Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Part One

I love Phineas and Ferb, and I empathize so much with Dr. Doofenschmirtz. Look at him, out there every day, building new devices and clearly communicating what they do, how they do it, his plans and everything. He might not be an effective evil villain, but he’s a very good communicator.

We’re now in the final third of this course, which I’ve called ‘Communicating’. There are lots of different contexts in which we share archaeological data, and lots of different ways to achieve that. Lots of different ‘publics’, too!

In this week’s materials, we’re looking at the ways archaeologists inform each other about their work, share their data, and the ‘open science’ movement, which aims for both reproducibility and replicability. Reproducible research means that if I provide you my data and show you my analytical methods, you can arrive at the same results that I did; replicability means that you can use a different approach on different data to find the same observation (ie, if two different teams took different samples from the same wooden artefact and used different dating methods, they’d arrive at the same date.)

The idea that archaeological research could be reproducible or replicable is quite new in the discipline, and runs parallel with efforts to make archaeological work more widely available via things like ‘open access publishing’, making results and data free-to-read. Given that a lot of archaeological work is publicly funded, this only seems appropriate, but the publishing oligarchies have managed to pervert this by charging exorbitant ‘article processing fees’, and then selling access to the journals anyway by bundling them with non OA-titles. But I digress.

I generally believe that making my research and my results open access is a moral imperative. But it’s worth taking a moment and reflecting on what can happen when OA intersects the ‘real world’. I want to tell you about what happened once when my own research escaped my control, which underlins that there are situations where the greater good may be served by not making our work fully open.

Long story short, our research on the human remains trade got picked up in the slow summer months by journalists, because human remains are ‘exotic’, ‘macabre’, and make good copy.

Then, in the run-up to the federal election, a political candidate bought a human skull as a gift for her boyfriend.

APTN, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, broke the story and asked me for comment, having seen the other newspaper articles, and again, having read our work. The APTN story was taken up by lots of other outlets, both in Canada and internationally. Suddenly, there were interview requests everywhere. Our work even made it into Wired magazine (the politician did not). But, in trying to be ‘balanced’, it seems, the story included interviews w collectors. And they made the editorial decision to embed in the story actual posts from Instagram selling human remains.

That story was picked up and re-worked across multiple outlets, including the Sun, Britain’s biggest tabloid. But in that version, we’d been erased from the research, and the nuance we try for in our work was completely lost. But the collectors sure got a lot of oxygen! More of their posts were added to the stories.

By the way, when a number of outlets contacted us, for interviews, including the BBC, they requested that we also put them in touch with collectors. I refused to do this. If we were studying sex trafficking, would you ask us to put you in touch with pimps?

As our research got out there, the humans who had been collected and we the researchers and our scholarly goals got gradually erased in favour of the sensational sound bites from the people doing the bone trading.

And so, with the press attention, and the celebration of the ‘eccentric’ collectors, how much traffic did we inadvertently drive to collectors? By publishing our findings openly, to what degree did we help promote the trade we are studying? Since we know bone traders actually do read our work (we’ve seen posts of them discussing it), how have we changed their behaviour to enhance their ability to trade without prying eyes?

These human remains were collected in morally, ethically, legally dubious circumstances. To reduce them to clickbait is to return us to the era of ‘human zoos’. How many times will these people be dehumanized? But… we published OA. We put our material out there.

The human remains trade in its origins is part of the literal flow of human bodies from around the world into the West. As the archaeologist Priscilla Ulguim reminds us, ‘we are sometimes at risk of sharing information which isn’t ours to share: to avoid this issue our stakeholders should be the people advising on ethical concerns and leading the process of opening our data.’ A binary approach to open access assumes I have the right to share; but that’s not always true, and the contexts are complex.

I am also from the global north, the consumer of these bodies, of these data. Unthinking OA allows me to profit academically from these bodies one more time.

