Digital Dataset as an Archive

Presentation at the Disentangling the Intertwinement of Digitalisation and Decolonisation conference at The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen.

Abstract

The impact of the digitalisation of archaeological field practices has been debated heavily since the 1990s. On a positive note it has been praised of the opportunities of increasing the efficiency, level of detail and extent of documentation. On the downside, the digitalisation of archaeological information work has been criticised of a fixation on data hoarding and of demoting interpretation and knowledge-making. While there is clear evidence of the change in data and information artefacts produced during archaeological fieldwork, there is so far relatively little research on the specifics of the change and its implications to the information record of archaeological practices. The aspirations to be able to reproduce inherently irreproducible, destructive archaeological fieldwork through information record are surely inflated but a question remains of how and to what extent the digital record of archaeological practice qualifies as its archive, both in metaphorical and judicial senses. 

This talk discusses the extents and means of how digital archaeological datasets form an archive of (digital) archaeological practice documenting both archaeological observations (data) and the practices (paradata). The discussion builds on extensive research on the documentation practices of archaeological data making, processing and use, and more specifically draws from an analysis of digital field documentation datasets. The analysis shows how digital datasets provide both a highly detailed and multifaceted record of field practice but at the same time, as David Weinberger noted (in a positive sense) of digital information in 2007, contributing to that “everything is miscellaneous”, or risks to become that.