Computer hacking, cracking and data exfilitration–as well as the piloting of small umanned aerial vehicles–once seemed as practices liminal, even subversive, to the state. Presently these activities are being reframed by criminal codes, appropriation by state services, and cooptation by commercial entities. This process can be labeled as professionalisation wherein the state defines legitimate work practices through pedagogy. In the process, binaries are generated, legal courses of actions defined, and insiders and outsiders differentiated. Courts, cops, and criminal codes reinforce the status quo. An industry of pros blossoms. But how does this happen and what is anthropologically interesting about this process?

The process of professionalisation attempts to transform unmitigated and potentially threatening acts. It works to sanitise folk craft. The desired effect is to eliminate outliers by barring alternatives and disruptions. In the process, a duality is constructed of right and wrong. The very notion of subversion is created as a hegemony is defined and counter-hegemonic actions explained and criminalised.

Creating safety and diverting away from crisis are classic public motivations for the development of professional pedagogies, institutions, and discourses. Legislators can prove that they are enacting pertinent laws to address modern-day concerns for health and well-being. Private businesses position themselves to work alongside the hegemony and celebrate the move to clean-up the wilderness. The new industries hire lobbyists. Former hobbyists have the option of joining the formalised process, be subversive and illegal and continue to do their work without approval, or give up and do something else.

With our dominant emphasis on alternative ways of life, I think we tend to romanticise in the amateur in anthropology. Motivated not by fiscal gain or social ambition, the amateur appears more authentic, self-motivated, an agent of their own destiny, a harbinger of history, and a driver of what-is-to-come. Likewise, in media studies–while it is thankfully becoming somewhat out of style now–there is a tendency to celebrate peer-production, the wisdom of the crowds, and others processes of user-generated productivity. Once something is professionalised it loses an aura of the raw and the real and becomes something over-cooked and predictable. This is as true as when a ritual is performed out of context and for touristic spectacle as when a formerly independent movie studio is bought by a major studio. We mourn this loss and the end of independence. The new may continue to emerge out of hackneyed older practices and something novel may arise again out of the old but for the meantime, or perhaps only in fetishistic retrospection, the process of professionalisation often looks commercial and tacky.

While there have always been hackers able to exfiltrate data from foreign servers working for the governments of the world, we commonly think of hacking as a tool of the weak. But with the nomenclatural addition of “ethical” to the word “hacker,” and the seeding of the idea of the development of ethical hacking certificates and courses, a cottage industry of private citizens transforming the offensive practices of cybercriminals and hacktivists into actions capable of not challenging but rather reinforcing the powers of the state has developed. The state designs its own hacker divisions in the CIA, FBI, NSA and beyond and military subcontractors recruit their hacker personnel. Politicians then legalise state-hacking and illegitimise hacktivist hacking. The problems of hacker professionalisation are obvious and the paradox is obnoxious: state’s legally hack hackers who illegally hack using the same skills and in some instances the very same hacked software as the legal state hackers. What is good for the goose is bad for the gander.

Likewise, for a brief period of time the piloting of small unmanned quadcopters was the remit of early-adopters playing with barely fit-for-purpose rigs, precariously attached video cameras, and crash-prone software. But with the proliferation of dangerous near-collisions with passenger aircrafts, buildings, people, and animals regulation of this former hobby became inevitable. Pairing the wildness of this amateur craft with the perceived profitability of drone applications for package delivery, internet provisioning, lands and animal survey, and surveillance and the moment is ripe for professionalisation. Politicians enter the fray, meet with the dominant players in this market–the drone manufacturers–and together they craft self-regulatory bills that exclude more experimental drone activity while enshrining themselves as the legal forebearers of the future of the atmosphere. Like hackers, will amateur drone hobbyist have to go underground or undertake expensive training and be interpellated in the process?

Both hacking and drone piloting are undergoing similar processes of professionalisation. (Unsurprisingly, the military plays an important role in sanctifying the new industry in both the hacking and drone cases.) These and other temporally-unfolding efforts towards professionalisation are important because they reveal the processual nature of cultural change in tangible ways. In hacking and drone piloting it is possible to see, analytically speaking, clearly demarcated phases of amateurisation replaced by professionalisation. Such finely drawn stratigraphies of practice and knowledge are enviably viewable from the perspective of the trainee. These are often rare to behold caught up as we are fetishising the now, duped by the immediate erotics of fieldwork, and seduced by the brilliance of new technologies.

Trainings are paid immersive events wherein individuals partake in the process of becoming professionalised. While expensive and at times exhausting, such events offer unique opportunities to tangibly participate in the cultural and historical process of professionalisation. It is here in a fablab in Manchester where the malware code hits the compiler and becomes a tool for hegemonic defense, state expansion, and subversive occlusion. It is here in a conference center in Glasgow that the chaos and fun of drone piloting is formalised by health and safety protocols adopted from the British Royal Air Force.

Trainings are usually quite formalised and busy and therefore do not allow for the ad hoc interactions where much valuable ethnographic experience develops. But because of the multi-day nature of trainings, the lunches, dinners, coffee-breaks, and other liminal moments there are opportunities to break through the formality. Regardless, undergoing the apprenticeship displays a commitment to an informant’s craft that can build important rapport. Beyond the benefits of befriending research subjects, trainings are an ideal place to participate in the pedagogy of professionalisation. As culture reformulates through formal and informal means, professional trainings are a way of witnessing the formal teaching of the first traditions of an industry. What gets canonised and what is pegged for exclusion and rejection? What intellectual and practical traditions does the emergent professionals draw from? How serious and difficult is the training? Is it authorised by an governing institution, a professional body, or the state or is it preempting state regulation? These are all questions whose answers reveal how professional guilds emerge through formal educational praxis. Trainings provide a valuable mode of participating in events that make history, concretise industries, and solidify the grounds for new traditions.

In two additional posts I am going to analyse the professional trainings I underwent, one on commercial drone flying and another on ethical hacking, in greater detail.  

This post is part of this month’s analog/digital series and the second post­ discussing my work as an archaeological illustrator in relation to analogue and digital media. In the previous post I outlined my mostly analogue workflow with some digital skeuomorphs and explored the differences between illustration and 3D modeling. Here I’d like to share some ways I’ve recently expanded my use of the digital in my workflow and explored a constructive interplay between the digital and analogue.

I am the site illustrator for Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic archaeological site in Turkey. I started working there in 1999 as an archaeobotanist, and since 2007 I’ve been the project’s illustrator. Every summer I spend about two months drawing artifacts and recording on-site features. Over the years I’ve seen the project transition from entirely analogue recording to a mix of digital and analogue, until it has become almost entirely digital in some trenches. At this point the project employs tablets, laser scanners, and even drones. Dr. Maurizio Forte’s team from Duke University and Dr. Nicoló Dell’Unto from Lund University have spent the last several years testing these digital technologies on site. Until recently my work has mostly been unaffected by this transition to digital, I’ve carried on with my analogue workflow on a parallel track (see my earlier post for some advantages to analogue media in illustration). ­But over the last couple years several situations have arisen where I have had to re-evaluate my approach and consider integrating some of these new digital methods.

For example, this past summer I was tasked with illustrating a large, fragile lump of molded plaster in the shape of a head with painted ochre designs. I sat in front of the head with all my drawing tools laid out, picked up my pencil, and stopped. The plaster feature had already been 3D modeled by Dr. Dell’Unto and photographed by site photographer Jason Quinlan from every angle. What was my analogue pencil and paper drawing going to record that these other digital methods hadn’t already? Why illustrate?

It took a discussion with site conservator Ashley Lingle and comparing model to plaster head, to answer this question. The 3D model and photographs captured the general areas of white and ochre plaster but not the fine details, such as broken surfaces and multiple layers of painting. I ended up creating several illustrations of the head, which isolated different layers of ochre painting and delineated damaged and broken areas, making clear what was the original, intended surface of the feature. I decided to forgo my own measuring process to make these illustrations and use the 3D model as a base in order to take advantage of the 3D model’s accuracy. Jason Quinlan worked with me to rotate the orthoimage into my chosen views, which I subsequently printed. These printouts became the framework for my drawings, allowing me to focus on filling in the details that the model missed rather than wasting valuable time measuring the head. The illustration below shows 4 views of the plaster head and records the latest layer of ochre painted decoration. (You can read a more detailed account of the plaster head’s excavation, conservation, and recording in Chapter 28 of this year’s Archive Report.)

I’m also currently integrating another type of 3D model into my analogue (or digital skeuomorph) illustration process for my ongoing reconstruction of the late formative site of Khonkho Wankane in highland Bolivia. Dr. Scott Smith and Dr. John Janusek hired me to reconstruct the site’s architecture, landscape, and use. At the beginning of the project, Dr Smith also supplied me with a Google SketchUp model of the site he had created. We decided on a view in SketchUp that encompassed the landscape and site features they wanted included. I then exported the view as vector line work to Adobe Illustrator where I fine-tuned the lines, giving the architecture a more organic look. Next, I printed out the line work and drew on top of it with graphite to add in landscape details and shading.

