In the dissertation I present my work in two forms of digital template. The New Media Transect is a tailor made presentation in the software package, ‘Flash.’ The second form of digital template called myGallery, was developed as a ease-of-use package for combining photography, sound and text by the MetaMedia lab at Stanford. In this section I briefly detail these mixed media templates before addressing a number of reiterative issues at the conclusion of this chapter.

The New Media Transect mediates a survey transect through a rich collation of various media. Let us briefly reconsider how archaeologists from the AEP dealt with a survey transect. The entire process of walking a line across a plot of land for the purpose of establishing patterns of past land-use, locating archaeological features, assessing geomorphology, and so on was related within a few pages from a field notebook.

On August 13, 1979, for example, the pages include a narrative of the day’s events as written by a member of the survey crew, and a 1:5000 scale trace map with the transect recorded as a line with a directional arrow (Figure 4.8). The narrative records contemporary land conditions (recently plowed, under a crop, or overgrown), ground visibility (from excellent to extremely poor, however ambiguous such designations are), or materials located along the transect (rooftiles, ‘combed’ ware, other sherds, a possible worked block, etc.). With traditional media the transect is inscribed so that text and a single pen stroke denoting a line with a directional arrow on a two-dimensional scaled map stand in for an archaeological engagement with a plot of land in the Southern Argolid from 1979. While the notebook captures the initial transformation of the countryside into archaeological documentation, such notes were once left upon a shelf collecting dust in an archive and were rarely revisited.

In contrast to traditional mixed media, the various media juxtaposed in the digital template of the New Media Transect allows for more qualities of the material world and aspects of those engagements to be manifest (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). On August 12, 2003, I revisited the plot of land transected by the AEP on August 13, 1979. I reiterated their transect by walking in the same direction, across the same plot of land, as the field crew on August 13th. I recorded both horizontal and oblique film sequences of the same transect. Now, in place of arbitrary designations of ground visibility with words such as poor, fair, excellent, the ground is manifested both aurally and visually. Materials encountered along the transect now appear as ‘pop up’ photographs at the points along the path in field where they were negotiated. But we also inscribe the transect in words and on the map. These too are to be mobilized. The digital template combines video, sound, image, text and map in an effort to mediate an archaeological engagement as with walking a survey transect.

I also present materials in a second form of digital media template called myGallery. myGallery in its current version organizes photographs in a sequence (Figure 4.11). However, it need not be unidirectional. Whether the one moves right or left along the accompanying slide bar or at random intervals, like flipping the pages of a book, the interlocutor chooses any image they wish to view. As an on-line gallery environment, various forms of media can be collated into one interactive presentation. myGallery combines image and sound, with layered text and the capability for viewers' to post comments. The myGallery component of this dissertation details a walk through the Katafiki gorge just north of the Ermioni kambos (plain) in the southern Argolid.

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Forward to: Reiterative issues

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