Archaeology, Photography, and Travel: A Digital Humanities Perspective

In his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, elevating the urgent importance of the individual in an increasingly reductionist and dehumanized online ecosystem, computer scientist/philosopher Jaron Lanier (2010, p.xiii) concludes his preface with a simple admonition that “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”  This is not to suggest that in order to share yourself you have to be somebody in the sense of a celebrity, or an influencer, just a person; a unique, nuanced, individual.  

Alright Lanier, have it your way.  

I’m a storyteller.  I tell stories when I speak, when I write, with my cameras, and with my maps.  For as long as I can remember, it’s always been about three things:  Archaeology, Photography, and Travel.  All are bound up in context, perspective, and experience, and as digital technologies have evolved and proliferated, I’ve gone far beyond that initial and foolishly simplistic enthusiasm that they would pretty much just increase the size of my audience and the reach of my message.  There’s so much more to it than just that.

Alabama Archaeological Site Map, RPG Style.

The thing is, I’ve been thinking deeply – and speaking loudly – about integrating data, storytelling, and digital platforms for years.  But it wasn’t until just two years ago when I was finally given the chance to share with audiences what my archaeological experiences felt like by interweaving speech, text, video, and photos into a multiplatform storytelling toolbox to which “the mutable conditions of display within a digital environment” (Drucker, 2016, p.63), were ideally suited.  This the first of what will surely be an ongoing series of experiences in the realm of the Digital Humanities: mobilizing knowledge from a field of study, its participants and collaborators, in a space where humanities disciplines of literature, rhetoric, history, and art, and networked, computer technologies are intermixed (Burdick et al., 2012. p.4), with the intent to encourage a broader public engagement with the past.

And that’s when it started to feel like the line between “real” and “represented” could be very thin.  In the realm of digitally mediated experience, characterized by rich and immersive multimedia, the worry is not so much crossing that line, but erasing it…

Visual Literacy

The only way I can think of to make sense of my first practical experience as a dig photographer/science communicator/educator/digital humanist/storyteller is to share my perspectives on figuring out how to teach visual storytelling to my students, and to frame those perspectives in the context of my students’ two most common questions.

What do those f-numbers on the camera mean?

To answer this question, I need to explain how I came to be a part of the Stann Creek Regional Archaeology Project in the first place.  I have amassed a varied, and what often feels like an unlikely, even rudderless skillset: an undergrad in archaeology, a continuing ed. certificate in photography, some hands-on training in film and broadcast television with our local public-access cable provider, and an applied degree in geographic information systems (GIS).  The common thread running through this apparently haphazard mélange of social and data science, technical arts, and academic and professional disciplines, is the visual: the art and science of seeing; of expressing – through a variety of modes – what it looked like, to me.  

Since my interests revolve around forms of visual communication – specifically images, and maps – and how to deploy them to effectively engage the public and communicate science, I was invited to join the project as a field-school assistant, as a GIS specialist, and as a photographer.

Later on, it was decided that I should contribute to the field mapping and surveying workshops, and then to teach a workshop of my own in archaeological photography.  I had gone from a technologist to an educator!  Once the imposter-syndrome subsided – and it didn’t really – I found myself agonizing over that photo workshop.  The GIS portion didn’t bother me at all, GIS is systematic, and data driven, but photography – make no mistake – is an artform.  There’s always been confusion about this because photography makes use of tools that are increasingly affordable, readily available, and frequently automated and it’s figured out how to make itself into an industry.  But it’s an artform, and art is subjective.

Student Mapping Workshop

Images are subjective – or at least, the process of making them is.  Photography involves countless choices about what appears in the image and what elements are going to be emphasized.  Photographers make endless decisions – some conscious, and some not – that can and do reflect their biases.  As such, their photos evoke different meanings to different viewers.  

They alter our perception of the passage of time, renewing old memories, old passions, and old slights.  And we’ve seen it happen (Goldberg, 2018), those old photographs, and their producers, and their inheritors hotly criticized because those old photographs reflect attitudes, and biases, and vocabularies that we no longer accept as reasonable, to put it charitably.

At first I tried to assemble a selection of introductory readings.  Nothing too technical – this wasn’t a photography field school after all, but I quickly realized that while instruction manuals are really good at getting you to do the right things in the right order, they aren’t all that good at getting you to think about what you’re doing.  To that end – although I didn’t know it at the time – the approach I chose mirrored Berry and Fagerjord’s (2017) approach to what they call “computational thinking” in the digital humanities.  In their case, this involved fostering technical acumen, literacy in terms of coding and programming language and logic, and ultimately practice and know-how: computational competence for a computer oriented culture.  In my case, I aimed to foster visual competence and thinking based on visual literacy.