I’m now in the process of digitally painting my Adobe Illustrator line art and graphite drawing in Photoshop, letting some of the pencil show through as seen in the screenshot below. It will soon be populated with people and llamas; as Laia Pujol-Tost points out such peopled pasts are often missing from virtual reconstructions. (I’ll have the final image up on my webpage and Facebook page in a couple weeks.)

In my work with layering analogue illustrations on 3D models, I continue to experiment for best results. However, this work reveals the benefits of combining traditional techniques with emerging digital technologies. This constructive interplay between the digital and analogue draws on the strengths of each media. The 3D model provides accuracy, much more then I ever could with my hand and eyes alone. With my analogue and digital skeuomorph techniques I add interpretive details, people the past, direct the viewer’s gaze, and foreground the image’s authorship with brushstrokes and pencil lines. These experiments have allowed me to see my analogue work not as separate or parallel to digital technologies, but rather in a productive dialogue.

(Thank you Colleen Morgan and Sara Perry for inviting me to be part of this series and Savage Minds for hosting!)

Archaeology is mostly about materiality. Its epistemological foundation is based on the relationship between humans and the material culture. Some of this objects, will later be displayed in museums to convey interpretations of the past. Yet, as Yannis Hamilakis and other authors have argued, Archaeology is a modern “science”. As such, it is mostly about the eye, and little about the body. On site, it mostly records and analyses visual, spatial, geometrical features. At the museum, this has meant a universal rule of not touching, and objects are isolated in showcases, for the sake of… mutual protection.

Then came Information and Communication Technologies (before they were called Digital Media), which under the promise of increased accessibility, interaction and engagement, reduced archaeological heritage even more to image and visualization: it had been digitalized; that is, de-materialized and even “de-musealized”. A series of evaluations conducted in museums since the 90s evidenced a conflict between the exhibition and the new media. The main reason being, as Christian Heath and Dirk vom Lehn pointed out, that exhibitions and computers belonged to different communication paradigms.

Around that time, several studies conducted in different European museums led me to the conclusion that the best way to integrate digital technologies was to stop just placing computers in exhibitions, and instead re-design the interfaces purposefully for such environments. Yet, what happened was the advent of mobile devices.

Meanwhile, some researchers working in the highly interdisciplinary field of Human-Computer Interaction started advocating for more natural ways to interact with computers. As a result, a new field called Tangible or Embodied Interaction arose around the 1990s. In this context, the concept of “Tangible User Interface” was developed. In TUIs, the interface is not anymore a PC but an (everyday) object. This takes advantage of the human capacity to manipulate objects, and allows a better integration with the context of use. Since the 2000s, labs used occasionally the cultural field as test bed; until 2013, when the first EU-funded project specifically devoted to tangible interactive experiences in Cultural Heritage settings was set up.

Now 3D printing has become the hype. As it happened with computers in the previous century, this technology is not new: it has been used in the engineering field for rapid-prototyping since the 1980s. But only recently it has become accessible to markets. Its applications are manifold: engineering, clothing, food, housing, health… But more than that, its implications regarding traditional product design, production and distribution chains are so enormous, that some people already talk about additive manufacturing being the next industrial revolution. The Cultural Heritage field has not been indifferent to this development. For example, the Smithsonian has started the X3D project, aimed at digitalizing and allowing the 3D printing of its collections. In the academic domain, some sessions at the EAA conference dealt with the implications of 3D printed replicas for Archaeology. Finally, the first mixed exhibits have appeared in European museums the last years, used either as mediators, smart replicas, top tables for shared exploration and gaming, or as full-body interactive environments.

I am so excited about it! Does this mean that we may finally close the circle and, after such a long history of “voyeurism”, fully acknowledge materiality and tangibility in the cultural heritage field? It is interesting to note that, as it happened before with interaction or storytelling, we needed the pressure of the digital revolution to (re)discover or finally accept elements that already existed in the museums field. Still, I believe there is a big potential in this area, more than with digital media, and this is exactly what I am starting to investigate now. On the one hand, the specific advantages of smart replicas or tangible exhibits for Cultural Heritage settings. I have adapted Eva Hornecker’s overview of Tangible Interaction to list the following features:

1. Appreciation of the materiality of the real object.
2. Direct manipulation instead of just visualization.
3. Performative action instead of passive gaze.
4. Natural interaction without added symbolism.
5. Natural integration in the exhibition environment.
6. Non-fragmented visibility.
7. Suitability for exploration in group.
8. Personalization (especially suitable for children).

On the other hand, I am concerned about the strategies and threats for their adoption in museums. The experience shows that, as costs decrease, the availability and penetration of technologies increase. Still, the problem is designing and maintaining high-tech exhibits. Most museums tend to outsource digital media projects; but this has more often than not proven to be a bittersweet experience in terms of budget, sustainability, end-product, workflow, etc. Institutions are currently implementing different solutions. For example, EU-funded projects emphasize the creation of do-it-yourself authoring tools. Also, the big museums in the USA and Europe give strong support to the creation of their own digital media departments, so that such experiences can be fully developed in-house.

Yet, as we witness again a concern similar to supposed threat posed by the virtual to the brick-and-mortar museum, we first need to complete the unfinished debate around the concept of authenticity in cultural heritage. In my opinion, the problem to be solved is not with smart replicas (which, following Bernard Deloche’s taxonomy, only act as analogical or analytical substitutes), but with the role of originals in the age of information, commodification, and globalization. However, this is a discussion for another time and place.

(Part of this month’s Analog/Digital series, thanks to Savage Minds for hosting!)

It was hot, but that was not unusual. We woke up at the first call to prayer to be on site at sunrise. I would trudge through the dimly-lit streets of the village, up to the ancient tell, and sit next to my trench until I had enough light to see my paperwork. The cut limestone went from dull gray, to a rosy pink, then that brief and magical moment called the golden hour, when the archaeology would become clear and beautifully lit and I would rush around trying to take the important photos of the day. Then the light would become hard, white-hot, and often over 100F. By lunchtime all of the crisp angles of the limestone would disappear into a smeary haze, hardly worth bothering with a camera. Photographs of people were impossible too—everyone was dusty, hot, irritable, half in shadow under hats, scarves.

I picked up my camera and climbed out of the Mamluk building I was excavating, on my way down the ancient tell of Dhiban and back up the neighboring tell of the modern town of Dhiban. As I walked between the Byzantine, Roman, Nabatean and Islamic piles of cut stone, a faint trace of smoke made me hesitate, then come off the winding goat path. Two of the Bani Hamida bedouin who worked with us on site were stoking a small fire on the tell. While making fires on the archaeology was certainly not encouraged, the local community had been using the tell to socialize for a long time. I greeted the men and they invited me to sit and have qahwa, a strong, hot, sweet, green coffee served in many of the local hospitality rituals and customs. I refused once, then twice, then looked over my shoulder at the vanishing backs of my fellow archaeologists, on their way to breakfast. Then I accepted a cup. But first, I pulled out my camera and snapped a photo.

When I’m feeling ornery, I tell people that I wrote a whole chapter of my PhD thesis about a photograph of a teapot. Even worse, a digital photograph of a teapot. And it’s not really a teapot, it is a coffeepot, perched on a small twig fire on top of a tell heaving with archaeology, and tended by these two men, Atif and Zaid, who did not want to be in the frame. They are represented by two slightly blurry sticks, hovering in the foreground, a present absence. The photo isn’t even all that good.

See, in my thesis (Emancipatory Digital Archaeology) I was working through what digital artifacts do in archaeology. What does it mean to take a digital photograph of a pot sherd, a woman swinging a mattock, a teapot coffeepot in the desert sun? How is the analog-turned-digital moment mobilized to create archaeological understanding? Can a virtual reality model of a Neolithic house change the way we understand the past, and, can we start making these things, these digital ephemera, in a better way, to create a more participatory, multivocal, craft-based archaeology?

A tall order, right? Especially running headlong into archaeology’s hot mess of colonialism, imperialism and nationalism, oftentimes burned into celluloid next to ancient monuments. Yeah. It took a while.

So what did I find out? I came up with a pretty good methodology for digital archaeology that investigated each object (and its multiple) in context, explored the concepts of multivocality and authorship in digital object creation, and evaluated the relative transparency and ability to share each of these objects. As part of this, I explored digital materiality–that stuff-in-the-cloud that is actually in big noisy server farms in the countryside. I tried, in my way, to address N. Katherine Hayles’ question: What would it mean to talk about materiality in an era in which simulations are everywhere around us?

After presenting some of this work at the British Museum, thrashing through this analog-to-digital shift, Helen Wickstead asked, (and I badly paraphrase) “Can we productively query the analog with the digital?” Can I draw a circle around this thing called digital archaeology and use it to try to understand analog technologies and representations? What can the flexibility and ubiquity of cameras on smart phones tell us about the glass lantern slide?

I’m still working on it.

(Part of this month’s Analog/Digital series, thanks to Savage Minds for hosting!)

Post by Laia Pujol-Tost.

