The Social Web and Archaeology’s Restructuring: Impact, Exploitation, Disciplinary Change

Abstract

From blogs to crowdfunding, YouTube to LinkedIn, online photo-sharing sites to open-source community-based software projects, the social web has been a meaningful player in the development of archaeological practice for two decades now. Yet despite its myriad applications, it is still often appreciated as little more than a tool for communication, rather than a paradigm-shifting system that also shapes the questions we ask in our research, the nature and spread of our data, and the state of skill and expertise in the profession. We see this failure to critically engage with its dimensions as one of the most profound challenges confronting archaeology today. The social web is bound up in relations of power, control, freedom, labour and exploitation, with consequences that portend real instability for the cultural sector and for social welfare overall. Only a handful of archaeologists, however, are seriously debating these matters, which suggests the discipline is setting itself up to be swept away by our unreflective investment in the cognitive capitalist enterprise that marks much current web-based work. Here we review the state of play of the archaeological social web, and reflect on various conscientious activities aimed both at challenging practitioners’ current online interactions, and at otherwise situating the discipline as a more informed innovator with the social web’s possibilities.

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

“…A series of invited speakers outlined their challenges in short presentations with associated discussion, foregrounding areas such as Open Data, knowledge extraction, digital curation, digital visualisation, textual GIS, the social web, formalisation of knowledge, and additive manufacturing. A number of these were subsequently developed for publication in Open Archaeology (Dallas 2015;Huggett 2015b;Jeffrey 2015;Kintigh 2015;Murrieta-Flores & Gregory 2015;Perry & Beale 2015;Reilly 2015;Watterson 2015). Emboldened, the task was resumed at the Siena CAA conference in 2015 at a round table session entitled 'Challenging Digital Archaeologythe discussion continues' (Reilly, Lock & Huggett 2015).…”

Online Tribes and Digital Authority: What Can Social Theory Bring to Digital Archaeology?

“…This area of digital archaeology can encapsulate the broader personal, cultural, and structural changes involved in the digital turn within archaeology, and its relationship with people outside the discipline (McDavid 2004;Richardson 2015;Walker 2014b). For example, areas of study that use this sociological approach can include digital inequalities (Richardson 2014;Perry and Beale 2015) and their impact on access to archaeological content , the actions and activity of users online (Richardson 2014;, the organization of online activism (Richardson 2014a), dark digital heritage ( Morgan and Pallascio 2015), and issues with archiving and perpetuating digital data (Jeffrey 2012;Law and Morgan 2014). …”

Key Concepts in Public Archaeology

“…As already noted by several commentators (e.g. Morgan and Eve 2012;Perry and Beale 2015;Richardson 2014aRichardson , 2014b, in archaeology, as in other subject domains, the democratising powers of new digital media are hindered by the unequal possession of the physical means, skills and knowledge that are needed to get involved. Poor connection is still a barrier in many parts of the world, including more rural or remote regions in countries where, on the whole, Internet use is relatively high (see e.g.…”

“…In archaeology, crowdsourcing has been sought to create data or raise funding to support individual projects, although virtually no research has been published until now about the ways in which 'crowds' have been leveraged to pursue archaeological agendas (some initial work: Bonacchi et al 2015aBonacchi et al , 2015b. exploiting free labour and contributing to neo-liberalist economies (Perry and Beale 2015). The outcomes of heritage crowdsourcing practices (see case study 5.1) have also been critiqued for affirming 'truths' constructed by majorities, and often excluding the alternative views of minorities (e.g.…”

“…MicroPasts has been the first to experiment jointly with the crowdsourcing of archaeological data, forum discussions about the uses of such data to fuel novel research and the crowdfunding of community archaeology initiatives (Bevan et al 2014). 2012), Perry and Beale (2015) remind us of these potential issues and stress how little is known and researched about the impacts of the 'archaeology-themed' or 'archaeology-relevant' social web on the selfrepresentations of users/ producers, on the discipline of archaeology, on institutional workflows and on societal structures.…”