WRITTEN THINGS, HUMAN AGENTS, INHABITED WORLDS: Revealing processes of mutual constitution through digital technologies Dr. Kathryn E. Piquette UCL Institute of Archaeology

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

Written meaning in context Archaeological context Materials & techniques Graphical repertoire & composition Meaning 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 Technology and Social Agency. Ingold Materials Against Materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1-16.

Material properties and the inhabited world James Gibson 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 experience karnak

Daily Ritual at Karnak © 2008 Regents of the University of California

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?