Archaeology has a long tradition of using visual representations to depict the past. For most of its history, images were done by hand and based on artistic skills and conventions. But the last fifteen years, we have witnessed 3D models take over archaeological visualization. It is interesting to note that while hand-drawn depictions tend to show human figures and seem to be associated with scenes of “daily life”, virtual reconstructions mostly show architectural remains and public spaces, usually devoid of people and objects. Yet, authors state that their intention is to represent the past.

My field of research is what we now call Virtual Archaeology, but I started investigating when we still talked about “VR applications in Archaeology”. I have seen it become mainstream and evolve; and I wonder why after almost twenty years of technological improvements and theoretical debate, virtual reconstructions are still empty. Especially in comparison with drawings. Do the virtual and the physical have implicitly different goals? Are they subject to different perceptions or expectations by researchers and/or audiences? Have they received different historical influences? Maybe technological capacities still play a role?

Let’s put some evidence on the table. I have reviewed a lot of bibliography, and in my early career I conducted a series of studies that took me to Rome, Ename (Belgium) and Athens. The conclusion in relation to the matter at hand was the following: both audiences and experts associated VR with the objective reproduction of reality, while the introduction of human characters (and objects) seemed more speculative. As a result, they considered illustrations were better for wide audiences, especially for children, and associated their production with non-academic professionals (illustrators and educators).

This situation arises from a confluence of causes related to VR and to Archaeology. In the first case, VR allows the representation of and navigation within 3D geometrical spaces. The Cartesian concept of the world is deeply rooted in the Western mind, and is best represented by computers. But VR also comes from the pictorial perspectivist tradition, which is arguably considered the closest to human perception. In addition, we now have the possibility to acquire the model directly from reality, by means of photogrammetry or 3D scanning. Hence the belief that VR represents the world objectively. On the other hand, modelled humans are problematic because they require a lot of computing resources but still seem “fake”. The “uncanny valley” effect contributes to the belief that humans hinder realism.

Technological capacity has been one of the historical justifications for not populating archaeological virtual environments. However, even now that I am building my own VR-mediated experience, I am not persuaded. Video-games display very realistic worlds with human characters and maximum interaction. Certainly, the entertainment industry mobilizes a lot of money and people. But we do have examples of archaeological projects supported by big investments in terms of time and/or human efforts. On the other hand, realism is not limited to visual effects, but is achieved thanks to the interplay of different elements (an overload of visual details, affordances for interaction, sounds, etc.), which generate a general impression of verisimilitude. Besides, there are other solutions, none of them new, such as procedural generation (of textures, buildings, etc.), Non-Photorealistic Rendering, and more recently, the combination of digital and video-recorded content. Yet, I have come to understand that people involved in virtual archaeological reconstructions mostly think in terms of visual accuracy.

To discuss the other set of causes, related to archaeology, let me tell you about {LEAP]. This project aims at building a theoretical and methodological framework for VR mediated experiences, based on the concept of (Cultural) Presence. In order to refine the concept and its translation into user requirements, last August I conducted fieldwork at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey). VR applications share features with the original site (raw data); an experimental house built close to the site (immersivity); and illustrations of the settlement (presence or absence of humans). But VR applications also have specific capacities (dynamism and simulation) due to their virtual computational component. I wanted to see which ones were spontaneously used or considered important by experts when describing verbally and/or visually a past culture. What did I learn about illustrations and virtual reconstructions? According to the results, virtual reconstructions should: 1) show life and objects (like the illustrations but in a dynamic way); 2) distinguish between evidence and reconstruction (like the site); 3) be immersive and multisensory (like the reconstructed house); 4) allow natural navigation (at eye’s, not bird’s view); and 5) show temporal evolution and unusual perspectives (making the most of virtuality).

There is an obvious conflict between these expectations and virtual reconstructions. Moreover, Virtual Archaeology is now a mature area of research, for which an internationally acknowledged set of guidelines, the Seville Principles, has been established. Yet, several points (related to coherence between aims and methods, transparency, and effectiveness) are still not implemented in many VR projects. In my opinion the causes are to be found in archaeological practice. As debated in a couple of recent seminars, the dominant epistemological paradigms aim for the truth, understood either as explanation or description of the archaeological record. Objectivity and visual realism are one and the same. Nevertheless, there are other, very important paradigms that acknowledge the interpretive nature of Archaeology, and attempt to express it visually. Unfortunately, they are both confronted to the pressure of funding bodies, stakeholders and audiences, who demand the illusion of a (scientifically accurate) trip to the past. The consequence are hyperrealistic environments, where buildings are fully reconstructed (in spite of the availability of data), but human characters and material culture are (sometimes) introduced as a necessary embellishment.

So in the end my question should not be why are virtual reconstructions empty, but if we want to change this and how. How do we do our job, how do we contribute to science and society, against hype, inertia, and economic interests?

This is the first in a series of posts, coordinated with Colleen Morgan, on the relations between analog and digital cultures. Over the next month, through the contributions of a variety of archaeologists, we will explore the concept of materiality in an age where the nature of ‘the material’ is rapidly shifting. How do physical materials and digital materials shape one another? How does experimentation with the digital rethink the dimensions of the analog, and vice versa? How, if at all, do we distinguish between one and the other – and is this even necessary (or possible) today? How have our understandings of ‘the real’ – of ‘things’ and ‘facts’ – of presence and the body – of aura and authenticity – been shifted by interactions between physical and digital materials?

As the premiere scholars of materiality, archaeologists are well-versed in the continuities between, and changes to, artifacts. Here, we probe their boundaries through discussion of our engagements at the intersections of the analog and the digital. I begin with some critical comments on mobile apps: oft enrolled in visitor experiences at archaeology and heritage sites, are these digital tools actually valuable?

I’ve been working at the convergence point of analog and digital technologies for many years now. This entails studying how archaeologists deploy them in their professional practices, training others (and myself) in the use of digital tools to facilitate better understanding of the archaeological (physical) world, and creating opportunities to expose crossovers between analog and digital environments (for example, developing virtual exhibitions displayed in physical spaces).

Most recently, I’ve become concerned with mobile apps. In archaeology – and in the museums world – these kinds of hand-held technologies have a long history of use, particularly for delivering interpretation of artefacts, exhibits, and full sites to visitors (e.g., see Jeater’s review). A project or an institution may develop an app that you download on-location or beforehand, which then typically acts as a form of guide around the place and its collections.

My interest is in the link between these mobile technologies and the material world. In the best case (e.g., see the work of Eve, Hoffman, Morgan, Pantos and Kinchin-Smith, produced as part of the Heritage Jam), they are means to full multi-sensory experiences of ancient landscapes.

But in the worst case, they have little or no physical relevance, in the sense that they could just as easily (or more easily) be used in the home, while still in bed, rather than out in a mobile landscape.

If you’ve tested out a few apps for heritage sites, you’ll likely identify with this predicament. Their real possibilities are often not being exploited (e.g., the opportunity to physically move around different locations), and when they are (e.g., in the case of augmented reality apps), it’s unclear who’s using them, how meaningful they really are for visitors’ appreciation of the archaeological record, and what bigger impact they are having on relevant fields of practice (e.g., how they are really altering heritage interpretation? Is it worth it?). If sound is deployed on the app, it regularly works as little more than a surrogate tour guide.

When using heritage apps, you often spend much your time staring at the screen of your mobile device, reading text or viewing visual materials on the device itself to the detriment of the site you’ve come to see. Some recent testing we’ve done in York has even suggested that apps falsely lead users to feel that they’ve visited ‘everything’, when in fact they’ve visited only a fraction of what non-users experienced.

Many people also seem inclined to develop apps that reinforce these problems: they are standard, unexperimental, grounded in the typical hand-held audio guides that were the ‘mobile apps’ of 50+ years ago (e.g., in museums).

Developers often talk about the positive aspects of mobile apps, especially their potential to attract new and younger audiences, their promise of immersion or embodied experience, their entertainment value and heightened relevance in the modern world. Others have highlighted their negatives, which as I’ve noted above, can seemingly be infinite, e.g.:

• distracting visitors from the actual site itself
• isolating visitors from their companions
• isolating artifacts from one another
• can be expensive to develop
• memory limits on mobile device may make downloading or use of the app impossible
• app may have an additional costs for users including expense for connecting to mobile signals
• persistent digital divides might make apps inaccessible to significant demographics, and reinforce structural inequalities

Despite all the negatives (and I can go on, as not only do I teach mobile app development, but a number of my students are studying the efficacy of existing heritage apps), I still find them compelling. I’m drawn to them because I believe they have so many under-exploited possibilities that might have transformative effects on how we interpret the archaeological record and on how we interact with other interested people.

If done well, I believe such technologies can perform a critical role in enabling their users (and makers) to think through the complex relations between space, place, humans & media. Mobile devices are ubiquitous in many parts of the world, and in some of the developing contexts that I’ve been working recently (e.g., Egypt), they are an essential part of all aspects of everyday life, yet are rarely used in the context of heritage. They allow integration of multiple types of rich media (still & moving imagery, sound, etc.). And, as I see it, they are still in their experimental phases, so there is much room for innovation, and – as they have not yet been fully institutionalised – there is still real flexibility to push on their boundaries.

