BBC NEWS | Technology | Peering beyond the technology hype

Interesting item in the BBC Magazine today on innovation and hype.

It is extremely difficult to predict which technologies will become part of everyday life in the future.

Some of the best known innovations, like the net, have swiftly become part of the furniture for millions, even though many said it would only benefit academic research and governments.

Similarly, few predicted text messaging would take off the way it has, with millions of thumbs across the globe twitching away every day.

Sometimes, according to Gartner technology analysts, a gadget, gizmo or technology just needs one good idea - a trigger - to catapult it into something that even dads have heard of.

But other times a whizzy idea sinks into oblivion, only to be reborn when the other factors come into play.

It all actually reads like a hyped ad for Gartner - a consultancy firm. They claim to have a model for product adoption, for how innovation succeeds or fails.

It is actually a description of a common pattern and doesn’t explain why contemporary consumer electronics works this way.

It is also mostly useful for marketing, with a short term view of things.

The archaeological view of innovation is both longer term and explanatory. I do like the overall point though -

Innovation usually occurs at the margins and in ways that run counter to expectations.

It is a network effect.

This is one of the themes of my new book - the last few days I have been looking again at the adoption of agriculture.

Meg Butler left a wonderful story as comment on the photos of the apartment in San Jose.

Both the pictures and your comments remind me of a small town in Texas that I visited. My first impression was of a dying town. It isn’t on a main highway or interstate, it isn’t touristy in any way - the one thing the town actively “advertises” is that it is the birthplace of a famous country singer. The stores on the main street are empty (but still bearing the old signs painted on the windows), the hospital building is abandoned (but carefully locked), the movie theater, now closed, still has the signs up from the last film it showed, the streets and sidewalks when I visited were dead quiet, empty of people and of life, except the occasional car. The few residents I met were older people who had spent their whole lives there and, for sentimental reasons or financial reasons or because they were just to tired to manage, had decided not to move, even when the town emptied out of their relatives and all the young people and when their own generation began dying out. The town actually has a website with a calendar where town events can be listed, but as far back in time as you can search and as far forward as well, the only things listed are the standard American holidays.

There was a store on the main street (one of the two stores still open) that advertised itself as an antiques store. I can imagine where the store gets its merchandise, but I would love to know who the buying customers are. Nothing in the store was listed at more than fifty dollars. Old paperback mystery novels, plastic tea sets for having tea with dolls, American flag pins, used kitchen knives, bags of buttons, cookie jars in every shape and color imaginable, stuffed pigs … . Had I been alone in the store, I might have been “free” to laugh at certain items, sneer at others, or appreciate and examine the few objects that caught my fancy. But the store is owned and run by an elderly lady, a long-time resident of the town, and I felt embarrassed to be caught picking over the remnants of her hometown’s life, in spite of the fact that presumably this was what I was supposed to do as a customer in the store. Trying to evaluate and appreciate and understand a totally foreign object in front of someone who may know part or all of the object’s history is very unnerving. Initially I felt an overwhelming obligation to buy something as a gesture that I appreciated her merchandise. But in the end I was unable to buy anything. The objects for sale were disturbingly intimate in that they were part of “everyday” experience - an “everyday” with which I was familiar from visiting grandparents and elderly neighbors - and I couldn?t look at them, as I often look (though perhaps I shouldn?t) at objects in museums, without feeling awkward and intrusive. It was an entirely different experience of “viewing” than any I have ever known.

Thanks to Diana Valk who left a comment the other day about LOOK AT ME! - a fascinating site devoted to found photos.

This was after I posted the photo of the girl I found in an old camera case (the lab’s new Graflex) - [Link]

More of the uncanny.

Sam (Schillace) has put me onto yellowarrow.org - a fascinating new project in mobile phone deep mapping.

“yellowarrow” [noun] - a collective symbol for personal communication | [verb] - to leave and discover messages pointing out what counts

choose - find a place that speaks to you, something you want to point out, a detail in the cityscape that counts

tag - mark your place with the yellowarrow sticker

message - join the conversation - send a text message or email to point@yellowarrow.org telling the story behind your arrow

find - when you see a yellowarrow simply send a text message to point@yellowarrow.org with the arrow’s id to get the point immediately sent to your phone

save - make your arrow permanent - add a photo, map its location, build your profile at the yellowarrow.org archive, the site where you can view all the arrows placed around the country

Chris (Witmore) and I were talking again yesterday about Serres’s notion of percolating time - a favorite notion of ours - and the chaotic temporal folding of our experience of place

All those stories tied to places and intermingling, percolating, precisely when this kind of project provides the energy, the cultural heat.

