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, 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.

Metamedia launched Archaeolog in October of 2005. At first the unpolished ideas and commentary of 2 or 3 'archaeologers', archaeolog has now grown to encompass more than 40 regular contributors from North America and Europe.

An archaeolog, or blog for all things archaeological, has been part of Metamedia's e-publishing since 2003. At that time a few other, very early weblogs or static .html pages - most notably Internet Archaeology - were dedicated to publication of archaeological interests of/on the internet. Even a few early commentators - like Julian Richards or Christopher Chippindale - knew that digital publication would change how information and ideas are shared by archaeologists. Since these early days, a host of specialty blogs have appeared for those interested in archaeology. The digital media necessary to launch a blog are inexpensive - even free depending upon your server scenario. Indeed, part of the open-source initiative begun in Silicon Valley has the radically democratic ideal of making self-expression through software available to anyone. And since the 2004 US presidential election, blogs have become effective at offering an alternative to the widely held perception in the States that mainstream media is unreliable and biased. News to/from the people. Now every reputable mainstream news source - from BBC to CNN - integrates a blog component to their news casts. Without enlisting bloggers, and other new media such as Facebook, a would-be President of the US would be sorely lacking in funding. Grass roots organization and mobilization.

This has all been relatively good. For archaeology, publishers are, understandably, a bit nervous about what this portends for academic book sales. Questions of peer-review, quality and content control, and legitimacy come to mind. These questions should be taken seriously; but they can also be seen as established interests worried about financial futures and gate-keeping in academia. Suffice it to say, most new media theorists argue that the digital is no substitute for the physical and real. It augments various qualities - capture, distribution and storage, for instance. So traditional publishers ought to be rest assured that there is no substitute for book-in-the-hands. What will occur are strategies to mix traditional and digital components of publication. Books will be printed, but they'll be supplemented by new media tools, such as additional images or full resolutions databases of images (which are prohibitively expensive to print), sound bytes or podcasts of interviews, YouTube video shorts and even commentary/community pages (all only made possible by new media).

With so many archaeology blogs out there now - and more appearing daily - the onerous on e-publishers is consistency and longevity. Quality should go without saying. But a blog or other e-publication environment must remain reliable. This gets them into users' rss feeds and other aggregates so that they become a habitual source of interest and information. Other distinguishing characteristics could be listed about e-publication. The one that really matters for academics, however, is a function of analog publication constraints. With near instant posting, commenting and reviewing in these collaborative authoring architectures, a digital journal cuts the production time down to a week or less. This means that e-publication can outpace the dated articles which appear in traditional journals - which often take a year - or sometimes more! - to surface after they are submitted. Accelerating debate and the sharing of ideas and information. This will be the great utility of e-publication over the next few years. And archaeolog will be part of archaeology's digital future.

The 6th Media X Annual Meeting took place March 3-4th in Arrillaga Hall at Stanford University on the theme, Transformative Insights about Virtual Worlds, Collaboration and Participation in Mixed Realities. This year's meeting features new results from interdisciplinary teams catalyzed by Media X - describing the chain of effects across neuroscience, emotion and engagement; describing the importance of human-machine interfaces for energy-efficient buildings and cars; describing participation in mixed reality environments; describing best of class virtual collaboration processes and technologies in construction, education and medicine; and describing a novel approach to creating open source virtual worlds that includes automation and tracking capabilities.

Michael Shanks of the Metamedia Lab presented his current research on design criteria, software tools and interactive platforms to accelerate development, motivate engagement, and influence involvement in virtual worlds.

"This online book brings together dance and archaeology, engaging with body knowledge, understanding archaeology as a corporeal way of knowing."