For such reasons, and in collaboration with multiple teams, I’ve been experimenting with mobile app development in various environments. This includes the making of low-tech, open access/open source apps crafted and conceived by students (thanks to Tom Smith for all his support!). It also includes larger scale initiatives, for instance at the world-renowned Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

At Çatalhöyük, over the past 7 years and in partnership with students and colleagues from the universities of Ege, York and Southampton), I have led many of the site’s heritage interpretation ventures (e.g., curation of its Visitor Centre, development of on-site signage, production of the site’s guidebook, maps and brochures, etc.), including evaluation of visitor experience. (For more info on our activities, see the “Visualisation Team” section of Çatalhöyük’s Archive Reports).

Here, we have developed a very thorough understanding of tourist expectations (as a relatively remote site, it still sees upwards of 20,000 visitors per year). And we have the opportunity, through the support of the Project Director Prof Ian Hodder, to experiment on a large scale with digital/analog interventions, with great potential to impact not just visitor experience, but also professional practice (given Çatalhöyük’s visibility in academic archaeology).

Çatalhöyük is an important case study for many reasons:

• The nature of its mud-brick architecture combined with the dusty environment make it difficult for non-specialists to perceive the archaeological record.
• Despite our efforts, there are still relatively few interpretative materials on site, and those that do exist are often not maintained.
• Difficult weather (hot in summers, cold in winters) and technological conditions make visiting and presenting the site challenging; and Çatalhöyük is in a remote location with problematic public transport options.
• Only a small number of knowledgeable people are available on site to communicate additional information to visitors on a year-round basis; virtually no archaeologists are present outside of summer months.
• Inflexible touring schedule/approach, often with poor instructions and rigid route, handcuff the visitor experience; indeed, visitors have been observed to actually jump illicitly into excavation units in order to get closer to the archaeology, yet even then they still might leave with limited appreciation of the site.
• Because many visitors do a lot of research about the site before coming to see it, when they arrive they tend to understand more about it. Visitors often also seek out supplementary informational resources, plus they regularly come to site with mobile devices & are willing to use those devices on site. This presents a tremendous opportunity for us, because given that visitors are doing such pre-visit research and are prepared to use their mobiles, it means we can potentially cater to them with technological options delivered in advance of their visit.

Funded through the the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), and in partnership with the CHESS team, in 2014 we began to experiment with this opportunity. In the first instance, we constructed a mobile device-based narrative about a particular building at Çatalhöyük (Building 52), written by the site’s own experts, populated with existing visuals and audio recorded by the authors of the story. Our evaluations of the app suggested that its real impact was actually on the archaeologists themselves who crafted the narrative. In other words, their involvement in writing the content of the app affected how they thought about the site and their research at the site (Roussou et al. 2015). Experience of use of the app itself for understanding the archaeological record, however, was mixed.

In Summer 2015, with further funding from the BIAA, and again in partnership with CHESS, we returned to site to elaborate the app. This time, however, we wanted to push back against some of the problematic trends that we’ve observed with these tools, and maximise the capacities of the mobile device – its social functions, its multi-media possibilities, its portability – to create connectivity. Our aim was to use the app not simply to communicate a story about Çatalhöyük, but to:

(1) facilitate engagement between visitors on site (both people in the same tour group and other unknown people touring the site), and

(2) engage users’ bodies and prompt interactivity with the physical world around them at the site

To do this, we split the existing script for the app (created in 2014) into multiple parts so that two members of a visiting group had to work together to understand the storyline. In other words, each person would only hear/see a fragment of the story, and it would only be via (prompted) conversation between the two of them that the full narrative would become evident. We added even more prompts to various parts of the story in an effort to compel discussion, reflection and collaborative decision-making about past inhabitants and activities in Building 52. We worked to augment the haptic nature of the experience of holding/looking at the mobile device by asking users to touch and align their devices. This created a kind of ‘shared screen’ for visitors, pulling the content on their individual devices into a larger whole – something which they could subsequently explore together. We also attempted to add playfulness to the experience, for instance, prompting users to choose particular items excavated from the house to virtually ‘give’ to their partners.

Our efforts were rolled out through a multi-stranded approach.

Firstly, we conducted a ‘body storming’ session at Çatalhöyük with researchers at the site, specifically aimed at thinking through how we might better engage the body in the interpretative experience at Çatalhöyük. Participants in the session were asked to articulate, then act out (without words), concepts associated with being a ‘Çatalhöyükian’ – and what ‘Çatalhöyükness’ meant to them. The idea was to be able to use the embodied results of this session to inform new content and experiences for the app. However, while full analysis of the session is forthcoming, initial interview results provided mixed feedback on its utility.

Secondly, we tested a prototype of the app on site in July with an audience of researchers and students. Evaluated through interview and video capture (see Katifori et al. 2016), the results again were mixed, but with more sense of promise: some users liked the interactivity we’d added, some did not; some felt they were being ‘cheated’ by having to ask their visiting companion for information (rather than learning direct from their own device), others felt clearly more engaged with the site. Everyone, however, appeared to enjoy the playful elements added to the app. A full description of our work will be presented at the next Museums and the Web conference in Los Angeles this April.

Thirdly, with my team of students from Ege University and the University of York, we installed on site a separate, physical display – meant as a point of comparison to the digital display of the app. In this case, we used Çatalhöyük’s replica house as a hiding place for a number of printed plexi signs. Each sign provided a clue to locating the next sign, with the aim of encouraging visitors to actually engage with the physical parts of the house – its oven, baskets, storage rooms, etc. Initial assessment suggests that these signs have been successful in encouraging touch, movement, material and bodily interactivity – more than I’ve typically seen with mobile apps.

Possibly the most interesting component of all of this work for me has been its evaluation, and the passionate reactions expressed by many – particularly to the mobile app. We’ve only just begun to review the interview data collected from users of the app, but my impression is that it’s generated a polarised set of replies. These range from true advocates who felt genuinely influenced by the experience, to those who perceived it as a waste of time, or as something too radical, or gimmicky, or distracting from the experience of ‘being there’.

Personally, I continue to feel conflicted about mobile technologies for heritage interpretation. I’m not convinced that we’ve yet untangled the means to blend the physical and the (handheld) digital into a complementary visitor experience. But ‘being there’ at a place like Çatalhöyük is very complicated (for reasons that include everything from transport and infrastructure to the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record), and these technologies do have affordances that could ease – perhaps even eliminate – such complications. I’d like to think that one day this will be possible.

So I’ll sign off now with a series of questions that I continue to grapple with, and that will present themselves in different forms in some of our other posts over the course of this month:

What are digital technologies actually enabling, if anything? Does the traditional analog equivalent (in my case, a printed sign) still offer more to users?

How can we deploy digital technologies (for example, mobile apps for cultural sites) in more productive, bodily- and thought-provoking fashion?

And from the archaeological perspective,

How can we improve people’s experience and understanding of the archaeological record? For instance, if developing a mobile app, how can that app create a more impactful tour of a site for visitors, more human-to-human interaction on the tour, and a richer sense of one’s own presence there at the site – in the moment – and in the past (as a Çatalhöyükian)?

Increasingly, our lives are mediated by the Internet and other digital technologies. For anthropologists like myself, this presents new opportunities for research, but the digitization, exchange, and storage of personal data also generate new privacy concerns for our participants. During my research on Brazilian Internet freedom activists, I learned about both the potentials of the Internet, as well as the way that digital technology can, and is, being abused to violate civil liberties. What I call the “privacy paradox,” refers to the situation in which the U.S. government at once defends research participants’ privacy through Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) while it simultaneously violates their privacy on a massive, global scale through mass surveillance national security apparatus.

The privacy paradox become apparent to me in July 2013, just a month after the Snowden leaks that exposed NSA mass surveillance, when I sat down to interview a high-level official of a Brazilian IT firm. Before the interview, I detailed the measures I was taking to ensure that his personal data would be protected and I explained that this was required by Vanderbilt’s IRB per U.S. law. Upon hearing this, the IT official looked at me incredulously. Over the previous two months the front pages of newspapers had been plastered with articles detailing U.S. government surveillance projects with codenames like PRISM, XKeyscore, and Stellar Wind that used the global telecommunications infrastructure to collect personal data on people around the world. My interviewee was well-versed in issues of privacy in the digital age, so to hear me state that the U.S. government was concerned with his privacy was laughable.

While I had already been paying attention to issues of privacy and mass surveillance in my research, this encounter forced me to re-evaluate the ways that U.S. government policy is impacting the work of researchers worldwide and why it is important for the academic community to defend the privacy rights of all people in a digital era.

Institutional Review Boards and Participant Privacy

In the U.S. virtually all researchers who perform research with human participants are required by federal law to have their methods evaluated and approved by an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, including social scientists like anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. According to the federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), which oversees IRBs in the U.S., the goal of this oversight is to protect “the rights, welfare, and wellbeing of subjects involved in research.” The current IRB system developed in the second half of the 20th century in response to a number of unethical research projects, which revealed that more oversight was necessary to protect participants. In 1974, the U.S. congress passed the National Research Act that created a government-supervised research evaluation system meant to diminish the possibility of unethical and overly risky research.

