After Virtual Archaeology: Rethinking Archaeological Approaches to the Adoption of Digital Technology

Beale, Gareth; Reilly, Paul

doi:10.11141/ia.44.1

Cited by 21 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…Mutations are spawned as unapproved versions. However, the School's established knowledge management capabilities and quality controls are severely limited outside its virtually worn corridors and it is in these wild and public places that we encounter an undomesticated, dynamic archaeological community that has begun to unpack, transform, repackage and rethink digital technologies such as games and augmented reality in order to create and propagate new born-digital archaeologies (Beale & Reilly 2017b). We can no longer assume that novel digital archaeology applications, research and their associated knowledge and new capabilities will emanate exclusively from the Ministry of Digital Orthodoxy or the Academy of Digital Advancement.…”

Section: The School Of Digital Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Huggett

Reilly

Lock

2018

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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IntroductionThis position paper concerns the direction of computer applications and the digital more generally within the discipline of archaeology, and the manner in which they are adopted and then affect our practices. Digital technologies are integral to many facets of current practice in archaeology. However, there is little evidence of disciplinary-wide coordinated programmes but clear indications of haphazard application adoption, fractures, and silos. The objective here is to develop a framework within which meaningful progress can be made towards a common strategic goal with regards to how we adopt technology and create, develop, manage and share our disciplinary knowledge, competencies and capabilities in the age of the digital.Strategic thinking necessitates negotiation with the future, a task fraught with risk. We can think of probable futures in which we extrapolate some existing trend, such as the adoption rate of a specific technology, or envisage the next generation of technology coming over the horizon (Burton & Barnes 2017). However, there are generally several possible, very plausible, alternative futures, in which case we may think in terms of a collectively preferred future and set a strategy which seeks to favour that outcome. In the real world such predictions can be completely undermined by a wildcard event, something thought so improbable, or even undreamt of, but having a massive positive or negative impact. External factors such as economic instability, political change, and technical disruption can have profound repercussions for the practice of archaeology: our disciplinary structures, principles and norms, and how our collective knowledge, competencies and capabilities are deployed, developed, and maintained or lost. This paper seeks to lay the groundwork for an executable disciplinary knowledge strategy that is both flexible and robust enough to withstand constant disruption as we move forward into an unstable, erratic, and uncertain future. Contextualising the PresentIn seeking to ground any observations about future developments in digital archaeology, it becomes apparent that present perspectives of digital archaeologists fall somewhere between two extremes. At one end, there is a broadly utopian view of digital archaeology as a transformative development, epitomised by Djindjian's "ineluctable success" (2015), whereas on the other there is a more dystopian perspective that recognises the transformative aspect but questions whether archaeologists had much to do with it (e.g. Scollar 1999). Others prefer not to predict whether the impact will be positive or negative, but note they will undoubtedly have profound impact on practice and theory (Ucko 1992). Digital technology increasingly pervades all settings of archaeological practice and virtually every stage of knowledge production. Through the digital we create, develop, manage and share our disciplinary crown jewels. However, technology adoption and digital mediation has not been uniform across all settings or stages. This diver...

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Section: The School Of Digital Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Huggett

Reilly

Lock

2018

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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“…Archaeology has a disciplinary tradition of exploiting the narrative affordances of digital media. 3D computer graphics has had an established role within archaeological practice since the 1980s and continues to be the subject of critical discourse and innovation in archaeology [3].…”

Section: Reconstructing the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The risk in creating compelling reconstructions based on partial historical records is that members of the public are unable to distinguish between authentically reconstructed elements of a scene or story and dramatic devices or interpretations [3]. This can be particularly problematic with fictionalized representations of historical events where the alteration of characters, events or settings for narrative and dramatic effect can be genuinely misleading.…”

Section: Reconstructing the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Beale [3] suggests that preserving discussion and decisionmaking processes and making them available alongside visual reconstructions is one way of clarifying this process. This approach has also been taken in some television documentaries: BBC series Planet Dinosaur used detailed discussions of the fossil evidence behind each of their reconstructed creatures to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the reconstruction process [24].…”

Section: Reconstructing the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Designing museum exhibitions is increasingly seen as a storytelling discipline in which artefacts are used to illustrate past events, adding tangible flesh to historical bones [3]. Rather than the intrinsic properties of objects, it is their context that is all-important; in particular what objects can tell us about human experience in times past.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Viking VR

Schofield

Beale

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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Viking VR is a Virtual Reality exhibit through which viewers can experience the sights and sounds of a 9 th Century Viking encampment. Created as part of a major museum exhibition, the experience was developed by an interdisciplinary team consisting of artists, archaeologists, curators and researchers. In this paper, approaches to the design of authentic, informative and compelling VR experiences for Cultural Heritage contexts are discussed. We also explore issues surrounding interaction design for the long-term deployment of VR experiences in museums and discuss the challenges of VR authoring workflows for interdisciplinary teams.

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Towards Embodied Paradata. A Diffractive Art/Archaeology Approach

Dawson,

Reilly

2024

Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

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For archaeologists, artists, and cultural heritage workers, paradata are generally viewed as explicitly selected and documented attributes, or defined sets of circumstances, authoritatively considered to have a material outcome on the provenance, collection, and manipulation of both recorded data and metadata and their subsequent interpretation or analysis of artefacts and other (contextual) remains. Being chosen, their own provenance is questionable: why were the selected data, metadata, and paradata more relevant than other options? We (re)consider embodied practice as a form of paradata-making normally airbrushed out of the hegemonic accounts of how works of art and archaeological excavations are presented and analysed. Decisions to not include the embodied worker, their apparatus, and their practices of making, or uncovering, haunt images purporting to be historical accounts in the art and archaeology literature by their absence. Adopting a diffractive art/archaeology approach, and subversively applying several well-known cultural heritage recording and presentation techniques, recursively and unconventionally, we throw light on embodied paradata and (re)present them as potentially very valuable pedagogical boundary objects. We also dislocate paradata away from a purely epistemological dimension into an entangled onto-epistemological nexus.

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After Virtual Archaeology: Rethinking Archaeological Approaches to the Adoption of Digital Technology

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Viking VR

Towards Embodied Paradata. A Diffractive Art/Archaeology Approach

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