising and developing the archiving and information process in Swedish archaeology. It seems that a shared and more tangible idea of the products and outcomes of archaeological operations and information  together with a clearer idea of customerships (i.e. who needs the information we are producing and how we can provide more meaningful information for other stakeholders) and supply-chain management (the process of producing, managing and using archaeological information in the society) could form a basis for a more robust and meaningful information production, management and archiving process.

In developing this understanding, it seems also relevant to put a special emphasis on how the different institutions and actors are working in practice with the production and management of archaeological information. A certain abstract consensus of the importance of documenting and preserving archaeological information and its significance aspects was shared by all informants, but when the discussion shifted to the everyday practicalities of working with archiving archaeology, the abstract consensus tended to turn to a broad range of not always entirely compatible practices. A finds administrator put specific emphasis on the management of finds, contractor to the practicalities of field work and an archivists on the details of the administrative process in ways that do not necessarily end up in a consistent corpus of records.

These highly preliminary first observations of the interview data will be complemented in the near future and reported in formal and more detailed publications in the near future. Slides and an abstract of a presentation held at the CAA 2014 conference can be found on the web.

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.

ARKDIS in Birmingham

The last visit of the ARKDIS tour in the UK was hosted at Digital Humanities Hub at the University of Birmingham by Vince Gaffney and Henry Chapman. We spent the day by learning of each others' work at a mini-conference where both ARKDIS and Birmingham researchers presented their recent and on-going work. We had several common interests from the methodological issues of GIS and landscape archaeology to 3D modelling and management of archaeological data. The presentations also showed clearly that the state-of-the-art of digital methods in archaeology is about combining solid theory and solid research questions.