"The Application of GPR and Resistance Tomography by the BSR on Complex Urban Sites in Italy"

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"The Application of GPR and Resistance Tomography by the BSR on Complex Urban Sites in Italy" presented at the 2nd Valle Giulia conference on Urban Survey in Italy and the Mediterranean at the Dutch School in Rome, 2009 with Simon Keay, Stephen Kay, Kristian Strutt and Sophie Hay.

The application of ground penetrating radar and resistance tomography by the British School at Rome on complex urban sites in Italy

Google Earth image sorgente Bagni di Tivoli: Aque Albule

0-22cm 38-59cm 50-72cm 63-84cm 75-97cm 88-110cm 101-122cm 113-135cm Ground-Penetrating Radar Portus

Herculaneum GPR Resistance Tomography The Basilica

Herculaneum 0-14ns 24-28ns 36-50ns 48-62ns

For further information www.bsr.ac.uk http://apss.soton.ac.uk

Web archives – including social media archives – have become a critical resource for accessing historical snapshots of the Web. Beyond the increased promotion of web archives as a source for scholarly research, a growing number of examples point towards the use of web archives as tools for political accountability (e.g. Politwoops1); to provide temporary access points during times of restricted web access (e.g. during the 2013 US government shutdown2); and to reconstruct deleted domains (e.g. Ben-David’s (2016) work on the former Yugoslav top-level domain3) – to name a few. Growing concerns and public debates over the trustworthiness of online media have positioned both web archiving and web archives as necessary and legitimate sources in the face of an ever-shifting ‘ephemeral Web,’ political unrest and algorithmically-generated access to web-based information. In practice, web archiving initiatives have spanned from the large-scale activities of national libraries and archives, the Internet Archive and the work of networked communities such as Archive Team, to the individual efforts of scholars creating web archives for their own purposes. However, the processes undertaken to produce these vast and longitudinal resources are not well understood, and are often projected as uncontroversial technical solutions to the failings of web architecture. The ways in which practices and tools shape the nature of collection and access strategies – e.g. the timing, frequency and length of collection – are under-documented, along with the motivations and meaning-making activities that drive archival practices. These aspects of collection and access present problems related to the use of web archives and the ways in which web archives are interpreted and understood as archival sources. Whereas an abundance of technical research exists around developing tools and improving the efficiency and quality of web archival captures, little research exists around the interactive nature and structuring effects of human, algorithmic and automated agents in decisions around how, what and when to archive. This research contends that these (often) undocumented activities and practices are critical for interpreting the affordances of web archives and the types of claims made possible by their use. Here web archives are positioned as contingent constructions that inherently rely on the work of web archivists (as both networked human and non-human agents) to transform and preserve the Web(s) into archived snapshots. Drawing on Downey’s (2014) work on the materiality of ‘information labour,’ here the concept of web archival labour is explored to encompass these practices and highlight the ways in which web archivists shape and maintain the preserved Web.

Observing Archives: Web Archiving as Socio-technical Practice

Jessica Ogden

This paper presents the preliminary results of an ethnographic study of web archiving, in an effort to explore the ways in which practitioners shape the preservation and maintenance of the archived Web in its various forms. A combination of non/participant observation, documentary sources and interviews were conducted over the course of several weeks in collaboration with web archivists, engineers and managers at the Internet Archive – a private, non-profit digital library that has been archiving the Web since 1996. Whilst several socio- technical components of practice have been identified thus far, this paper focuses on the types of ‘knowledge work’ that informs the selection, collection, repair and maintenance of the archived Web(s). This work draws on Downey (2014) and recent calls within STS (Jackson 2014; Russell & Vinsel 2016) to move beyond a pre- occupation with innovation to consider the repair and maintenance of technologies as potential sites of critical engagement and social discourse. Here the concept of ‘web archival labour’ is proposed to encompass these practices and highlight the ways in which web archivists (as both networked human and non-human agents) shape and maintain the preserved Web through practices that are often embedded in and obscured by the complex technical arrangements of collection and access. As a result, this engagement positions web archives as places of knowledge and cultural production in their own right, revealing new insights into the performative nature of web archiving that have implications for how these new forms of social data are used and understood.

Observing Web Archives: The Case for an Ethnographic Study of Web Archiving

Jessica Ogden

Interrogating the Politics and Performativity of Web Archiving

Jessica Ogden

The Day of Archaeology: Archaeologists as Audience? The grassroots creation o...

Jessica Ogden

Opening the ARK: Uncovering the socio-technical evolution of an archaeologica...

Jessica Ogden

Within the field of sociology of science and technology (SST) studies, it is now well-established that the technical design and social values of the creators (and users) of technologies are interrelated (Abbate 1999; Friedman 1997). Technical solutions to archaeological data management are not only ‘epistemologically significant’ but the variety of both generic and bespoke systems also acknowledges the implicit complexity of the interaction between the ‘technical capabilities’ and the motivations and interests of the individuals and organisations that have driven their development (Flanagin et al. 2000, p.409). In this way, databases and the software that support them are the result of socio-technical processes that both constrain and facilitate the creation of primary archaeological records, and it’s these processes that deserve further attention. Drawing on aspects of previous research on digital repositories and SST studies, this paper and poster examines the evolution of archaeological database software through the lens of Flanagin’s (2000; 2010) concept of ‘technical code’. This preliminary exploration specifically focuses on the 10+ years of continuous software development of the Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK), and aims to: • Expose the historical choices and values (e.g. openness, flexibility) that have led to the current software; • Highlight periods of rapid change in the social values and technical practice within the wider arena of archaeological data management, including the emergent practice(s) of user communities that have influenced the code development; • And foreground the values, assumptions and priorities that have not yet been realised with the hope of further understanding both the past and future trajectory of this software development. References Abbate, J., 1999. Inventing the Internet, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flanagin, A.J., Farinola, W.J.M. & Metzger, M.J., 2000. The Technical Code of the Internet/World Wide Web. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(4), pp.409–428. Flanagin, A.J., Flanagin, C.F. & Flanagin, J., 2010. Technical code and the social construction of the internet. New Media and Society, 12(2), pp.179–196. Friedman, B., 1997. Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"The Application of GPR and Resistance Tomography by the BSR on Complex Urban Sites in Italy"

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