A primary concern of IRBs in evaluating research proposals is protecting the personal data of research participants, with good reason, because researchers often collect very personal and sensitive information about people that could negatively affect them if it became publicly available. For example, to protect against the accidental distribution of my participant data, Vanderbilt’s IRB required that all the information I collected digitally (i.e., notes, interview recordings, etc.) be stored on a password-protected computer that only I had access to. In many cases researchers are required to anonymize data and/or use pseudonyms when publishing. Such requirements show the extent to which IRBs are legitimately concerned with participant privacy.

Privacy is one of the topics specifically addressed on many Informed Consent documents –forms that participants must read that detail the research goals, potential risks and benefits to individuals, and rights of participants. For example, the final section in the Informed Consent form I used for my research in Brazil included this standard language:

Privacy: Your information may be shared with Vanderbilt or the government, such as the Vanderbilt University Institutional Review Board, Federal Government Office for Human Research Protections if you or someone else is in danger or if we are required to do so by law.

This language alerts participants that in certain, seemingly limited cases, the IRB and/or the U.S. government may seek to gain access to the researcher’s data. For non-U.S. citizens, it also gives the illusion that the U.S. government is concerned with their privacy and will not collect and store their data without cause. However, it is now apparent that the U.S. government is not always as concerned about individual privacy as it would appear in these informed consent forms. This is particularly true for non-U.S. citizens.

NSA Mass Surveillance

The revelations about NSA mass surveillance exposed how the U.S. government was invading the privacy of both Americans and foreigners in the name of fighting terrorism. The NSA’s mission had always been to collect foreign signals intelligence, but now it was revealed that it was performing a massive dragnet in which it was trying, as the former director General Keith Alexander put it, to “collect it all.” This meant that rather than targeting individuals or groups, the NSA was collecting as much telecommunications data as possible – sometimes all the telecommunications traffic in entire countries – and storing it in massive data warehouses.

The Snowden leaks generated a backlash in the U.S. because they revealed that the NSA was storing and analyzing the cell phone habits of millions of U.S. citizens. For many observers, the collection of such data without a warrant is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Indeed, a number of citizens are now suing the government, arguing this practice violates their civil liberties. In response, the Obama administration has pledged to make changes to the NSA program, in part to protect the rights of citizens.

However, there are virtually no protections for non-U.S. citizens. Thus, data collection outside of the U.S., which was always more intrusive because it had no legal limitations, most likely continues unabated. In practical terms, this means that every email and phone call of the Brazilian participants in my research project was fair game for NSA data collection. Furthermore, even U.S. citizens’ communications are swept up by the NSA when one of the people involved in the chain is thought to be outside the U.S. Indeed, just the mention of an individual thought to be under surveillance in an email or computer file is justification for its collection by the NSA under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Critics have called it a “backdoor loophole” to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens. In any case, it is clear that all the communications of non-U.S. citizens, including communication with U.S.-based researchers, is currently being targeted and collected by the NSA.

In practical terms, this means that every email and phone conversation I had with my Brazilian research participants could have been collected by the NSA. Furthermore, had I posted any of the data I collected on my computer (Word document field note files, interview audio recordings, photos, etc.) to Vanderbilt’s server from Brazil, it likely would have been swept up the NSA, tapping the international telecommunications cables on which that data would be transferred. The likelihood is increased by the fact that the Brazilian government was a prime target of NSA surveillance, so my interviews with Brazilian government officials would be even more interesting to the NSA— meaning, as a researcher, I could have potentially abetted U.S. surveillance without being aware of it.

The Privacy Paradox

The privacy paradox emerges from these seemingly contradictory U.S. government policies to protect research participants from unethical studies while invading the privacy of people around the world using the telecommunications infrastructure. Recent attempts to reform the NSA surveillance system are mainly aimed at protecting the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. Thus, there is still little concern for the privacy of non-U.S. citizens whose information is being collected and stored in large data centers in the U.S.

What can researchers do practically and ethically given this difficult situation?  Here are a few ideas about what we can do to protect the rights of our participants:

Encryption:

The most urgent task for social scientists is to become proficient with the technological tools necessary to secure the data they collect and send. Secure encryption can significantly delay the ability of global security agencies to decipher emails, field notes, audio recordings etc. All social science research methods courses need to be updated to teach researchers how to use these tools. A recent Savage Minds post by Jonatan Kurzwelly offers a number of great resources for researchers interested in further protecting the data they collect.

IRB Reform: 

Researchers need to push IRBs to gain a more comprehensive grasp of cyber security issues taking into account government surveillance. For example, currently an IRB might require a researcher to store material on a secure, university-controlled serve. However, the IRB might not recognize that sending data to the server from abroad might put all of the privacy of that data at risk. No longer can IRBs ignore the actions of security agencies like the NSA and how they affect researchers working internationally.

An International Internet Rights Convention: 

Academics need to become strong advocates for national policies that protect civil liberties in the digital age. Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist best known as the creator of the World Wide Web, has called for a global Magna Carta on Internet rights. He launched an international campaign called The Web We Want to help people around the world create digital bills of rights in their respective countries. The Web We Want campaign was, in part, inspired by the success of Brazilian Internet freedom activists who successfully fought for the passage of a pioneering Internet freedom bill in 2014. Indeed, the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, one of the primary topics of my own research, included provisions meant to protect Internet user privacy. More initiatives like this around the world and potentially a global convention on Internet rights would create an environment more conducive to ethical research.

Ultimately, the privacy paradox is not one that shows signs of being resolved in the near future. Thus, social scientists must be aware of how conflicting U.S. government policies regarding privacy impact their work. For starters, this will require thoughtful engagement with technology to protect research participants. Additionally, researchers who value their own privacy and the civil liberties of all individuals need to add their voices to discussions about how to protect privacy in the digital era.

Indeed, more than ten years ago Gross, Katz and Ruby published Image Ethics in the Digital Age, a pioneering volume whose topical concerns – privacy, authenticity, control, access and exposure – are arguably more conspicuous now than in 2003. Today, their complexities appear to be extending as digital interactions themselves extend, and the consequence is an inevitably fraught landscape of practice with debatable outcomes.

There is no shortage of voices commenting on the state of ethics in anthropology (myself and Jonathan included), and an increasing number of those voices are now zeroing in on certain forms of anthropological research that seem to nurture special ethical conditions. Visual media, for instance, have triggered an entire discourse on ‘visual ethics’, which – as reviewed by Andrew Clark – seems to be premised on a series of claims about the uniqueness of the image and, hence, its incompatibility with existing ethical codes (or its wholesale neglect by those codes).

While all data forms arguably have their own unique repercussions, it is difficult to dispute the argument that existing ethical schemas are often inadequate for managing new or emerging modes of media application. As one example, assurance of anonymity is regularly a blanket condition in most ethical frameworks. Yet, quoting from Clark with regards to imaging work, “it is often impossible, impractical, or even illogical to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of individuals in artwork, photographs and film.” Beyond picturing practices alone, however, online modes of engagement now often hinge upon visibility and identification—thereby colliding with standard anonymity policies. This puts us in a position where we must stretch out the nature of our ethical structures if we expect our research programmes to survive. As Brent Luvaas has been compelled to ask in the course of his research into online self-promotional work, “what if our subjects don’t want to be protected? What, in fact, if their very participation in our research is contingent on the exposure it might bring them?” To my mind, these questions ultimately demand a reorientation of prevailing ethical paradigms.

The intersections between visual data/practice, digital technologies and web-based engagements are especially thorny. For instance, following the work of Sabra Thorner (among others), many long-brokered matters – such as (digital) repatriation of indigenous material culture – are now the subject of deeper turmoil, as efforts to take control back over channels of circulation and ownership bump up against now growing (especially Western, neoliberal) claims to “open access” and “open sourcing”.* In this case, the seemingly ethically-inspired open access / open source movement could be seen as anything but ethical: a kind of dubious enterprise aimed at usurping hard-won rights. In other words, the movement itself becomes a moral conundrum, with privacy and openness seemingly pitted against one another. To borrow from Kendall Roark, they are “framed as competing interpretations of the public good.”

Digital culture, in fact, impacts on the whole nature of work and play, leisure and labour, increasingly blurring the boundaries between them, and therein contributing to a larger precariousness in human existence (for more, see the work of Ekbia and Nardi 2014). The connectivity and supposed ‘democracy’ of the web mean that skilled communities of practice (e.g., as seen in Thet Shein Win’s research on visual effects artists) are more and more easily undercut. On top of this, the entire means by which we define and interact with other humans is complicated as hybrid forms of life become enrolled in acts of pleasure, surveillance, etc. (see Mitali Thakor’s enquiries into 3D avatars as means of entrapping pedophiles), or as media artefacts are drawn into specific political and ideological disputes (see Miguel Diaz-Barriga and Margaret Dorsey’s analysis of photography of the US-Mexico border wall in relation to national security).