Dr. Lopez y Royo's work simultaneously engages with issues of cross-cultural interaction and the relocation of cultural and artistic practices, in the past and in the present. As she describes the project in the preface. "The dance past is fragmentary: dance reconstruction is based on reassemblages of fragments and traces of the dance past and interpretation of these. The dance past translates into a notion of dance heritage, often posited as both value and conflict–free, and predicated on authenticity and purity. Dance reconstruction involves engaging with issues of dance representation and documentation. The documentation of dance is itself a form of dance representation. The documentation of dance is inevitably partial and based on classifications which are not meant to reflect a definitive order of things, but are conceived as flexible tools of understanding. Representation changes its object, thus representing dance is not about capturing its ‘authentic essence’ but about transformation; documentation of dance is about capturing (and transforming, through interpretation) fragments of the dance experience."

Read more of Alessandra Lopez y Royo's book@Chiasme.soft.books here.

Matt Edgeworth, of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, has released an on-line, soft book: Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archaeological Practice. An important movement in archaeology has been to turn reflexive attention to the process of field excavation and survey. Yet most archaeologists have restricted such awareness to the end products or results of research; generally the site report or other textual manifestation. Matt has done a great service in reminding archaeologists that we are, in spite of the close disciplinary ties (especially in the States), our own poor ethnographers. We forget to notice the complex exchanges which occur between archaeologists and the material minutiae that constitute 'the stuff' of doing archaeology. Lending an observant and anthropological eye to what these exchanges are when we do archaeology, Matt has made the familiar strange.

As has summed it up himself: Turning the outward-looking gaze back on the treasure-house of material items of equipment stored in the tool-shed and the planning-hut is a strategy that is likely to cause surprise. Such implements are rarely if ever constituted as the objects of attention in themselves; they are used to work upon other objects, and it is those objects being worked that occupy attention. Tools such as trowels, spades, brushes, cameras, scales, theodolites and planning-frames are the mundane things of everyday life for archaeologists working out in the field. Yet these are the implements through which the objects of knowledge are brought to light, manipulated, meaningfully-constituted and transformed into textual data. It is precisely these mundane articles that mediate the subject-object and culture-nature transactions that characterise the production of archaeological knowledge. Any general (i.e. reflexive) theory of material culture should start here. More of Matt's on-line writing projects can found at his site.

Like other pioneering work in modern material culture studies and archaeology of the present, Graffiti Archaeology pushes the edges of what is considered properly archaeological. Principally, it resonants with the notion of an archaeological sensibility that foregoes defining the discipline upon subject matter criteria ('the remote past') and instead emphasizes what is unique to how archaeology understands our complex relationships to things. Attention to minutiae of the everyday; detailed documentation of change through time; the processes behind the accretion of an archaeological trace; the individual and creative acts of even 'marginalized' groups. This broader and bolder view of what is unique to archaeology takes action and practice over etymology and definition to contribute a specialized perspective to deep time and modern material practices. As a shared sensibility, rather than a parochial discipline, archaeology indeed has a place for the interesting and challenging work being done by the graffiti project and others who bring to the fore, if only for a question begging moment, our assumptions about the material world. The article concludes with a concise statement by Timothy Webmoor which candidly sums up the Graffiti Project: "It's not going to be traditionally archaeological, but damn if it's not fascinating."

The final Visualizing Knowledge seminar takes place on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at the Stanford Humanities Center from 4:00-6:00 pm. This final roundtable convenes a panel of 14 scholars working throughout the schools of Stanford to discuss the primary themes that the Sawyer-Mellon Visualizing Knowledge Seminar has raised over the course of the year.

These themes include:

1) What is the significance, importance, and effect of translating non-visual forms of knowledge into visual representations? How does meaning change in the translation process? What is gained? What is lost?

2) What is the direct and immediate epistemological value of the visual? What kinds of knowledge are conveyed by or produced in the visual register? What is unique to visual forms of knowledge? What kind of authority does the visual hold?

3) Technologies and instruments of visualization augment visual senses in numerous ways, making the invisible available to the senses. In what ways do instruments limit or change knowledge that is made visible? What is the relationship of instruments to the human senses? How do instruments change our purchase on the natural world? Does a mimetic or schematic representation have more value when visualizing knowledge?

