WRITTEN THINGS, HUMAN AGENTS, INHABITED WORLDS: Revealing processes of mutual constitution through...

WRITTEN THINGS, HUMAN AGENTS, INHABITED WORLDS:

Revealing processes of mutual constitution through digital technologies

Dr. Kathryn E. Piquette

UCL Institute of Archaeology

k.piquette@ucl.ac.uk

The “tyranny of text”

• Material as passive – Writing ‘foundation’, ‘support’, ‘substrate’

• Conflation: object + inscription = ‘text’• Selected visualisation

– ‘Disembodied text’

• Critique in archaeology, e.g.– Tim Champion 1990. Medieval Archaeology and the

Tyranny of the Historical Record.– John Moreland 2001. Archaeology and Text.

Written meaning in context

Archaeological context

Materials & techniques

Graphical repertoire & composition

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Social practice in time-space© Piquette 2005 courtesy of the British Museum

© Piquette 2005 courtesy of the Egyptian Museum

ATLAS.ti: Archiv für Technik, Lebenswelt und Alltagssprache

Screenshot of ATLAS.ti Hermeneutic Unit (HU)

Materials: A wider perspective

• Writing as artefact also meaningfully constituted through / by:– Human agency– Embodied practice– Sensory perception

• Process and outcome• Dobres 2002. Technology and Social Agency. • Ingold 2007. Materials Against Materiality.

Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1-16.

Material properties and the inhabited world

• James Gibson 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

– Medium: affords movement and perception– Substances: relatively resistant to movement and

perception– Surfaces: interface between the medium and

substance

© 2008 Regents of the University of California

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“Daily Ritual” at Karnak

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Questions for discussion…

• Materials in practice: To what extent can / should we account for other related reciprocal relationships that bind inscribed object and agent together?

• Materials through sense: How might consideration of modes of sensory perception involved in making / using inscribed objects aid understanding of written meaning?

• Visual default: How might we also model the materiality of writing in relation to touch? Sound? Or even smell or taste? What will be gained?

• Embodied practice: How can human computer interfaces and ‘visualisations’ more satisfactorily reproduce / reconstruct embodied engagements and experiences of past human actors who made and used a given inscribed object?

• Partial / indirect evidence: Is the goal of a holistic approach appropriate for all evidence types?

…and one more

• Transparency in digital knowledge construction: Some digital ‘visualisations’ can be misleading with regard to apparent certainty or fixity of representations, reconstructions or interpretations. These run the risk of fossilising knowledge that is in fact continually evolving and changing.

• How then do we develop an interface between a perceptual present and a virtual past that makes the process of knowledge construction transparent while enabling its modification as new insights emerge?