Moreover, in an increasingly digital world, assurances about the security of data are transformed when those data have no physical manifestation whatsoever, but rather exist entirely in virtual form (e.g., see Barbara Hoffman’s enquiries into cloud-based storage), and are otherwise all-too-effortlessly deployable in myriad and often unintended fashion (e.g., see Aaron Thornburg’s examinations of the dissemination of digital student work).

In such a complex climate, the “ethical absolutism” (Wiles et al. 2012 citing Plummer 2001) that many anthropological research programmes hit up against in formal ethics review processes is wholly inappropriate. As Clark (2013) discusses it, existing ethics guidelines might not “constitute ethically appropriate guidance at all.” And, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that – in ethically-contentious fashion – researchers themselves variously resist and subvert ethics processes (via, for example, forms of ‘creative compliance’ or ‘half-truths’) in order to survive the system. Or they cope by otherwise purposefully doing a disservice to their practice and interlocutors via scaling back, sanitising or censoring their own work (see Wiles et al. 2012).

To borrow from Clark (2013), “Ethical moments emerge at the interplay of relationships (including power inequalities)…when ethical quandaries cannot be resolved by resorting to pre-determined universalistic principles.” Such moments obviously don’t just manifest in the context of research, but are part of ordinary life. Here, a kind of ‘everyday ethics’ – navigated by all human beings in the course of their day-to-day existence – informs individual behaviours. Such ethics are frequently brought to bear in engagements with digital and online cultures (see Clark 2012) where, for example, regular acts of self-censorship or self-exposure are performed (e.g., see the work of Jessika Tremblay on online Indonesian political participation, and el-Sayed el-Aswad on online Emirati self-representation). But how such ‘everyday ethics’ are accounted for in institutional ethical policies, or how they are robustly assessed and refined by individuals themselves, is far from clear.

Taken together, all that seems obvious about ethical practice is that it is fluid and complex, driven by practical needs, organisational frameworks, related regulatory requirements, specific intellectual circumstances, not to mention individual and collective moral tenets. In other words, ethics tend to be necessarily situated (after Clark 2012, 2013), depending upon recursive reflection and constant questioning of one’s processes, objectives and modes of engagement.

Our experience, then, suggests that the most meaningful means of attending to and shaping ethical action is in dialogue with others. A growing number of forums now exist that aim to facilitate such dialogue, including the AAA’s own ethics blog (which, disappointingly, seems rarely used), the Centre for Digital Ethics and Policy’s online meeting place and associated resources/events, and Jonathan’s and my own efforts at annual ethics symposia, among many others. As anthropologists we arguably have an ethical responsibility to participate in these conversations, and to continue challenging existing ethics infrastructures that do not align with everyday human behaviours. Such participation also has the benefit of strengthening bonds across our communities of practice and amplifying our programmes of study. So, if you’re not already part of the conversation, please join—it’s an opportunity to shape both research and broader human futures.

*This predicament is also reminiscent of Boast’s (2011) discussion of the neocolonial museum.

As our aim here is to model good practice, and to benefit from the collective intelligence of Savage Minds, we present below the project research design for constructive critique. In brief, we’ve excavated a found hard drive, and while in the next post we’ll document for you our process, our written and photographic records (stay tuned for a Harris Matrix), and our interpretative outputs, here we detail the nature of our field site and field method, ethical engagement with our excavation, and sustainability/access to our data.

Colleen is the principle author of this research design, and it’s important for me to say that I’ve learned much through my collaboration with her. As someone who has spent the past 10 years outside of the excavation trench, it was very meaningful for me to jump back in—using single context recording no less!—with Colleen as my guide. Here is the project whose results you’ll see reported over the next week on Savage Minds…

Media Archaeology Drive Project (MAD-P): Research Design

MAD-P Staff

• Dr Colleen Morgan
• Neil Gevaux
• Dr Sara Perry

Introduction

Hard disk drives have been used to store data of all types since their introduction by IBM in 1956. Since that time, hard disk drives have gotten progressively smaller and less expensive, thus integrating them into the daily life of most people in industrialized nations. Even as they have become pervasive in daily life, they are rarely visible until they stop functioning, sometimes resulting in a catastrophic loss of data. The term “Data Archaeology” has been created to characterize both the attempt to recover data after the failure of a hard drive and to investigate obsolete data formats. Similarly, the term “Digital Archaeology” is used to characterize the investigation of old, out of date websites, and the growing body of digital practice in archaeology. Until recently there has been relatively little overlap between these fields (Law & Morgan 2014; Pogacar 2014).

The MAD-P team has targeted the hard drive for an investigation into the connections between Foucauldian media archaeologies and archaeological practice as understood by archaeologists. From this investigation MAD-P hopes to realize the potential for an “archaeological media archaeology,” with this excavation prompting critical examination of both fields. There are several key questions that prompt the excavation of a hard drive: is an archaeological fieldwork methodology useful for understanding the contents and structure of a hard drive? Can archaeological methodology be adapted in a way that is useful for media archaeologists? What does the archaeological investigation of a hard drive tell us that a more historiographical approach cannot? Can the excavation of a hard drive build on the previous work of contemporary archaeologists that productively makes the familiar unfamiliar (Buchli and Lucas 2001)?

To address these questions we have designed a program of research that addresses a single hard drive, with the potential to expand the project into other hard drives, but also into other forms of media archaeology. In this document, we provide the background of this work, describe the history and context of our field site, detail our field methodology, and then discuss the future of MAD-P investigations.

Background

MAD-P was conceived as part of an ongoing series of collaborations between digital archaeologists at the University of York (UK). The University of York has cultivated a network of digital archaeologists through a series of initiatives. As the home institution of both Internet Archaeology, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, and the Archaeological Data Service, which has supported archiving of archaeological data since 1996, the Department of Archaeology at the University of York has been involved in digital archaeology on an institutional level for nearly 20 years. More recently the Centre for Digital Heritage was founded in 2012 as an international collaborative venture, with an annual conference, field school, and funds for start-up initiatives.

In this context, MAD-P was conceived as a project that would explore the boundaries of digital archaeology, and test the utility of materials-based archaeological excavation for understanding media archaeology.

History and context of our field site

After consulting with Neil Gevaux, the Department of Archaeology Computer Officer, we identified several potential hard drive candidates for excavation. As we were interested in the contents of the drive, we requested a working hard drive that had been rendered redundant. We selected a 40GB Samsung Hard Drive, model SP0411C. The hard drive had been made in Korea in September of 2004, and bought by the archaeology department shortly after. At the time of purchase, 40GB was a relatively small amount of storage space as 80 and 160 GB drives were readily available, and a 500GB drive was available by 2005. The drive cost about 50 USD. It is unknown if it was bought as part of a pre-assembled computer or on its own. Since the time of purchase, the history of ownership of the hard drive has been lost.

That the history of the hard drive had been lost was ideal for us, as MAD-P wanted to approach the hard drive as an unfamiliar landscape; as Buchli and Lucas suggest, alienation from familiar objects exposes the transgressiveness of archaeology, an “almost perverse exercise in making familiar categorisations and spatial perceptions unfamiliar – a translation from an everyday perceptual language into an archaeological one” (2001, 9). The drive had been rendered obsolete after a decade and had been discarded.  Archaeologies of consumerism incorporate “all aspects of consumer societies – political, religious, educational, legal, leisure, economic, aesthetic, and so on” (Majewski and Schiffer 2001, 27). As such, these categories will be examined in our final report.

Field Methodology

The excavation of this hard drive will be modeled on the Museum of London Archaeology recording system. This recording system follows the single context planning system which records each stratigraphic “event” in sequence. Each of these events is given a context number, photographed, recorded in a standardized form, drawn by hand, and then removed to reveal the next event.

Without knowing the full extent of the data stored on the hard drive, MAD-P decided to employ a sampling strategy that involved following folder structures of the hard drive, drilling “down” through the layers and recording the contents of a single set of folders on the drive. Preliminary investigation revealed that the drive was relatively unpopulated, so we were able to select a sequence of folders that offered a greater “depth” of deposited data.

After the folder structure has been explored through this selective sample, MAD-P will commence the physical excavation of the hard drive, disassembling it piece-by-piece. As this is an irreversible process, Neil Gevaux attempted to back up the hard drive to preserve any data, yet permissions on the drive prevented the storage of some material. After consideration, MAD-P decided to follow through anyway, as this irreversible process more closely reflected the affordances of archaeological methodology as a destructive investigation.

Each component of the excavated drive will be appropriately labeled and stored for further analysis. A future repository for both the excavation material and the archive has not yet been determined, but they are currently in locked storage at the University of York.

Ethics

The investigation of this hard drive had the potential to reveal inappropriate or indiscreet information about students or colleagues in the department; even were it not so, a discussion about the ethics of research is a necessary component to an archaeological research design. Hard drives can hold vast quantities of personal information that could be used for fraudulent or hurtful activities, as well as more indirect information, not intended for public scrutiny, that could be wielded with deleterious consequences for a variety of audiences. While these are potentially interesting for archaeological enquiry, connecting these activities to individuals was not a desired outcome of this research. This marks perhaps the greatest deviation of digital archaeological practice from data archaeology, as the specific information is not necessarily as interesting as the configuration of these data.  As such, MAD-P decided to (1) avoid disclosing the identities of the drive owners if there was personal information available on the drive, (2) inform any identifiable individuals of this research, and (3) give these individuals the option to remove themselves from this research.

