Some Fragments on the Future of Archaeological Publishing 4

I had plans to write about something else today (inasmuch as I plan things with this blog at all), but I had my first successful writing day in a few weeks and I thought that I should share what I had written. 

I took some time away from writing this summer and focused on “data collection” in Cyprus and Greece and then, when I got back, I became busy with some publishing projects and course development. Now, finally, as the dust settles on the summer, I’m getting back into a writing groove, which is good because I have deadlines.

In any event, as the title of this post indicates, here are some more words that will, in some way, find their way into our paper: “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication” which we plan to submit to the Journal of Field Archaeology for their 50th anniversary issue. You can follow links here to read more of what I’ve been doing on this topic.

(If you don’t know, this article is about the writing and publishing of David Pettegrew’s Corinthian Countrysides: Linked Open Data and Analysis from the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey. I offered a sneak peek of this book a couple weeks ago and is very close to being ready🙂

As long as the JFA has existed, there has been a vibrant debate about the nature of archaeological publishing. Over the last 50 years, archaeologists of all stripes have critiqued the character of traditional site reports on practical and epistemological grounds. On practical grounds, the discipline has critiqued published site reports a boring and even unreadable. Gray paper reports filed as part of commercial archaeology’s compliance procedures have met similar criticism. On more epistemological grounds, scholars from Ian Hodder to Alison Wylie and Gavin Lucas have recognized the intimate relationship between archaeological writing and epistemology. In particular, they have noted that narrative serves to weave together threads of archaeological arguments that may not hold firm on the grounds of formal logic alone. Giorgio Buccaletti has shown how the fragmentary character of digital data allows archaeologists to make more visible the relationship between archaeological information and written arguments. Thus, as Rachel Opitz has shown, digital practices in archaeology also open up new forms of narrative and storytelling. Corinthian Countrysides sought to integrate the granularity of contemporary digital archaeological data with the potential of digital publishing to support multiple narratives. This traces growing interest in epistemological plurality in archaeology and growing efforts to produce publications that embrace or support the potential for multiple narratives.

Corinthian Countrysides sought to draw on both the digital turn and new forms or and ways of organizing academic publishing to support multiple possible interpretations. Vast reams of scholarly publication have acclaimed, critiqued, and deployed a growing suite of digital technologies, repositories, and publish platforms. New forms of “best practices” have emerged alongside these new forms of data collection with standards aimed at metadata, paradata, archival standards, and accessibility guidelines. While we will address the most relevant of these conversations to Corinthian Countrysides in the sections that follow, it is important to note that scholarship on digital practices in archaeology often explicitly considers the ways in which these tools expand or in some situations restrict who has access to archaeological information. Open data movement, for example, with its commitments to F.A.I.R. practices (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) encourages the development of a linked, open, reusable data that can support the kind of pluralities of interpretation representative of a more inclusive approach to archaeological knowledge making. At the same time, we would be remiss not to acknowledge that F.A.I.R. principles still often require levels of specialized expertise to support their implementation. In the wider realm of digital archaeology, bespoke applications, proprietary tools, and complex and opaque algorithms often serve both to limit who produces archaeological knowledge and to shape in often obscure ways the kind of knowledge that we produce. As an example, for all the brilliance of the Gabii project, it remains out of reach for most archaeological projects on financial, technological, and ultimately practical grounds. The tension between the potential of open data and the complex reality of digital practices continues to loom large in archaeology as a discipline. In response, calls for punk archaeology which celebrates ad hoc approaches to archaeological challenges which range from the high tech to analogue. Punk archaeology also offers a place from which to resist corporatized, efficiency driven, digitally mediated futures in which archaeology become a wholly owned subsidiary of a dystopian technocracy. 

The growing financial power of academic (and often commercial) publishers and their long-standing influence over the academic standards, particularly tenure and promotion decisions, has further influenced the character of archaeological knowledge making. The rising costs of books and access to leading journals, the emergence of article processing fees and subventions necessary for compliance with open access standards, and the shifting institutional commitments to research have exacerbated increasingly overt appeals to the need for archaeological knowledge to be commercial viable to gain the imprimatur of a major press. While recent studies of the history publishing in the discipline have shown that it has always had commercial aspects, fewer studies have acknowledged how the needs for efficiency, scalability, and profitability in publishing have shaped the way our field values archaeological knowledge. The concept of slow archaeology, with its emphasis on experience at the expense of efficiency in knowledge making, runs counter to prevailing pressures to produce more quickly, cheaper, and at a larger scale. In many ways, slow data is the opposite of big data in the same way that slow publishing might stand opposed to commercial publishing. Scholar-led publishing projects, such as Corinthian Countrysides, offer an alternate vision for archaeological knowledge making that both recognizes the potential of the digital turn in archaeology to support diverse understandings of the past while also resisting practices and priorities central to the commodified character of traditional archaeological publishing. These two objectives found fertile ground in longstanding perspectives on the pluralism inherent in archaeological epistemology, punk approaches to use of available digital technologies, and the slow practices that eschew prioritizing efficiency, scalability, and profitability. Scholar-led publishing projects such as Corinthian Countrysides is not meant to offer a reproducible template for future projects. Instead, it presents a future of archaeological knowledge that acknowledges and seeks to mitigate at least some emerging economic, disciplinary, and institutional forces with the potential to prevent scholars from doing their best work.