Making Digital Archaeology

I read with considerable interest Ethan Watrall’s very recent article in Advances in Archaeological Practice, “Building Scholars and Communities of Practice in Digital Heritage and Archaeology.” The article is very useful outline of how Michigan State has worked to train and develop the next generation of digital archaeologists through a series of three initiatives. (The article can be read productively against two recent article co-authored by Paul Reilly: one with Jeremy Huggett and Gary Lock, “Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures” in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology and one with Costas Papadopoulos, “The digital humanist: Contested status within contesting futures” in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Watrall’s article is unabashedly top down and offers an interesting template for developing the next generation of digital archaeologists, social scientists, and humanists. The programs developed at Michigan State and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities cultivate the ability to plan, organize, and develop digital projects in real time. They emphasize skill building, collaboration, project management, and shared, public outcomes. These are indeed the building blocks for developing archaeologists comfortable with digital approaches and tools and present a model that is consistent with the kind of “high impact” practices that are increasingly common across the U.S. Participants work in groups, develop key skills through rapid development project, present regular updates, and deliver a product that whenever possible is public, open, and relevant. This is good stuff in terms of providing a framework for practical engagement with not only digital practice, but, one could argue, any collaborative project in the social sciences and humanities. I suspect this thoughtful, contemporary design also contributed to the generous funding that these initiative have received from the NEH and Michigan State.

One things that I was particularly intrigued by was the idea that the approaches developed in these programs cultivated communities of practice. Watrall offered a furtive glimpse into how these communities of practice functioned. For example, in the NEH funded Institute on Digital Archaeology Method and Practice participants found a home on Twitter (with the hashtag #msudia) to communicate eschewing applications like Slack designed to support collaborative research in primarily a corporate environment. Another hint at the way in which communities of practice began to develop was the tendency for groups to change over time with members shifting from one collaborative environment to another. Obviously, the long term results of programs like those developed by Watrall at MSU and whether they develop sustained communities of practice will be difficult to evaluate. At the same time, the particularly dynamic character of the digital world magnifies the need for resilient and sustained communities dedicated to navigating the challenges of new technologies, new social and institution structures, and new ethical parameters grounded in practice.

It’s also intriguing that these communities of practice will have to carry on the work of producing a digital archaeology long after the institutional work and institutional communities provided (funding and staffing and access to technology) by the NEH and large universities like Michigan State disperse. As Reilly, Huggett, and Lock have suggested, the future of digital archaeology may well rely on this kind of institutional support to ensure that communities of practice thrive. At the same time, there are, as Watrall himself recognizes, other models for a healthy digital archaeology in the future. This doesn’t undermine or diminish the success of Watrall’s Michigan State initiatives, but makes it clear that existing communities of practice will continue to shape the future of the field.