Archaeolog

A conversation at the Metamedia Lab with Torin Golding (avatar), the creator of ROMA, the largest archaeological site in SecondLife.

Digital technologies are changing the nature of scholarship. Far from an exception, archaeology too is changing. It may be that archaeology is traditionally thought of as a 'down and dirty' profession, done 'out there' in the field, the popular/public image of an archaeologist-at-work - we even like this conception of the 'rude scholar', equally at home before a bookshelf or a mountain. At the same time it is a discipline with a particular history of technophilia. For a set of closely related reasons (epistemological and ontological), it is especially beholden to technological desires. Why? By some accounts bridging the gap of 'record' to generalization, technology, specifically the tried-and-true instruments of technoscience, were to assure the objectivity of 'second order observations'. The complex - 'polysemous' and rich - quality of archaeological materials could be transformed through instruments' reproducible procedures into 'data'. They were neutral devices. We can count with/on them. Most often this technology visualizes the results of such algorithmic alchemy.

Indeed, archaeology has also been one of the leading fields in conveying the 'stuff' of the archaeological site and landscape in visual form. More than most disciplines, archaeologists have been at the forefront of developing and strategically deploying and thinking about visual media. For the discipline, visual media serve as 'stand-fors' the vestiges of the past. From GIS maps and query databases to stratigraphic profiles and artifact sketches to obsidian hydration composition graphs to photogrammetry, site and feature photographs and theodolite maps, little of archaeology can be conveyed or argued without visual media. This is particularly so with a discipline that records as it irrevocably transforms through archaeological excavation and survey. Often all that remains at hand are our visual media. These become the guarantors of what was once 'out there'; the anchors to what we say. Unfortunately, archaeologists too often restrict their usage and familiarization with visualization to GIS or 3-D 'fly-throughs'.

This legacy, perhaps more prominent in North America and the U.K., brings us to the current 'new' technologies of digital media. Some Archaeology and Media type readers are becoming available to archaeologists. Most of these books on media tend to have anachronistic arguments. Perhaps for reasons of 'viability' in the publishing world, or because of the still strong influence in Britain and the States of viewing media not in its technical capacities but as a powerful mechanism of the culture industry's status quo. Asked about media and quite a few colleagues would talk about popular reception in mainstream media, the role of television and radio(?!). Some are still stubbornly instrumentalist, especially in their view of GIS, AutoCAD and VR applications.

This is not (yet) a media manifesto for the discipline.
We do believe that the digital turn in both society and the discipline holds promises for increased public interest and engagement. Not simply through the limited (old Web 1.0) idea of internet 'access', but through the emergent Web >2.0 platform enabled actions of: user-generated content, mixing, mashups, database proliferation, etc. Yet it also may threaten the 'boundaries' of the discipline through the dispersion of archaeological information across vast networks not beholden to peer-review or other established measures of quality and accuracy.

More conference proceedings - particularly at WACs and TAGs and CHATs - cull papers on new media and other internet based technologies. There is the estimate that a new blog is born every 1/2 second on the internet; a good number (see Witmore's March 1, 2006 entry) dedicated to archaeology. No project has yet been entirely devoted to the issue of the increasing ubiquity and convergence of digital media in society and its demonstrable impact upon archaeology. So in the setting of an on-line journal dedicated to archaeology, it seems an appropriate time to look at some of these new media in detail - with the features and interactivity that only a blog such as Archaeolog can provide. So in this initial installment, we are going to hold a discussion about Second Life.

Interest and use of this on-line gaming-cum-social-network phenomenon in archaeology is emerging. Some of this interest has been shared already on Archaeolog (see Tringham's November 19, 2007 entry). Metamedia and Stanford Humanities Lab also collaborated early on with new media artist Lynn Hershmann to explore how to animate archives - link. Not just a game for an isolated group of bug-eyed, monitor masochistic techies, Second Life brings up many salient issues for archaeology: what is the nature of representation; what is accuracy versus imaginative dissonance; how do we get people to commit to visualized information; is the partially immersive the way forward for World Wide Web 3.0; how do we engage differently with digital heritage; what is remixing and co-creation of the past? To illumine many of these concerns for the future of the past, we sat down with Torin Golding, the avatar of the creator and manager of one of the earliest and largest archaeological sites in Second Life (SL). In the first part of this discussion we will simply highlight some of the parameters for understanding the buzz around SL; present some demographics and other facts. To really get the detail, an ethnography of digital culture would be requisite (for a partial account see Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human by T. Boellstorf). For now we will give SL in broad-strokes and hope that most users of Archaeolog are somewhat familiar with the avatar world. For those unfamiliar or who have just wandered aimlessly a bit, Torin Golding's experience of getting started will provide a field guide of sorts. The next part (1.2) of the discussion will get at the practicalities of running an archaeological island in SL, as well as frame the pressing issues relating to the digital futures of the past.