4) How does the increased reliance on visual forms of knowledge change inquiry? What skills must develop or changes with the rise of visual forms? Does this lead to more interdisciplinary work? Does it create new types of divisions? What protocols of research does the reliance on visual forms encourage or require?

5) Does visualizing knowledge encourage social interactions or build community? Would a correlation between socializing and visual representations explain some aspects of gaming, online communities, cinema, TV, theatre?

6) The seminar was presented as considering how knowledge is made visual from Alberti’s window to digital arrays. While we considered Japanese visual culture, it was largely against a Western framework. Has the seminar operated within a Western optical hegemony? Is there another approach that would have allowed us to avoid this comparative method?

7) To what extent is the computer screen a window to the world? What is our relationship to the screen? What world is referenced when visual knowledge is presented on a screen?

8) What’s the emerging importance of the body in a new visual culture? In the past, the eye was considered a portal to the body. Do new forms of visualizing knowledge require us to participate in a different and more corporeal manner? (Wii, computer mouse) Is the experience different by gender?

"Live" events centered around a discussion of such topics led by archaeologists Ian Russell (Trinity Dublin), Alfredo Ruibal (Madrid), and Chris Witmore (Brown) and by new media expert David Phillips (Austin, Texas).

"Absent" events - online, in a virtual world, and on a military base in Europe.

Chronicle of the colloquium and links to the absent events can be found at the Humanities Lab wiki.

A colloquium will be taking place at the Stanford Humanities Center on May 3rd to discuss the future of the archive. The purpose of the colloquium is a simple one - to share experiences and projects that are dealing with the future of the archive, the museum, the book, the document...

We need the past. Memories make us who we are. And when there are no memories we have diaries, written accounts and documents, pictures perhaps, and, above all, things. History, and who we are, lies in the material remains of the past ... in archives.

Archives - the store rooms of humanity - what has come down to the present.

Archive - a place where records are kept, a record so preserved, to place or store in an archive. The architecture of access to the remains of the past.

Archive 3.0 ?

Are we in a new phase in the history of archives?

Archive 1.0 - bureaucracy in the early state - temple and palace archives - inscription as an instrument of management.

Archive 2.0 - industrialization and digitization of archival databases - with an aim of fast, easy and open access based upon efficient dendritic classification and retrieval.

Archive 3.0 - new prosthetic architectures for the sharing of archival resources:

- animated archives

- a reemphasis on personal affective engagements with cultural memory.

Just think of the possibilities now for personalized documentation, access to information, sharing and searching of vast cultural storehouses of account, narrative, news, image, video ...

There is an emphasis here on interface - but not solely as a human factor of ergonomics or of behavioral efficiency and conceptual transparency - an issue now of richness of engagement.

Thinking critically about visualizing the past is not something conventionally associated with archaeology.

However, we have a Metamedia lab in our Stanford Archaeology Center. Michael Shanks has worked for many years with a site specific performance arts company - Brith Gof. And there is a collaborative project with the new media artist Lynn Hershman in the online VR world SecondLife - Life Squared. Such work is very unique in the discipline. Why do archaeologists need to think about media? How is visualization implicated?

Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor of the Metamedia Lab came together before a seminar representing over 15 departments and colleges (a post-disciplinarity) at Stanford University to answer these question and explain archaeology's relevance to media and to visualizing practices for information rendering generally.

Read more at their wiki for the presentation.

Archaeology took on Science Studies (again) at the joint (4S) Society for Social Studies of Science and the History and Philosophy of Science Conference this past weekend (November 2-4, 2006) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The working title for the conference this year was: "Silence, Suffering and Survival.” While there has been a long history of engagement between archaeology and philosophy of science, too often archaeologists have not taken active part in this inter-disciplinarian debate. Science studies opens a productive avenue for attending to pressing issues in the actual practice of the human sciences. Archaeology is emerging as a unique player in these studies, straddling as it does the natural sciences-humanities divide. And the discipline was well represented with an international assembly of archaeologists and philosophers.

