Archiving realtime archaeological (para)data or archiving archaeological (para)data realtime?
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2020-09-09

The apparent differences between realtime capturing, reflexive making and not-quite-realtime documentation of archaeological data have multiple implications in the context of archaeolog-ical practices and knowledge work. They have consequences to what the data is and how it can contribute to the making of archaeological knowledge but also to what and how we can know about the making of the data. From this perspective a better understanding of the notion of realtime and the nature of realtime archaeological data can be argued to be helpful in fram-ing  and  unraveling  a  part  of  the  problem  of  how  to  capture  enough  contextual  information  about  data  creation  processes,  so  called  paradata.  Based  on  the  insights  gathered  during  the  work  conducted  in  the  context  of  COST  action  ARKWORK  and  research  project  ARKDIS,  this presentation discusses the notion of realtime, and the relation of realtime and non-real-time documentation from the perspective of archiving and describing archaeological data. The enquiry on the issue suggests that while the realtime and non-realtime documentation lead to different information (and consequentially knowledge), documenting the data (metadata) and the process of making/capturing it (paradata), also require radically different methods of doc-umentation. The presentation concludes by exploring Flusser's distinction between traditional (or 'imaginieren’) and technical (‘einbilden’) images as a potential conceptual apparatus to shed light to their differences.


Isto Huvila