Next week, I've been lucky enough to be invited to a workshop hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. The workshop will focus on the challenges and opportunities of using digital data in archaeological research and bring together a wide range of scholars who are using digital data in various ways. To get folks onto the same page, we've been asked to complete a fairly simple homework assignment. One of the questions is whether anyone (or a group) owns or manages our data and whether there are any ways that we would like to centralize or better coordinate our digital workflow.
This afternoon, we have a meeting with various University of North Dakota folks to discuss our "emerging" Working Group for Digital and New Media. The working group is largely an artificial creation that was brought together in order to apply for money that the University President was offering for innovative, inter and trans disciplinary groups on campus. The Working Group includes faculty from English, History, Music, Scientific Computing, and the head librarian here. It appears that we will receive a substantial infusion of funding to stimulate (in the language of the day) collaboration and innovation. While the details are still being worked out, I think it is likely that some of funds will go toward creating a centralized Digital and New Media Lab.
In the lead up to my meeting today and my meeting in New York next week, I've been thinking about how often I still regard data and the digital realm as something that needs to be managed, centralized, and structured. We have been talking about archaeological data management and the creation of a "center" for digital and new media on campus. At the same time it is becoming more and more obvious that our ability to produce and manipulate digital data is becoming increasing de-centered and de-centralized. As our digital data gathering devices (cameras, GPS units, phones, laptops, video, et c.) proliferate and expertise proliferates -- we have multiple people who can manipulate and create databases, spreadsheets, and GIS. Even in these conditions, we can certainly imagine the utility of a single data manager or a system that can integrate digital media from a variety of devices and organize them systematically (after all, analogue data has a tendency to proliferate on archaeological projects as well and it projects have always prioritized the need to archive, organize, and record systematically). The future of data management, however, may not be in such centralized and managed collections. These collections may be built around commonly agreed upon standards or best-practices, but even these centrally administered structures might not suit all the potential types of data, organizing questions, or analytical units that creative archaeologists can imagine. We may look to a future where researchers emphasize the production of concordances that relate different kinds of data to one another as the methods, data types, and applications expand. The issue remains, of course, that data to be useful nevertheless needs to be organized and preserved in some way, but it's hard to imagine such a radically decentered kind of data management method.
As an example, I've been talking with Timothy Gregory about how to manage digital data produced by the Isthmia Excavations. Like many large scale projects several different groups of people are producing and using data from Isthmia. Each group has its own research questions, data collection tools (ranging from experiment RDF tags to GPS), data management systems (ranging from Autocad to ArcGIS to Microsoft Access and legacy formats), and time frames. There is simply no way to produce a system that integrates this data as it is being produced and some of the data might be inherently resistant to combination. Nevertheless all of this information deserves to be archived and perhaps even maintained.
A similar, decentralized future might await the Working Group in the Digital and New Media. While it is easy enough to imagine how various groups on campus might benefit from pooling resources to satisfy specific hardware and software needs (high-end computers, large-scale storage, server space, access to applications and devices), it seems strangely outmoded to talk about a center for something like digital and new media since these technologies have done some much to de-center the production of texts, media objects, and even certain key elements in the public discourse. It seems more forward looking to imagine the creation of various nodes where individuals, groups, hardware and software could combine to solve specific problems and then disperse to ensure that the community as a whole can maximize the investments in capital (i.e. software, hardware, space). I like the model of an art gallery that can be re-arranged for various installations and exhibits quickly and efficiently. While an artist would have to accommodate some basic structures, like the architectural structure of the space, there would exist a fair degree of flexibility with the best galleries being open to a range of different kinds of exhibits.
Of course, these ideas are naive. After all, the existence of a center is as vital to archaeological research as campus politics. Resources are tied to professional credit and control backed by notions of intellectual and physical property. Restricted access to archaeological data has long formed a basic structure for academic research. The freedom provided by unfettered control over technological resources allows for the kind of personally, unstructured environment where a scholar is free to experiment, explore, and fail without impacting other members of the community. Finally, the center structures responsibility and accountability -- watchwords in the current economic and political climate. Someone being in charge of the data and in charge of resources ensure that someone can be held accountable for failure as well as successes. The urge to centralize is pragmatic reflection of the will to power.
Interesting to read this along with Jo Guldi's piece (http://landscape.blogspot.com/2009/04/age-of-digital-citation.html) today.
Looking forward to seeing you next week!
Posted by: Chuck Jones | April 08, 2009 at 05:25 PM