The session was entitled “Silenced pasts: Archaeological practice and the politics of manifestation”. It was organized by Christopher Witmore, Matt Ratto and Michael Shanks. The session included:

Matt Ratto
The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Amsterdam
matt.ratto@vks.knaw.nl
“Epistemic commitments, virtual reality, and archaeological representation”

Michael Shanks
Stanford Humanities Lab, Metamedia Lab and The Archaeology Center
Stanford University
mshanks@stanford.edu
“Presence effects and archaeological media: case studies in performance arts”

Timothy Webmoor
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Metamedia Lab and The Archaeology Center
Stanford University
twebmoor@stanford.edu
“Open source archaeology? The politics of collaborative heritage”

Christopher Witmore
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
The Artemis A.W. Joukowsky and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Brown University
cwitmore@gmail.com
“Site-specific media, archaeology and collective (im)mortality”

Alison Wylie
Department of Philosophy
University of Washington
aw26@u.washington.edu
Discussant: intellectual boundary crossing and the legacy of archaeology and the study of science

If we remain true to the etymology of ‘archaeology’ then archaeologists work with ‘ta archaea,’ quite literally, ‘old things.’ But this is no longer taken to be the past as it was. Rather, archaeologists work with what is left of various pasts as they are mixed into the present. As such archaeology is seen to be a practice of visualizing, verbalizing, and vocalizing. Archaeology is a practice of unforgetting.

Still, in practice, to be underlined as process of transformation and documentation, certain interactions with, and aspects of, these pasts are manifest while others fall through the sieve into silence. Whether particular understandings of local ‘heritage,’ the more ineffable qualities of human relations with archaeological locales, or peculiar qualities of things (i.e. the abject textures of detritus or whatever) a great deal is overlooked. Silenced in translation many voices, relations, and qualities are all too often ignored, treated as background noise, and are utterly (re)forgotten. Why do archaeologists speak of some pasts while at the same time they silence others?

This session explores the politics of ‘manifestation’ in archaeology. As such it is concerned with the silencing of pasts and their alteration (‘survival’) in the context of archaeological practice and documentation. Sensitive to archaeological modes of manifestation (i.e. paper-based, analog or digital media), we ask which qualities of, or relations with, the material pasts are silenced? And likewise which aspects ‘survive’ in the process of translation? Moreover what other pasts should be unforgotten? Through a variety of case studies we offer a combination of analyses and examples of archaeological modes of engagement, ‘memory practices’ and understandings for dealing with the articulation of various pasts.

This session brings together sociologists of science and archaeologists to explore a discipline which, spanning both the humanities and sciences, is beginning to set forward looking transdisciplinary agendas through its interactions with things.

Archaeolog welcomes short essays, book reviews, commentaries, and debate pieces spanning a range of topics and concerns across the discipline.

Archaeolog is committed to accelerating the debate. With the ability to comment it facilitates immediate feedback and discussion from a broad range of inquirers interested in exploring the archaeological sensibility at large.

If you wish to contribute, please send your completed work to any of the following archaeologers: Alfredo Gonzolez Ruibal, Timothy Webmoor or Christopher Witmore. Senior archaeologers include Bjørnar Olsen and Michael Shanks.

With few exceptions archaeology under-theorized its relationship to the material past prior to Clarke's 'loss of innocence'. Subsequently, a burgeoning 'theory literature' has attempted to systematize the relations between human behaviour and material culture. We argue that the resultant 'turns'/diatribe characterizing recent archaeological thinking derives from the shared, humanist presupposition of a radical division between people and things. In accentuating links and crossovers with technoscience studies and empirical philosophy, this session seeks to re-characterize archaeology's unique role in studying mixtures of humans (behaviour) and material things. Such a 'symmetry' of people-things forefronts archaeology in an inclusive 'ecology' of 'naturecultures'.

Joining the organizers were:

Dan Hicks, Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, UK
Alfredo Ruibal, Archaeology Center and MetaMedia Labs, Stanford University
John Schofield, English Heritage, UK

More information on the Symmetrical platform of a discipline of things may be found at 'Events and Articles' @ http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/Symmetry/814.

