ArXiv for social science research anyone? @savageminds @culanth @haujournal @jmtrombley @jasonjackson2 @daniel_lende @MattThompsonTMM

— ryan anderson (@anthropologia) May 19, 2016

This is a pretty interesting idea. What would it entail taking arXiv as a role model?

What is arXiv?

Like SSRN, arXiv is a digital repository. They are both examples of Green OA — a type of open access where authors deposit versions of their work so that they can be accessed by readers for free. What version of an article makes it into the repository depends on which publisher you’re working with, but almost all of them allow authors to deposit the original submission: no peer review, no mark-up, no type setting. Others are more generous, a few even allow the post-print to be deposited. It just depends, if you want to go Green do some research on your publisher’s homepage or ask a company rep.

Green OA is frequently contrasted with Gold OA, where the author submits to a journal that makes the final product available to readers for free, examples include HAU and Cultural Anthropology. Again, there is great diversity among Gold OA publishers just as there is among Green repositories but we’re not getting into that here.

arXiv is Green OA, it is a pre-print repository but of a particular kind. If you’re at an elite or second tier R1 you probably already have access to a repository through your institution. However many of these institutional repositories (IRs) share a common problem, faculty participation is low. Some universities have attempted to address this with OA mandates, but this is not always sufficient to change faculty behavior. People are really busy, or maybe they don’t see the value in access. Perhaps they think someone else will do it for them, or are mistaken about their author’s rights. For whatever reason many people who can go Green choose not to.

The generally poor showings for institutional repositories has lead some in the digital libraries field to argue that IRs are not the way forward for Green OA. Instead they anticipate that disciplinary repositories (DRs), sometimes called subject repositories, will be more successful. Perhaps in our neoliberal world faculty are less tied to their institution than their discipline? Both SSRN and arXiv are DRs.

nb. There are other ways you can get your pre-prints out there without a repository. Social networks like academia.edu and researchgate.net exist to facilitate self-promotion and the sharing of information. Similarly with personal webpages. However, a major advantage to IRs and DRs over social networks and personal webpages is that the former are run by information professionals. Digital librarians who will work to insure that your metadata meet international standards and that technical stuff, like bit stream preservation, are well maintained thus keeping your work discoverable and accessible. To get the best of both worlds deposit your work in a repository, this will result in a URL that you can embed on your webpage or network.

So both SSRN and arXiv are Green OA, disciplinary repositories run by full-time professionals. But there’s a difference!

What makes arXiv special?

Three things make arXiv magic. It carries prestige among the community it is intended to serve, it has a very successful business plan, and it has a very successful governance model. All of this was achieved with only twenty-five years of hard work and sacrifice.

On its front page arXiv boasts 1,148,725 e-prints available for download, better than double SSRN’s 563,300. This is pretty remarkable when you consider that arXiv was originally intended as a repository just for physicists (today it has slightly expanded that scope) whereas SSRN aims to serve all of the social sciences and the humanities.

For some reason physicists have really bought into what arXiv has to offer. Maybe it is a result of the collaborative atmosphere of physics research? In my imagination, cultural anthropology romanticizes the lone genius — we’re either collecting ethnographic data in some out of the way place isolated from the rest of the world or perhaps cloistered in an solitary office channeling that experience into text only to emerge with the finished product. Maybe we just don’t do enough stuff as part of a team?

Aside: I think an integral part of the professional life of someone in the social sciences or humanities is the experience of being in a constant state of precarity. Not only do our colleagues in the STEM fields have more resources at their disposal, they are not constantly called upon to defend their very existence to powerful outsiders. Shoestring budgets and the unending barrage of existential threats make a lot of social science and humanities faculty “small-c conservative,” risk averse and skeptical about diverging from the well-worn path of professional success offered by conventional publications.

All of this is to say, there seems to be something about the “culture” of physicists that contributes to their high participation rate. If I was a physicist and I deposited an e-print in arXiv I could tell my buddies and everyone would pat me on the back. Good job! Another publication! If as an anthropologist I make a deposit to SSRN and I tell my buddies about it, everyone would say, What’s SSRN? and, When are you going to publish that? Raising the prestige and visibility of Green OA is one of the best possible outcomes of the SSRN/Elsevier merger. But more on that later

One more detail: arXiv does not rely on peer review. Instead, there is a system of vetting author submissions. Like peer reviewers, experts volunteer to vet submissions but instead of writing comments they are primarily interested in making sure that papers are acceptable and properly sorted into their appropriate sub-field. Many arXiv papers go on to have other lives as traditional publications and thus go through a peer review process eventually. My point here is that physicists think sharing unreviewed work is a notable accomplishment in a way that anthropologists (currently) do not.

