DIGITAL REMAINS MADE PUBLIC
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-10-15

Note: this presentation covers a sensitive topic - human remains

We live in the information age. Our lives are increasingly digitised. The quotidian has been transformed by innovations in networking, computing and the adoption of new technologies. Yet, we not only live and work in a digital environment, we also die and mourn online. The digital world presents opportunities to investigate new forms of community and material evidence. As we continue to build and use technologies, archaeologists will begin to study the born-digital content of the deceased. Our online activities reveal practices, experiences and engagement with death and new embodiments of funerary practice and agency. The born-digital content of the deceased and digital funerary practices can create digital mnemonic landscapes. New ways of investigating digital death and the dead in these landscapes now enables a “funerary archaeology of the digital”. Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence capabilities on big data from the billions of interactions between humans and digital devices: conversations, emotions, voices, images, activities, means that concepts such as posthumanism and transhumanism are no longer confined to sci-fi. The potential to “predict” human actions and digitally “reincarnate” the dead provokes a profound theoretical discussion about how archaeologists will curate and manage personal information in the present and future. As more personal data are shared online concerns are raised over rights, privacy, security, ownership and their long-term implications. These concerns extend beyond the living, to the dead. This paper explores the ethics of a digital public archaeology of the dead in the age of innovation and digital abandonment, while reflecting on the future of our content as a mnemonic space. Archaeologists must consider the theoretical basis of our approach to the investigation of these spaces, to the commercialisation and privatisation of data by corporations, as well as the obsolescence and fragility of digital data.


Author(s): Ulguim, Priscilla (Teesside University)