Before I was a prof, being able to read and look at open access data let me play at being an archaeologist. Now on the other side, I want to get my research out there: but naive OA, especially in archaeology, is not without its risks, as this episode has demonstrated. ‘Open access’ should not be understood in binary terms, but rather as a complicated spectrum, and ideally the decision to be open needs to be taken by more than just the researchers.

Part Two

This week, we’re joined by Dr. Ethan Watrall of Michigan State University.

Hi there my name is professor Ethan Watrall and this is my interview - my self-interview- for Professor Shawn Graham’s digital archaeology class

ok first question: who am I and what am I currently working on. Alright so let’s start with the who am I. As many people know who were friends and colleagues I wear a lot of hats some of those hats overlap to be to be sure; first and foremost I am an associate professor in the department of anthropology at Michigan State University. I’m associate director of MATRIX Center for digital Humanities and social sciences which is our big DH centre and one of the oldest dh centres in North America. I’m director of the cultural heritage informatics initiative which is essentially a project based out of the Department of anthropology that is intended to that is designed to capacitate graduate students undergraduates and existing professionals with digital methods and computational approaches in archaeology and heritage. I’m also director of the DHI lab in the department of anthropology which is digital Heritage Imaging and innovation lab. The DHI lab is a sort of a joint partnership between LEADR (the lab for education and advancement in digital research at Michigan State University) and the department of anthropology. DHI Lab is essentially interested in providing a space and supporting research, specifically preservation and access in digital Heritage and digital archaeology (mostly material culture oriented, do a lot of digitization, 3D stuff, building digital repositories in archives, things like that). So that’s mostly me. I’ve got a couple of other hats but they’re not important in this in this context.

So what am I working on? I’m always working on a billion different things some of which are more ‘baked’ than others but of the things that are mostly on my plate right now are the IADA which is the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive my colleague Dr. Stacey Camp and I recently received quite a large grant from the National Park Service to build a digital archive that would preserve and provide access to and contextualize material culture from internment camps that held Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War in the United States. I’m also collaborating with a wonderful staff at Jame’s Madison’s Montpelier - James Madison, former President of the United States, his plantation, his property on the Montpelier digital collections initiative and I’m collaborating with a lot of really really great people there but mostly Mary Furlong Minkoff who is the curator of collections at Montpelier and we’re interested in basically building a digital repository of digitized materials not just archaeological materials but historic architectural materials, historic materials, museum materials from their Collections and it’s not just about digitization it’s also about access and in particular how do we collaborate equally and equitably with the Descent Community, those people who are descended from people who were held in slavery on the plantation. There were 300 people that James Madison and his family owned and many of these descendants are deeply involved in the James Madison plantation now - Montpelier- and collaborating with people so that the project is not just about digitization and building digital archives but it’s also about equitable and equal collaboration and partnerships with the descent community.

I’m also working with colleagues here at Michigan State University to come up with a workflow and a platform for both rapid and mass digitization project of all the archaeological collections held at Michigan State University. I’m finishing up fingers crossed and edited volume with my colleague Lynne Goldstein. It’s going to be published at University Press Florida called ‘Digital Heritage and Archaeology In Practice’. It’s a an edited volume that is both going to be physical and open digital and that is intended to basically as the name suggests, discuss digital heritage in practice - what are people doing, what are the challenges, right, it’s not just a show-and-tell but it’s also about how we wrestle with the very practical problems that many of us in the field such as it is encounter every day. So those are the big things on my on my plate right now; I mean, there’s certainly a lot of grants, I spend a massive amount of my time writing grants, so that’s always in the background but those are the sort of the major a big things.

