5.2. Response: Mobilizing (Ourselves) for a Critical Digital Archaeology

Authors

Adam Rabinowitz, University of Texas at AustinFollow

Files

Description

Mobile platforms, paperless recording systems, and High Density Survey and Measurement techniques are a new frontier for archaeological documentation. But like all frontiers, the borderland at the intersection of the material and digital offers both opportunity and unexpected hazards. This response calls for a critical perspective on digital methods and approaches in archaeology, and examines the other contributions to the volume from three perspectives: celebratory, reflexive, and cautionary. These perspectives are framed within three manifestos that praise, ponder, or criticize the effects of new technologies—and the historical, social, or economic contexts of those technologies—on their users. The reader is urged to consider how the replacement of analogue with digital tools conditions knowledge production in the field of archaeology; how the dependency of archaeologists on the producers of digital tools affects possibilities for the long-term preservation and reuse of archaeological documentation; and what might happen when the language and framework of “disruption” and the “innovation cycle” is transferred to archaeological research. Two particular areas of inquiry are proposed for future research: embodied cognition, in terms of physical engagement with different tools; and the extension of mobile or wearable data collectors to the documentation of the practice and habits of the archaeologists themselves.

Publication Date

10-21-2016

Publisher

The Digital Press @ University of North Dakota

City

Grand Forks, North Dakota

Keywords

critical theory, entanglement, embodied cognition, Futurism, haptics, transhumanism, capitalism

Disciplines

Classical Archaeology and Art History

Comments

For Supplemental Material see: https://mobilizingthepast.mukurtu.net/collection/52-response-mobilizing-ourselves-critical-digital-archaeology

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Rabinowitz, Adam. “Response: Mobilizing (Ourselves) for a Critical Digital Archaeology.” In Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology, edited by Erin Walcek Averett, Jody Michael Gordon, and Derek B. Counts, 493-518. Grand Forks, ND: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2016.