YouTube of ROMA

'A book in a room' - Three Landscapes

Philosophers of Technology are not a well established bunch. While they form even less of a ‘tradition’ of study in Europe, they do take their earliest progenitor to be the Continental thinker Martin Heidegger (Achterhuis 2001; Ihde 1983, 2005). It seems strange that thinking carefully about what stake technologies have in society should not have found earlier impetus. After all, tool-making has up until recently been synonymous with being human (classic summary in Mumford 1967). And as early as Plato, technological devices figured prominently in lessons on the ‘good life’, involving the role of techne (esp. in the Republic VII). The major reason appears to be that philosophy, no less than science, has on the whole been swept up with the instrumentalist rendering of technology; as the application side of scientific R and D (Scharff and Dusek 2003:3-6). The predominance of an analytic tradition in the UK and North America meant that technology fell through the cracks between epistemology and ethics, between how knowledge is obtained and how it should be used. Even the Continental tradition remained cast in Comte’s persuasive model of technology as applied science; though many had turned sour on Comte’s optimistic technoutopianism (Comte 1988).

This is why, in his characteristic irreverence, Heidegger bypasses well worn metaphysical trails and goes straight for the essence of technology (Harman 2007). (Well, ‘straight’ is definitely a matter of opinion given Heidegger’s abstruse writing.) He prompted us with the question of what is it to be in the midst of all of our technological doings (Heidegger 1977). Similar to Marx putting technology at center stage, yet developing neither a strong technological determinism nor a societal determination of technology, Heidegger’s character of technology is ambivalent. There is a mix of optimism and pessimism. There is the contrast between craftwork and modern, technologically assisted labour. In this romantic view, ‘traditional’ crafts gather together humans and nonhumans into meaningful activities. Borgman (1984:196) aptly terms these ‘events’ of craftwork focal things. Heidegger’s early discussion in Being and Time doesn’t, however, give us much to extrapolate from to our own modern, technologically immersed environments; who even has a jug laying about? When he expands his consideration of technological things in his later, famous essay, he does provide more contemporary examples of how modern technology turns everything to stone, so to speak (1977). Technology serves a cultural way of being that wills humans and things to be ‘standing reserves’, or causes, for manipulable ends (Feenberg 1999:183-4). This is technology as enframing, and contrary to craftwork this type of being with technology closes-down our insight into, or awareness of, the world around us. We will degenerate through this relation with technology into narcissistic controllers, hung up on the power of our subjectivity. I think there are interesting implications in Heidegger’s pessimistic depiction of technology which could usefully be expanded to the reign of ‘social' constructivism in the academy (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), as well as to pressing environmental and economic problems (these latter courses have, in fact, been suggestively pursued by ‘Deep Ecologists’ and ‘Buddhist Economists’; Naess 1973, Schumacher 1989).

I want to keep with thinking about technology, though, in view of our own dealings with new technology, and, specifically, the emergent role of new media for archaeologists. In fact, in view of what’s before your ‘window’ right now. Archaeolog has reached the milestone post of 100 contributions. This seems to be a most opportune time to reflect a bit on what sort of technology archaeolog is as a form of e-publication. Like Heidegger’s successors in the Philosophy of Technology, emergent digital media in archaeology is a relatively new phenomenon; its practitioners and ideas concerning its roles unconsolidated. It is an exciting time. Yet it is important to anticipate where mediǟrchaeology will go. We certainly have valuable signposts from both Heideggerian and reflexive archaeologists to encourage trailblazing these questions. So, do the mantras of ‘user generated’ and ‘user customization’ associated with new media really limn the narcissistic degeneration and auto-absorption that Heidegger pessimistically ascribed to modern technologies? Does it enframe in ‘Microsoft windows’ our relations with each other?; will we be left with virtual ‘de-worlds’? Or should we look to Heidegger’s later thought (1966) where he suggests that through a passive revolution we can attain a more positive, ‘free relation’ to technology? A relationship of distance which “will become wonderfully simple and relaxed” (1966:54). Later work in the Philosophy of Technology, especially that focused upon computing and internet technologies (Dreyfus 1979, 1999; Heim 1997; McCluhan 1966), seems to have incorporated Heidegger’s mixed message and oriented for a destination off-the-map combining ancient skepticism, Enlightenment optimism, and Romantic uneasiness (Mitcham 1990:32-33). E-publication in archaeology, and blogging more generally, has received just such a sort of mixed assessments.