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
© Piquette 2005 courtesy of the Egyptian Museum
Materials &
techniques
Meaning
Graphical
repertoire &
composition
Social practice in time-space
© Piquette 2005 courtesy of the British 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
experience karnak
© 2008 Regents of the University of California
© 2008 Regents of the University of California
“Daily Ritual” at Karnak
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?