What does this have to do with those mystifying f-numbers?  Those are just one of the ways that photographers control and manipulate Depth of Field (DoF).  And DoF – I decided – was how to make photographic know-how relevant in a world of camera-equipped mobile devices.  DoF manipulates images because DoF is controlled by the lens!  And lenses are still just wafers of ground and polished glass, and have not fundamentally changed in 500 years!  Because of lenses, images are crafted in the same way, whether with a cell phone or an SLR.

Depth of Field, simply put, is the image’s range of sharp focus.  This focus is determined by (a) the distance from the lens to the subject.  The further your subject is from the lens, the greater your DoF; (b) the angle of view.  Wide angle lenses have greater DoF than telephoto lenses; (c) the aperture.  This is how wide open the iris of the lens is.  A narrow aperture increases DoF, and wide aperture decreases it.  What is confusing is that the f-numbers are smaller for big apertures, and bigger for small apertures.  So instead just imagine a swimming pool.  If you’re at the f2.8 end, your DoF is shallow, and over there at f22, that's the deep end.

Hummingbird, Maya Centre Village, Maya Centre Village,
Stann Creek, Belize

DoF is fundamental, because it controls how and why images look the way they do.  A crisp portrait with a diffused background; a sweeping panorama focused to infinity, a frame-filling close-up of an artifact with every detail exactly replicated.  You can start to read these images now.   And if you dare to venture into the manual settings on your camera, you can start to compose them too.

Community

How should we shoot for publication, and what’s okay to post?

When I was asked this question, I’m sure it was innocent enough, and I’m sure I’m still reading too much into it.  I immediately imagined retailers, working out just the right ratio of high-ticket items to low-ticket items in order to maintain profitability, and with this upcoming generation of digital native scholars asking me for advice on making images for their publications, versus for their social media feeds, my response to them was to just make good content!  Deploy your visual literacy; compose the best quality images that you can; let it enrich the story of why you’re doing this; and share it.

The real question to ask, is not whether it’s good for publication, or just good enough for your social networks; it’s which content is most appropriate to the audience you’re presenting it to.  Don’t worry about differential production.  Make good content.

The reason for doing this is simple: we’re beholden to a lot of people, and this necessarily brings us to a consideration of ethics.  Remember that photography, as with all the stuff of human expression, digital or analogue, is a transaction between photographer and subject.  James Smithies (2017, p.224) points to “the length and opacity of most end user license agreements (ELUAs)” as being ethically suspect for either undermining the informed consent of their participants, or misrepresenting the online service provider’s own intentions.  In a similar vein photography, and indeed archaeology’s own history is far from laudable: replete with examples of asymmetrical transactions disproportionately favouring the photographer or the scholar over the subject or the indigenous community.

Our hostess, Mrs. Aurora, teaching us traditional pottery-making.
Maya Centre Village, Stann Creek, Belize

We’re answerable to the communities that we get to live and work in.  So consider the difference between “real” and “represent”, ask for permission, and represent them well.  They are our hosts, after all, and they will surely judge us by our conduct.  We’re answerable to the taxpaying public for the monies we unseat from the public trust in order to do our work: they will surely brand us as arrogant if we refuse to engage with them.  And we’re answerable to our field, to our peers who will review our findings, and who will determine whether our methods were sound or unsound.

Obviously, I’m a bit biased.  I think photography is important.  I think travel is a profoundly enriching activity.  I think travel photography is more than just a visual record of places visited: that at its best it’s an opportunity to embrace diversity and to achieve new perspectives on peoples, and places, and events, and to share how these all fit together in an increasingly connected and complicated world.

The relentless advance of media and data formats; the unstoppable interconnectivity of the web has made much of our intercourse digital, but cognitively, at least for now, it’s still human.  What I think should be the last word on this subject comes once again from Lanier (2010, p.72), admonishing us to remember that “It’s the people who make the forum, not the software.”

The SCRAP team, Site of Alabama, Belize, 2019 

References:

Burdick, A., J. Drucker, and P. Lunenfeld. (2012). “Humanities to digital humanities” in Digital Humanities. Cambridge, US: The MIT Press.

Berry, D. and A. Fagerjord. (2017). “On the way to computational thinking,” in Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity.

Drucker, J. (2016). “At the intersection of computational methods and the traditional humanities.” In Simanowski, R. (ed.) Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy. London: Open Humanities Press.

Goldberg, S. (2018).  For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.  National Geographic.  Retrieved from: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/from-the-editor-race-racism-history/

Lanier, J. (2010).  You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Smithies,J. (2017). “The Ethics Production”, in The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern (pp.203-236).  NYC: Palgrave.