Provenience, Sustainability, and Credit in Digital Archaeology

Sarah Bond wrote a thought provoking piece last week on whether the well-known Rome Reborn project (and now commercial concern) exploited the work of its developers. Her piece stands well enough on its own, and I won’t weigh in on the specifics of that case. Go read it now. 

UPDATE: And please also go and read Prof. Frischer’s thoughtful response to Prof. Bond’s piece here (and see his comments below).

At the same time, her work also – as it so often does – opens the door to a much wider conversation about digital work in archaeology. Since I’m starting to think about a paper that I’ll be giving next month in beautiful Buffalo, New York, that will touch on how digital practices in archaeology and in archaeological publishing will introduce new challenges to conventional approaches to archaeological knowledge making, it seems like a good time to put some words on the screen. Sarah Bond’s piece is a perfect prompt. 

1. Provenience in an Age of Logistics. Some of the challenge that Rome Reborn is facing is an issue of provenience. Where did the models come from that form the basis of the commercialized version of Rome Reborn?

Fortunately, archaeologists are experts on provenience and readily acknowledge that it is a messy concept. On the one hand, the best archaeological evidence comes form a known, permitted, legitimate, scientific excavation, was professionally conserved and curated, is accessible to both researchers and, if possible, to the public, and is published with care and in an approved venue (and if at all possible promptly). Problems at any one of those stages erode the value of the object and can lead archaeologists to exclude these objects from the archaeological discourse or to marginalize the value of the object (and any work that relies on the object for claims to truth). In short, archaeologists are very particular about context whether this be legal, archaeological, ethical, or social. Compromises at any stage of the process through any number of complicated ethical, social, political, and disciplinary decisions and policies can render an object useless to knowledge-making. Frankly, it’s intense.

It is not, however, exclusive to archaeology. Over the last several decades a similar interest in provenience has occurred among every day people. Perhaps our heightened sense of political awareness and social justice has pushed us to think more broadly about our own habits as consumers. There’s a growing interest in farm-to-table restaurants, ethically produced food, ethical practices in manufacturing and even extractive industries. These concerns have given rise to what some have called supply-chain citizenship which looks to ground the 21st century’s interest in globalization and logistics on a more ethical ground. 

Digital objects are particularly challenging in this context. While no one would deny the remarkable commercial value of digital objects – which range from snippets of code, to 3D models, data, or even complex software. There are, of course, a whole series of intellectual property laws and rules that ensure that individuals and companies receive credit (and compensation) for their work. At the same time, we know that digital practices and the fluidity of the digital world encourage sharing and the almost frictionless movement of digital objects from one context to the next. Whatever the improvements in global exchange of physical goods, digital objects circulate with infinitely less friction and at massively faster rates of speed.

More than that, digital objects can more easily be severed from provenience and their social, economic, political or even geographic context. This isn’t meant to excuse exploitation or even theft of digital objects and work, but to suggest that our linked world encourages a kind of fluidity of reuse that challenges notions of ownership, credit, and context.

2. Sustainability. Among the greatest challenges facing digital project in the academy these days is sustainability. There are a whole series of challenges facing large-scale digital projects like Rome Reborn. For example, large grants in the humanities tend to reward innovation and the next great thing at the expense of longstanding project. Universities tend to see grant funded projects as a source of revenue for the institution and the sustainability of more mature projects as a responsibility of the private sector or other sources of income. Commercialization is one possible route where intellectual property, particularly in the sciences, can generate additional revenue – through licensing – to the university, while also moving the cost of continued work to the private sector.

Large scale digital humanities projects tend to have significant ongoing costs related not only to their continued development – especially as platforms change, their preservation, and any planned expansion. Open access projects look to solve these issues through building a community of users who will contribute code, content, and even new functionality and applications to these projects. This kind of collaboration, however, can be unpredictable in terms of timelines, episodic, and irregular, and any discontinuity in the utility of a tool or access to content risks disrupting the community of contributors and making new developments less likely. The fluidity and speed of digital technology, resources, collaborations, and the press for innovation creates a constantly refiguring of priorities and effort in the digital sphere. 

UPDATE: Prof. Frischer offers some insights into how Rome Reborn will balance commercialization and Open Access in his follow up post here.  

3. Credit. The pace of digital innovation, the fluidity of digital objects and work, and the ambiguity of digital provenience makes the traditional functioning of academic credit particularly challenging. The standard [academic] critiques of Wikipedia, for example, embodies these challenges. Students will often say “anyone can edit it!” or “it can change from one day to the next,” or “how do I know it’s accurate?” Of course, academic writing and credit provide checks on the system. The need for persistent credit ensures that publications remain stable, attribution produces authority that reinforces legitimacy and accuracy of knowledge, and all of this allows for our work as academic professionals to result – in indirect ways – in professional and usually economic reward. 

In archaeology, of course, attribution and credit is always messy, but recently there has been greater attention to crediting student volunteers, graduate student analysts, local workers, and even junior partners on projects for their contribution to archaeological knowledge making. Traditionally, a name on or a reference in a notebook connected an individual to archaeological work (although this isn’t to suggest that this was entirely transparent or doing archaeological work ensured that one received professional credit). 

With digital practices, this becomes more complex. While it is easy enough to credit someone for producing a particular record, the very nature of records in a database ensure that they can be disaggregated and recombined. Here credit may go to the original data creator, but also the individual responsible for a query or an analysis. Credit becomes distributed in a system.

As the system becomes more complex, however, the potential to track credit through networks of linked, open data (LOD) diminishes. This is even more the case with machine aggregated datasets where the data, the code, and the use of the aggregated data could all represent different individuals contributing to the over all utility of an assemblage.

To be clear, I’m not blaming technology or even digital practices for the potential exploitation of individuals over the course of any long-term, iterative research project (like Rome Reborn). The digital systems that we’ve adopted and created for archaeology, however, rest on certain technological expectations that do not privilege the rewarding of all parts of the network with equal visibility. As academics trade, in part, on attribution there is an incompatibility. From crowd sourcing to Uber and Amazon’s “mechanical Turk” economies of practice have emerged that aggregate piece work and monetize it while rending the individuals responsible for that work all but anonymous.

The ability to fragment both data and labor into more and more granular parts is key to    most contemporary digital practice. At the same time, we continue to try to push back against the fragmented nature of contemporary practice and life through public critique, calls for the return to craft practices, and supply chain citizenship. These are really challenging questions and Sarah Bond’s article reminds us that they do not have simple answers. Like archaeological provenience, digital practices in the 21st century are more then just the adherence to best practices and require constant critique and the constant reformulation of what we think is right and just. 

It’s hard work and it has to be done at the pace of our digital world. We probably can’t fix logistics and capitalism, but we can at least hope to produce a more aware, more critical, and better discipline of archaeology.