Arlight question number 2, how did I get into digital archaeology? Like many people I sort of wandered into it sideways. I guess I’m of a generation where disciplinarily there were no programs for digital archaeology and heritage, they didn’t exist. There are now so I sort of come before that. I had always been computationally inclined has a kid growing up right, programming on a VIC-20, Commodore-64, and as an undergraduate at the University of Regina I got particularly interested in how computers can be used in the context of archaeaology, sorta played around with it a little bit but I didn’t really sort of dive headfirst into the the domain until I was a graduate student. My dissertation is purely an archaeological dissertation, not computational in any way shape or form - basically I looked at households in predynastic Egypt and the role that they played in the local economy at at one particular side called Hierakopolis in Upper Egypt. Nothing computational at all! But as I worked through my graduate career I started leaning more towards people digital methods and computational approaches and fell sideways into it. And while I’m a trained anthropological archaeologist, y’know, worked through North America worked through North Africa, Egypt, the Sudan, I don’t consider myself a field archaeologist anymore. I don’t have a field program. My primary research, my primary work, is in digital archaeology and in Heritage and my interests are mostly publicly engaged, digital archaeology and heritage.

okay 3, ‘what is the biggest challenge facing digital archaeology at the moment?’ The answer to this question is obviously going to vary from person to person giving their own particular sort of bent and their own particular perspective. I have two that I think are particularly challenging to the domain of digital archaeology and Heritage. the first is that when you talk to people about digital archaeology, if you look at the spectrum, if you look the field there’s an awful lot of big money, big infrastructure, expensive equipment, highly technical processes and as such there’s a little bit of a barrier there right? I’m constantly frustrated that the only sort of conception of digital archaeology and heritage is one that is inaccessible to most people because it’s expensive, it’s technical, it requires incredibly burdensome financially equipment, it requires really really expensive infrastructure and you know to that I would counter the need to think about digital archaeology and heritage also being - not exclusively being, but also being - nimble and quick experimental and “good enough” instead of perfect.

The other thing that sort of concerns me, I don’t know, biggest challenge, is a simplistic approach to openness. I’m a very very copyleft scholar. I believe in open culture and openness very very strongly. For a lot of good reasons however openness is really complicated - really complicated! Ppatrimony, copright, openness, especially in an Indigenous context, especially in a descent community context, basically this idea of ‘who owns the past?’ and the legacies of colonialism that are sort of trickling into digital archaeology method and practice. And that complexity often encourages some to think about openness as binary - you’re either open or you’re closed - and that’s something that I take, I have a problem with. I would argue that openness exist on a spectrum and that you can be thoughtfully open, “thoughtful open” is a term that I use a lot in my work and when I talk to students. You can be thought you can be thoughtfully open while still being mindful, respectful, consultative, with the descent communities, the owners of the materials if it’s material culture for instance. So this idea that openness is binary, you’re either open you’re closed, openness can exist along the spectrum that is informed by the local conditions is really important to me and something that I argue about a lot with with people.

Okay four, ‘what drives you up the wall about how digital archaeology is currently received or perceived in the profession?’ I mean both of those challenges are things that drive me drive me up the wall; I mean there are certainly lots of other things but those are two certainly two big things.

Last question, ‘what fills me with hope about the field?’ I mean there’s lot that fills me with hope about the field. But quite honestly one of the biggest things is projects that are not sort of technologically fetishist, that are serving a greater purpose, right? In particular digital heritage, heritage and archaeology projects that are serving the needs of communitiesm that are community-engaged, that are community first, and serving the needs of those communities ethically, responsibly, and equitably. Really, I’m seeing more and more of these projects that are taking this wonderful spectrum of digital methods and computational approaches and then wrapping them, those methods, in ethical protocols, right? You know, in community-engaged protocols. I mean we’re not there yet by any stretch of the imagination because archaeology as a discipline at this point is not there yet by any stretch of the imagination but I’m really really encouraged by digital heritage and archaeology projects that are community engaged and that are really serving that community whether it’s an Indigenous community, whether it’s a Descent community, whether it’s you know any other kind of community.

Okay so those are are my y five questions! I hope that you have enjoyed my sort of very very brief self-interview here and I really thank you for your time!