Enabling Multiple Viewpoints with Digital Collaborators
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2024-03-08

Ian Dawson, Louisa Minkin & Paul Reilly

Collaboration is a process in which different perspectives matter. Who, what, why, where, when, and how, are a few registers indicating the diffractive possibilities surrounding the notion of collaboration. These imbricated factors, over which some actants have disproportionate impact, responsibility, and authority, fundamentally affect the direction projects and other matters of importance will take within these extended assemblages. Here, we endeavour to extend the knowledge derived from digitally-based collaborations into a much richer multivocality, surrounding two artefact assemblages, both held in institutional settings with restricted access. One is a carved stone, from both the Bronze Age and the Romano British period, called the Nessglyph, currently lodging in the University of Southampton. The other is a distributed assemblage of Blackfoot belongings held by several UK Museums, including the National Museum of Scotland. We helped make both these collections available to invested collaborators via digitally enabled, remote viewings employing in the first case an open crowdsourced collaboration model, and in the second we consider some of the dynamics of a closed collaborative group. The Blackfoot belongings were (re)considered by a closed group consisting of Blackfoot Elders, museum professionals, artists, archaeologists, and our digital collaborators. Such distributed cognitive assemblages embrace different modes of collaboration, something we want to investigate further. We ask: "who or what counts as a collaborator?" We conclude that both our collaborative projects require an openness that is only afforded through constant work and constant re-working as the digital artefacts and images in these projects constantly fold into their own omissions so that the work can respond to the politics and ethics of image/object making.