The business plan for arXiv is perhaps the most crucial ingredient to its success. Born in the Los Alamos Laboratories in 1991, arXiv has since migrated with its founder Paul Ginsparg to Cornell. Cornell University Libraries, known as a leader even among the most elite libraries, has since 2011 provided the repository with infrastructural support and staffing. Annual funding from CUL is supplemented with the deep pockets of the Simons Foundation, both in the form of annual funding and challenge grants. Further contributing to this are voluntary pledges from about 200 institutions that represent arXiv’s heaviest users, these pledges range $1500-3000 per institution per year. The above are 2012 numbers.

Oya Yildirim Rieger writes in “Sustainability: Scholarly Repository as Enterprise” (Bulletin for the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol.39, No.1) that there are five sustainability principles CUL adheres to in planning the future of arXiv: (1) deep integration into the scholarly community and scholarly process — scientists take a leadership role in guiding arXiv, it reflects their values and their community as a result; (2) a clearly defined mandate and governance structure — if you’re running a digital archive then you’re playing a long game. The long game is the whole point of archiving things!; (3) technology platform stability and innovation — the data architecture and user interface game has to be top notch and always responsive to the constantly changing expectations of the users; (4) systematic development of content policies — be crystal clear about collection policies, submission guidelines, copyright status, etc.; (5) reliance on business planning strategies — you want big money for your repository? Then you better be able to talk the business talk and show value to your investors.

The long term viability of arXiv is sustained by its thoughtful governance structure. CUL upholds its end of the bargain from a managerial and administrative standpoint, they house the archive. But they are in constant communication with two boards: a Member Advisory Board, consisting of elected representatives from stakeholder institutions, and a Scientific Advisory Board that consists of researchers in the fields arXiv serves. These two boards are responsible for providing input on different aspects of arXiv’s development. The MAB is more concerned with implementing information standards, working towards interoperability, and planning. The SAB is concerned with intellectual oversight and the vetting process.

What about the future of SSRN?

As you can see arXiv has a lot to recommend it and achieving these goals will be a tall order. In the meantime, we already have the SSRN plus all manner of other institutional repositories and digital libraries. So, do we really need something like arXiv instead?

To be sure Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN is disappointing to many open access activists because it represents another step towards the corporate enclosure of intellectual life. Elsevier is perceived by many as among the worst of the bunch because of its reputation for playing hardball, being litigious, gobbling up author’s rights, and even on a few occasions acquiring OA journals and then charging for access to them. What a bully!

Elsevier has also been the focus of past and ongoing boycotts with scholars refusing to cite their journals, submit work, or volunteer as reviewers or editors. No doubt some authors will feel that they should abstain from participating in SSRN as an extension of their OA activism. If this sounds like you, then you will no doubt be in good company. There are lots of other ways you can go Green OA. Vote with your feet and choose one of those instead.

I’m actually going to run the other way with this. I am not going to advocate for the boycotting of SSRN and this is why: open access is not free.

arXiv solved the problem of funding open access by aligning itself with an Ivy League school and the philanthropic arm of a crazy rich hedge fund manager. Plus it still manages to get hundreds of other libraries to send it checks on an annual basis, NPR-style. SSRN saw another way forward, selling out to corporate America. Did the professional staff at SSRN all get big bonuses and golden parachutes as a result? Probably not. They do, however, get to have salaries and benefits which is pretty cool considering they give their product away for free. They, SSRN, had reached the limit of their growth as an independent entity and needed more resources to advance their goal. Ckelty is probably right that Elsevier sees this as an opportunity to feast upon data, but if the service remains free to use while increasing in quality then that might be an acceptable trade off. As we have known since Darwin, trade offs are an integral part of distributing risk through populations living in complex ecosystems.

I suspect that some will not be persuaded. Contributing to an Elsevier property will be an ideological bridge too far and, to be honest, I am sympathetic with this position. An arXiv for the social sciences holds a lot of promise — but here’s the rub. Even if you had arXiv’s mad funding and governance skillz, you would still be missing a key ingredient: acceptance and prestige among the community the archive intends to serve. The physics community has embraced arXiv and Green OA in a way that anthropology and the social sciences has not. That’s on us.

So maybe we don’t need to replicate arXiv. Maybe we need to have a period of reflection, reflexivity in that classic ANTH 101 sense, about our “culture” as a discipline. Then conceptualize a repository that reflects that in a way that other anthropologists will think is valuable. That might result in something that is not identical to arXiv, but uniquely our own.

But the mad dough and Ivy library would probably be pretty helpful too.

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!)

Post by Christine Finn, as part of the Analog/Digital series

The photo was taken at the dawn of the new year, 2016. It is a snapshot taken at a home in Islington, North London. I was using my old BlackBerry, which I prefer to a touch phone. It captures, albeit in a grainy style, a generational dynamic. The child is mediating the moment of Big Ben chiming, not just through he television, but capturing it on his smartphone. The woman, my generation, is peering through the window. She is about to open it to hear the fireworks of celebration over the Thames a short drive away. I am working constantly with the dance of technologies fading, disappearing, and resurging. And a quest for authenticity. This photo captures something of my own sense of time passing, through the filter of technology.