A panel of eminent scholars came together to discuss Alfred Whitehead's relevance to current issues in science studies, technoscience and pragmatism. Beginning with Isabelle Stengers' recent work on "Penser avec Whitehead", the panel discussed the role of Whithead's 'propositions' for facilitating non-reductive modes of understanding 'common matters of concern' in the sciences. Stengers and Haraway generally agreed that a 'pragmatic and situated philosophy' was necessary in order to avoid abstractions and highlight corporeal/felt understanding irreducible to and incommunicable via language. While this seems so steer the sciences toward fragmentation along 'individual' lines, the two scholars emphasized that 'common concerns' or 'obligations' within an ecology of practice function to join specialists without being subsumed under denaturing, 'unwise' concepts. Rorty agreed that fragmentation of specialties was ocurring but was more optimistic about the result of democratic and adjudicating inquiry. Further, he contested that while Whitehead attempted to 'disclose what was formerly undisclosed' via propositions and attention to complex relationships, he fell short in his project to show the 'failure of language'. For Rorty, this was more ably acheived by Wittgenstein and his demonstration of the use/practical value of language in tandem with its inability to fully disclose (with reliance upon abstraction) any 'essential reality' in science or life generally. Nevertheless, Haraway used examples of dog-human non-verbal communication to argue that, contrary to Rorty's insistence upon utility being found primarily in language, there are a host of non-discursive relationships which have utility and highlight coordination in Stengers' 'matters of concern'. In what Stengers called an emerging awareness of an 'ecology of practice', these non-verbal connections are what need to be attended to in science and technology. Such a move away from linguistic practices (contra Rorty) is to de-center humanism in order to take seriously relationships between humans and nonhumans. With this insight, the discussion hooked-up with recent work in symmetrical archaeology and its move to de-center the archaeologist-as-interpreting-a-past-as-text. As well, with collective utility being forwarded as the panel's measure of success in investigation, the notion of working-with the past, rather than disclosing the past, highlights media as a vital, non-verbal manner of affecting active engagement with the past in the present.

Amongst other specific topics discussed, were ideas on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and the ramifications for the movement, driven by scholar.google and digitization of academic library holdings, of e-texts and the publishing future for a discipline such as archeology. This delves into the informatic liberation movement, or digital democracy as its more friendly epithet, and what action (if any) archaeologists will take on the matter.

While many may prefer to remain sidelined or insular from the ensuing informational revolution (particularly in terms of distribution and accessibility), oddly enough the litigation begun for cultural property rights from Indigenous/stakeholder claimants may equally force the issue for mid-lined archaeologists as such copy-''rights'' are beginning to merge into issues of digital copyright and information conveyance. We see this happening with the move to digital information (as simple as on-line .pdfs and images to library cataloging) and the archiving of data sets in archaeology which has been widely encouraged. Such protection or claims to digitized heritage will be litigated with regard to soft copyrighting which is somewhere between ''all rights reserved'' and ''public domain''/no rights. Two early developers at the forefront of this information sharing accord came out of a Stanford Law-Silicon Valley team-up and are linked below:
creative commons
scientific commons

For media practioners and archaeologists involved, this seems to be precisely the ethical way forward, which is to make data open, free and available to all (researchers/stakeholders alike), while retaining the minimum of attribution. Archaeology would not be alone, as public culture has already moved in this direction. Like Michael was saying, this is really where the creative artist world is going in terms of information sharing; he mentioned the visual/performing arts, but for independent minded musicians, this is also where it is at.

So this brings us to the cross-roads of: digital mediation of archaeological knowledge + property rights with specific respect to on-line/fuzzy realm of cultural production (where copyright laws do not yet fully exist/bind) + push for ''informatic liberation'' or digital democracy and the fostering of inclusion (to maintain ideal of free, accessible information and for us as archaeologists to facilitate this). This is why I am in particular wanting to push this usage of mediation: its semantic derivation, legal connotation and enhanced conveyance-of-information-via-new-media association all hook up synergistically.

New territory for insights and inclusive collaboration.