The University of Southampton and 
are convening a conference on Visualization and Knowledge Formation in Archaeology. A group of specialists will come together on October 23-24 to discuss what work the visual does for archaeologists. This will be the first of a multi-year event focused on visualization. The goal for the events is as follows:
Visualisation in Archaeology has been established in order to provide a ‘space’ in which high quality research can be undertaken around interrelated themes centred on visual communication in archaeology. To this end the project team comprises a robust cross-section of specialists drawn from different fields of study to critically explore the production, the form and the organisational power of images in archaeology and to re-think the boundaries of that exploration.
Building from our experience running the Visualizing Knowledge Sawyer-Mellon Seminar, Tim Webmoor of the Metamedia Lab will present the case for mediation. While visual media, informatics and computing are still imagined to be peripheral to the discipline, the transformative work on the past we accomplish with them is central to archaeology. This is because archaeology is traditionally thought of as a 'down and dirty' profession, done 'out there' in the field; archaeologists equally at home before a bookshelf or a mountain. Yet, 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, assures 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 are neutral devices. We can count with/on them. Consequently, the process of visualization, as an algorithmic alchemy, has come to play an important role in warranting archaeological knowledge. Secondly, at the end of the day (or fieldwork season) we need something to point to when we make our claims. Visual media serve as 'stand-fors' the vestiges of the past. This is particularly so with a discipline that irrevocably transforms through archaeological excavation and survey. Often all that remain at-hand are our visual media. These outputs of visualization become the guarantors of what was once 'out there'; the anchors to what we say.
These two roles for visualization commit archaeology to a strong belief in a correspondence theory of truth; media-as-mimesis. Much recent scholarship from across the academy, though, highlights a more pragmatic view; media-as-prosthesis. What binds visual practices together from across disciplines, and indeed cultures, may have less to do with visually transcribing the world than working on the world. Visualization not as representation - an expressive fallacy - but as mediation.
The implications are that selective fidelity, imaginative dissonance and low resolution may be more important principles for visualization than would be expected. Underscoring these principles is the example of new media and the ‘platform shift’ arising from Web 2.0. Rather than ‘high res’, mimetic renderings, new media technology aims to satisfy a different suite of functionalities: user-generated content, mixing and mashups, database proliferation, customization and collaborative architectures. SecondLife, an open source, partially immersive 3-D environment already hosting several archaeological re-creational sites, is emblematic of just such a visual logic of mediation. Overall, the digital turn in both society and the discipline portends a user-centered role for visualization; a personal and pragmatic use that converges with the ‘paradigm shift’ toward greater public participation and outreach in heritage management.
More information about the conference can be found at The University of Southampton website.