Future investigations

After the results from the current MAD-P investigations are fully reported, further inquiry into hard drive archaeology may involve excavations of additional hard drives. The MAD-P team would very much like to involve a more multidisciplinary team, including engineers, hard drive recovery specialists, and media archaeologists to fully investigate the social context of the hard drive. As these excavations continue to proceed, we will fully document the process and make the archive available for other researchers, and we urge that future work be made available in the same way. At this stage we will employ a Creative Commons Attribution license, to encourage the broad dissemination and re-use of this research.

On Friday my colleague, Dr Colleen Morgan, and I will be co-delivering a paper at the University of Bradford’s Archaeologies of Media and Film conference in Bradford, UK. For anyone not familiar with the still-emerging field of “media archaeology,” this is an exciting event, featuring some of its pivotal thinkers (e.g. Jussi Parikka, Thomas Elsaesser), and a diversity of researchers discussing everything from 19^th century stereoscopy to statistical diagrams and animated GIFs. As the organisers stated in their Call for Papers, the conference is a gathering of various interests, all converging on “an approach that examines or reconsiders historical media in order to illuminate, disrupt and challenge our understanding of the present and future.”

Colleen and I are talking on the last day, in the last block of parallel sessions, in a line-up of speakers who appear to be the only other archaeologists at the event. While I’ll delve into the details of “media archaeology” in a subsequent post, it is notable that archaeologists effectively never feature in this stream of enquiry. Rarely do archaeologists or heritage specialists attempt to overtly insert themselves into the media archaeological discourse (Pogacar 2014 is arguably one exception), and neither do media archaeologists typically reach out to archaeology for intellectual or methodological contributions (but see Mattern 2012, 2013; Nesselroth-Woyzbun 2013). Indeed, the media archaeological literature has explicitly distanced itself from archaeology, with the editors of one keystone volume writing:

“Media archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a discipline. When media archaeologists claim that they are ‘excavating’ media—cultural phenomena, the word should be understood in a specific way. Industrial archaeology, for example, digs through the foundations of demolished factories, boarding-houses, and dumps, revealing clues about habits, lifestyles, economic and social stratifications, and possibly deadly diseases. Media archaeology rummages textual, visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasizing both the discursive and the material manifestations of culture. Its explorations move fluidly between disciplines…” (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011).

I’ve been curious about this trend of archaeology-free media archaeology for a while now, particularly after attending Decoding the Digital last year at the University of Rochester (see Matthew Tyler-Jones’ excellent review of the meeting in two parts: I and II). At this conference, one of the attendees with an obvious media archaeological bent lamented the difficulties of studying abandoned virtual worlds wherein direct identification of human beings was essentially impossible (for all that was left in these worlds were fleeting digital traces). The implication was that few methodologies were available to negotiate this seemingly hopeless interrogative exercise.

However, to an archaeologist, the study of abandoned worlds is an everyday affair—and an exciting and hope-filled one at that. Our work is complicated by the fact that these worlds aren’t actually abandoned, but part of complex and ongoing histories of creation, use, reuse, discard, interference, reworking and appropriation. To manage these complexities, we have accumulated massive epistemological and practical toolkits, honed over centuries in collaboration with a variety of interdisciplinary agents—both human and non-human. I wondered, and I continue to wonder, why our toolkits thus wouldn’t be the go-to points for anyone researching such issues. I am suspicious that the disconnect here lies in the narrow academic appreciation of what archaeologists do.

My curiosity about these issues is further heightened by a lot of reading that I’ve been doing lately about expertise with digital media, the future of (digital) knowledge, and what it means to nurture intellectual change and experimentation. In his recent Theses on the Epistemology of the Digital, Alan Liu, in an attempt to provide provocative points of development for the new Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge, suggests that

“digital age humanities scholars should be encouraged to complement their dominant discourse with other kinds of discourse – including challenging collaborative work, difficult and innovative acts of data collection and analysis, and research outputs…that do not sum up in a critical/interpretive monograph. The other proposition is that…scholars should not be engaging solely in discursive acts at all. Instead, it is already clear in the field of the digital humanities…that a gestalt-shift is underway that recasts acts of discourse as acts of “making” and “building.”

Earlier in these theses, Liu indicates that “A key test for the proposed Centre for Digital Knowledge…will be whether it is willing at least on occasion to accommodate non-standard forms of knowledge organization, production, presentation, exploration, and dissemination acclimated to the digital age or open to its networked ethos”, and he concludes by noting that “Whatever the program, the goal is to engage the topic of what it means to “know” in the digital age in a spirit of serious play – at once disciplined and exploratory of new paradigms.”

By my reckoning, if such propositions are truly indicative of the future of (digital) knowledge, then archaeology is already at the vanguard, as this is exactly what many archaeologists do – and have long done. Indeed, many of our York-based projects have precisely these dimensions, including the recent Heritage Jam, our Heritage and Play sessions, and our annual Heritage Practice field school and Digital Heritage summer school.

By this logic, archaeologists are the prototypical media archaeologists—studying media (in its broad conception, as discursive and material means to a plurality of different ends/processes), inventing and tinkering with media to progress such studies, and skilfully deploying other media to circulate this work. All of the archaeologists whom I consider the catalysers of meaningful change in the discipline are savvy in these multiple lines of media scrutiny and management. I would welcome other examples to add here, but prime cases include Colleen and her pioneering PhD on Emancipatory Digital Archaeology; the research and teaching of digital humanist and archaeologist Shawn Graham, which are premised upon craftwork and nurturing expert capacities to create and experiment; ‘punk archaeologists’ Andrew Reinhard (well known of late for the Atari Landfill excavations) and Bill Caraher; Katy Meyers (of Bones Don’t Lie) and Kristina Killgrove (of Powered by Osteons) whose engagements via blogging and linked social media have had profound reach and impact on a variety of publics; the quartet of archaeological specialists behind the long-needed TrowelBlazers site; Lorna Richardson, Jim Dixon and the Public Archaeology 2015 collaborative, who are collectively testing what it means simply to do archaeology, as they put it, “in ways that make meaning for others”; and Stu Eve, Guy Hunt and the L-P Archaeology team, where commercial archaeology, public knowledge exchange, digital experimentation and theoretical boundary-pushing coincide.

When media archaeologists advocate for an “archeological sensitivity” (Snickars and Vonderau 2012, 5) but without reference to the sensitivities that archaeologists themselves have refined over hundreds of years of practice, I do suspect a rather ungenerous academic rejection of (or, at least, an illiteracy in) our discipline. By the same token, when Colleen and I discussed the cross-fertilisation that could come about through knowledge sharing between archaeology and media archaeology, it became obvious that our methodologies might not be entirely legible to media archaeologists, nor amenable to certain artefacts (including many communications technologies) that should actually be standard units of study in our discipline.

Over the next few weeks on Savage Minds, in what we consider to be a style true to our conception of ‘media archaeology’ (developed in conversation between multiple people and things, focused on discursive and material enquiry into a specific media artefact, and elaborated through online mediated dialogue), Colleen and I will lay down a methodology for literally excavating media objects. We will provide further context on the nature of “media archaeology”; make clear some of the practices of archaeology that we consider to be unique to the discipline and deeply (although not unproblematically) linked to innovation and intellectual transformation; outline a research design, methodological tools, and a traceable procedure for digging into media artefacts; and then present for comment, critique, refinement and reconfiguration our preliminary efforts at the excavation of one such artefact: a discarded hard drive.

Alongside critical consideration of ethics, impact, digital labour, community, making and craft, this is a trial run at an archaeological media archaeology. We aim to complicate and elaborate our understandings of what archaeologists do, open up a conversation about the potentialities and promise that lie at the core of excavation, and invest collectively in the playful, energising, fundamentally collaborative practice that is archaeological fieldwork.

Its clear that Crovitz twisted his story to fit his technolibertarian agenda. Manjoo aligned his more accurate history of the internet in a technoprogressive defense of the president’s wickedly edited non-gaffe. McCracken used a most overused and unconvincing technoindividualistic argument to champion the great white men of internet history. Finally, Johnson put forth the most novel of the historiographical theories, introducing the idea that peer-production is behind the internet, or at least the operating systems that run the computers and apps that access the internet.

Not being a trained internet historian but rather an anthropologist of network culture it seems to me that Johnson is closest to the answer. On the temporal scale of the longue duree, Johnson is most correct. Innovation and increasing social complexity–including states and corporations–is the result of peers acting together through time. On a less grand and more internet-focused scale, Johnson’s concept of peer-production could be the leitmotif for a more accurate depiction of internet history. All that the technoidealistic theory of peer-production needs is a more expansive conception of peers to include not only individuals but states, corporations, and peer networks sharing code and ideals within a matrix of politics, cultural practices, and economics. This is to say that all of the four perspectives are right enough. It was the successful relationships–the networks–between the four actors that should interest us, how institutions and publics collaborate to produce technologies that impact, more or less positively so far, democracy, innovation, and other collaborative acts.