Christine Finn is a journalist, writer, and creative archaeologist. She has written and presented on computers as archaeology since 2000, when serendipity led her to San Jose, California. Her book, “Artifacts: an archaeologist’s year in Silicon Valley”, on the material culture of the dotcom boom and bust, was published by MIT Press in 2001, and is now an ebook. She is author the author of “Past Poetic: archaeology in the poetry of WB Yeats and Seamus Heaney (Duckworth) and her authorised biography of Jacquetta Hawkes, a 20 year literary excavation, will be published in the summer. She has also contributed to the Sunday Times, Guardian, Wired, BBC, and Edge.org. As an artist she has made site-specific works in the UK, Italy, and the US, and received seven Arts Council England funding awards. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Reuter Inst for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

I am an archaeological illustrator and in this post, as part of this month’s analog/digital series, I’d like to discuss my work in relation to analogue and digital media. My job includes recording on-site features, drawing artifacts, and creating reconstruction illustrations of architecture, people, and activities. I also help researchers think through their data and raise new questions during the illustration process. Until recently I would have considered my illustration practice wholly analogue. I feel most comfortable working with pencil, paint, and paper. When I first started producing archaeological illustrations (about 10 years ago), the only digital part of my workflow was at the end, scanning my hand drawn images and cleaning them up in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for eventual publication. The image below is an example of this process.

Since then, there has been a gradual creep of the digital into my workflow. I now continually switch back forth between analogue and digital methods when making an illustration. After an initial sketch by hand, I scan the image, then play with the composition digitally, perhaps print it out again and draw on top of my print, scan it again, etc. I continue this back-and-forth until I have a preliminary drawing that I am happy with and that incorporates any comments or corrections from my clients. I’ll then complete the final art in an analogue medium with digital details and final flourishes. This combination of analogue and digital production is fairly straightforward, a skeuomorph of strictly analogue processes.

Therefore, for me as an archaeological illustrator, the central tension between analogue and digital lies not in the different media used in my workflow, but in the relationship between illustration and 3D models. I see two main contrasts in how illustration and 3D models present archaeological data. The first is a contrast in the viewer’s perception of both the type of information presented and the authorship. As Laia Pujol-Tost summarized in an earlier post in this series, both audiences and experts view virtual reconstructions as objective and illustrations, specifically peopled scenes, as speculative. The speculative, subjective nature of illustration is sometimes seen as a drawback. “Why illustrate?” is a question I am frequently asked. The belief that digital media such as photographs and 3D models are superior conveyors of archaeological data is often the subtext to this question. I’ve even had people question my right to be part of archaeological discussion because what I am creating is “art” not “science”.

All illustration is interpretation whether it is intended for an academic or more general audience. I see this subjectivity as a strength and an integral part of what I do. Even with artifact illustrations, seemingly straightforward representations of objects, my clients and I make decisions about the object’s manufacture or purpose and encode them in the drawing. These decisions are made on a larger scale in reconstructions depicting interpretations of past architectural use, behaviors, and landscapes. This decision making process is an ongoing dialogue with interpretive consequences. In the image below, by following archaeological illustration conventions, I’ve included information on the sherd’s decoration (the light from the upper left allows the viewer to conclude the decoration is impressed in the clay, not raised), the inferred pot diameter, and the original position of the sherd in a complete pot.

Interpretation is also part of the 3D modeling process; it is just not as evident. Depending on the purpose and intended audience of a model, 3D modelers make a suite of interpretive decisions, from what is and isn’t part of a site or feature to speculating about building forms and materials in architectural reconstructions. The glossy and smooth computer generated look of these models masks their authorship, leading the viewer to overlook the creator between models and recorded objects, and giving the models their more objective air. On the other hand, analogue media foregrounds the illustrator’s role in the illustration process. Brush strokes and pencil lines hint at the hand that made them and remind the viewer that this is an interpretive process.

The role of guide is the second contrast I’d like to highlight between illustration and 3D modeling. The illustrator is your guide in archaeological illustrations, leading you through the archaeological data, arranging it in specific ways to highlight different interpretations or data sets. Not only do I present these ideas, I help guide the viewer’s eye to key information by making compositional and rendering decisions. For example, a couple years ago I created several images of figurines from Playa de los Muertos in Honduras for Dr. Rosemary Joyce. The textile details on the figurines were her focus and I chose to illustrate them in such a way that highlighted these details (you can read more about this here).

3D models, in contrast, often allow the user to manipulate the view her or himself. The user becomes their own guide through the presented information, rotating an artifact to choose their own view or selecting a path through a site. This has its own advantages such as allowing the viewer to interact with what they deem important and to not be constrained by the limits of a 2D image.

In sum, I see analogue illustration and its digital skeuomorphs filling a much different though equally useful role from 3D modeling in archaeological research. Both illustrations and 3D models are conveyors of archaeological data, they just present it and allow the viewer to interact with it in different ways. In my second post I will discuss how I have recently had the opportunity to combine illustration and 3D modeling in ways that go beyond the skeumorph to constructive interplay between analogue and digital.

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)?