And so at this point we are talking in less journalistic, political, or techno-fundamentalistic terms and more in terms of social anthropology. These historically shifting, technologically enabled, and culturally inflected constellations of theory, politics, technology, and people begin to look less like journalism or political posturing and more like global assemblages. This concept is difficult to explain and more difficult to position in politically rhetorical terms, and so such complexity is missed in these 500 word journalism essays. But describing this complexity and relationality is left to the anthropologists and historians of network culture to articulate.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]

In the article, “The Internet? We Built That,” Johnson says Crovitz, Manjoo, and McCracken are wrong, asking and answering the simplistic question: “So was the Internet created by Big Government or Big Capital?” According to Johnson, “The answer is: Neither.” The internet was the creation of “networks of peers…decentralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor with the entire world.” It was the much celebrated free and open source volunteers who built the internet, which I guess, is like Us only with a lot more coding competency and free time than most of Us. To support this claim, Johnson has to veer away from the specific technologies of the internet (packet switching, TCP/IP, HTML) to discuss the open source origins of the Linux operating system, UNIX kernel, and Apache software—systems, platforms, and software on which most government and corporate internet-based work now depends. Johnson’s argument is more about the appliances and applications we use to access the internet and therefore has an easier job making his point. But my point is not to choose who is correct but to map the discursive and classically liberal space of internet historiographical revisionism.

Johnson argues against McCracken’s great men of internet history thesis saying, “we have an endless supply of folklore about heroic entrepreneurs.” Instead he addresses the tropes of the previous accounts by stating that each internet revisionist draws from a known genre of storytelling. What “we lack” are “master narratives of creative collaboration.” In a brief attempt to write a draft towards that end, Johnson invites us to access the open source “success stories that prove convincingly that you don’t need bureaucracies to facilitate public collaboration, and you don’t need the private sector to innovate.” In Johnson’s argument, decentralized peer-to-peer networks have qualities particularly conditioned for the fast-paced and disruptive evolution of consumer networked technology. “Peer networks” he says “don’t suffer from the sclerosis of government bureaucracies.” In this, following Yochai Benkler, Johnson claims that a new form of social organizing has emerged of which peer-production is the leading edge.

This final genre of internet historiographical revisionism is technoidealism with its claims that the internet is an exceptional and novel technology that is revealing the emergence of both post-state and post-corporate social formations. Scholars like Benkler, Sara Schoonmaker, and Christopher Kelty share some of this hopefulness about a “reorientation of knowledge and power” brought about or exhibited by the network of networks.

Like each of these discourses, technoidealism exists on a spectrum. On one end of the technoidealist spectrum is technoutopianism, an extreme form of internet-exceptionalism and technodeterminism highlighted by Kevin Kelly, linked to the life-extension fantasies of transhumanism and Ray Kurzweil, and other claims that the internet is an early example of the singularity, a metaphor for teleological progress to a point of bio-information synthesis. On the other end of the technoidealism spectrum are much more tamed versions of technopragmatism emerging from grounded research with peer-producers, free software activists, and open source coders. The scholars investigating these cultural iterations tend to articulate the emic perspective of their informants who say that the internet is exceptional and capable of provoking post-state and post-capital transformations.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]

Harry McCracken, Time Magazine’s tech writer, further developed Manjoo’s takedown of Crovitz of a day earlier. McCracken added that the element that both Manjoo and Crovitz missed was the role of “gifted individuals” in the development of the internet, the web, and web browsers. To get a taste of his approach he begins by calling ARPA director Bob Taylor a “visionary.” He then goes onto populate his text with the great men of internet history: Vint Cerf as inventor of TCP/IP (and also a federal employee at ARPA), Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse and hypertext, Ted Nelson the correct father of the term “hyperlink” not Tim Berners-Lee as Crovitz claimed, and Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, the inventors of Mosaic, the first graphical browser, and students at the state-run University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. McCracken concludes by saying “in the end, everything is invented by individuals.” These “visionary” and “gifted” individuals who invent “everything” are within both state and private financed institutions and are the real inventors of the internet. McCracken’s “great white man theory of history” was first popularized by 19th century Scottish author Thomas Carlyle and debunked by anthropologists and their precursors, including Herbert Spencer surprisingly, but its persistence in these instances of internet historiographical revisionism illustrates how liberal discourses of the potency of male individualism continue to articulate with origins stories of the erection of networked technology.

What McCracken expresses is what I’ll call technoindividualism, a negative liberal theory of individual self-empowerment galvanized by networked technology, eventually triumphant despite the stifling oppressions of state regulation, consumers with temporary bad taste, and the ignorance of little-minded CEOs. Technoindividualism meshes with the technolibertarianism expressed by Crovitz and the Technology Liberation Front in that each concept emerges from a belief in technological entrepreneurial exceptionalism. The theory goes: some people just have the preternatural gift of understanding the supernatural internet and all of the rest of us consumers get the honour of relishing their work.

Technoindividualism is often perpetuated by lazy technology journalists, ambitious venture capitalists, and corporate boards with the hopes of creating hype and investment bubbles around their metaphysically genius producers and sublime products. Personality traits of Mosaic/Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, and the recent drug and murder escapades of anti-computer virus entrepreneur John McAfee have all been highlighted for their technoindividualism in braving the Wild West to manifest their dreams of intuitive technology.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]

The most compelling argument made by Manjoo is a reminder that it was Barran’s packet-switching technologies, the capacity to split-up data, attaching routing directions, send the data, and reconstitute it elsewhere, which is the basis of the internet today and was first put into practice in the US federal government’s ARPAnet. Manjoo explained, “In tech, no one does anything on his own. … in the tech industry, it takes a village.”

Manjoo critiqued Crovitz’s conflation of the internet and the world wide web, his ignorance that Vint Cerf was a federal employee as was his co-creator of TCP/IP Robert Kahn an employee of the Defense Department, his misunderstanding that the Ethernet connects computers to a single not a multiple internetwork, and his mistake in not recognizing that packet-switching technology was developed at RAND, a government funded think tank.

He goes onto defend the role of government in technology saying that it wasn’t bureaucrats who stymied the roll-out of the internet but rather AT&T who rejected Paul Barran’s idea of packet-switching technologies running on their phone lines. Manjoo states, “And that’s why the task fell to the federal government—the Defense Department had to create the Internet because private enterprise refused to.” He concludes: “The Internet, the Web, the microprocessor, GPS, batteries, the electric grid—if you’ve built a thriving company that depends on any of these things, you didn’t get there on your own. Or, as the president once said ‘You didn’t build that.’”

Manjoo’s discourse on the origins of the internet can be conceptualized as technoprogressive, aligned as it is with the historical and present US progressive movement, social liberalism, and social Democrats. This view acknowledges the role of the state in funding technology and science while addressing the shared costs and responsibilities of a state-supported networked society. Technoprogress has been theorized by Douglas Rushkoff, Donna Haraway, Mark Dery, James Hughes in the form of “democratic transhumanism,” and Dale Carrico. Hughes and Carrico, for instance, have been affiliated with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, which forms the technoprogressive answer to the Technology Liberation Front’s technolibertarianism. Carrico says that technoprogressivism “assumes that technoscientific developments can be empowering and emancipatory so long as they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities.” Manjoo, and President Obama before him, embodied technoprogressivism by claiming that it was the democratic and regulatory mechanisms, not to mention the US federal funding, that made the internet possible.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]

However, Ethernet connects computers to computers, not computer networks to computer networks like APRAnet. Ethernet was invented at a corporation, Xerox PARC, where Robert Taylor was working after developing APRAnet for the US federal government. Thus, it was not the US federals but private business, namely Xerox PARC with a later incarnation of Taylor, that came up with what became the internet. The government? “Bureaucrats,” according to Crovitz, harassed Xerox PARC’s engineers.

Crovitz positions media corporations as responsible for and the rightful heirs of the internet. This is technolibertarianism, the belief that private individuals with unfettered access to technologies working out their negative liberties and economic self-interest is not only legal and just brings about economic prosperity for the most. Technolibertarianism is most vigorously defended and self-labelled by the Technology Liberation Front (TFL), a blogging think tank with connections to the best funded conservative think tanks: Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, TechFreedom, Mercatus Center and other bastions of neoliberal information policy construction, debate, and propagation. Adam Thierer who at FTL is the primary chronicler of technolibertarian self-referentiality calls Crovitz his “favorite technology policy columnist,” couldn’t come to his mentor’s defence on this experimental revamping of internet history around a privately employed Taylor, Ethernet, and PARC but he has much to say about technolibertarianism.

“Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.” –Adam Thierer

Crovitz is attempting to reengineer the history of the internet in order to have an origin story more in line with the technolibertarianism advanced by Thierer. If the internet is not made by the state then the state has no right to manage it. If it is made by corporations then corporations are the rightful heirs to the internet. In the following posts I will introduce how another depiction of the origin of the internet carries its own ideology despite its historical accuracy.

[This is a part of a six part blog on four debates about the origins of the internet. Please see all six posts here.]