It is just what Mike Pearson, Cliff McLucas, Dorian Llywelyn and I were trying to do with our notion of deep mapping cultural experience - a cartography of the intimate, the everyday, the monumental, the ephemeral, the epochal … [Link]

Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place …

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001) page 64-65

San Jose

I visited the apartment today - the one abandoned over a year ago.

He had lived there since 1964. It looks as if he was preparing to leave - there were some things in boxes, and the place is a little to messy with junk. But all his things seem to be still there. He must have gone with very little.

So why did he leave? There are rumors locally that someone was after him. After he left, no one heard any more.

I took the cameras to record this personal archaeology and found it very disturbing. Yes the place will have to be cleared; but this everyday detritus seemed just too intimate …

Not intimate articles, but the lack of design and presentation, the way the stuff was just left lying, prepared for no one else …

The intimacy, ironically, heightened by absence and distance.

Maybe this is why I screwed up some of the film I was using.

How can anyone ever think that this kind of ethnography is somehow neutral? - the ethics of looking into someone’s life - of handling, even loking at their things - awkward matters for an anthropologist/archaeologist.

More to come …

More on what we leave behind in Wired magazine’s August issue - and how tracks through cyberspace can be crucial clues to who we are and were - Raising the dead

A water-well digger found the body. It was 1968, and Wilbur Riddle was tromping around Eagle Creek, off Route 25 in backwoods Kentucky, scavenging for bell-shaped glass insulators fallen from overhead power lines. A buddy of his could resell them as paperweights, $5 a pop.

As Riddle kicked through the leaves and brush, his foot caught on something solid. It was a green burlap sack, the kind carnies use for carrying big-top tents, tied with a tan cord. Inside was a woman’s body. She was naked except for a shred of cloth diaper draped over her shoulder. Her eyes had rotted away. She had three broken fingernails - part of a futile attempt, apparently, to claw out of her shroud.

A state cop told reporters, “We think the girl was rendered unconscious by a blow to the head, then tied up in the bag to die a slow death by asphyxiation.” Local sheriffs deputies tried for more than six months to figure out who she was. Her epitaph was merely approximate: Tent girl. Died about April 26 - May 3, 1968. Age about 16 - 19 years.

Over time, her death became less of a tragedy and more of a mystery. Riddle told everyone he encountered how he found her. Everyone. Waitresses asking what he wanted for breakfast heard about the Tent Girl instead. Riddle would show a yellowing copy of Master Detective magazine, with a cover story on his gruesome discovery, to kids who came to play with his 16 children. Those same kids rubbed the Tent Girl’s rose-colored headstone as they ran through the town cemetery in joy and terror every Halloween.

The Tent Girl could have been like so many of the 5,400 John and Jane Does taking up space in morgue freezers and potter’s fields around the US - nameless forever. Attaching identities to those bodies from the pool of 100,000 known missing persons would be an overwhelming task, even if it were a priority for every cop in every city and town. Without families, without live leads, the Does often end up in the arctic interiors of the cold case files.

Twenty years after he found the Tent Girl, Riddle told his story to a teenager named Todd Matthews. And Matthews, driven by tragedies of his own, would become compelled to connect a life to her death. By figuring out who she was - and it’s not giving the end away to say that he did - Matthews sparked a movement that is redefining how Does are identified. The methods are painstaking but simple: By trawling idiosyncratic combinations of Google, Yahoo! Groups, and personal as well as official Web sites, online sleuths have helped crack more than 20 long-unsolved cases. Their success has changed the way law enforcement and desperate families come to grips with these mysteries.

At the scene of crime anything might be relevant.

An item today from The Scotsman

Sue Black was a teenage schoolgirl in Inverness when Renee MacRae and her son Andrew vanished in November, 1976.

Yesterday, the renowned forensic anthropologist was back near her home city hoping to help solve one of Scotland?s most enduring mysteries and a crime etched in her memory.

Professor Black, of the Centre for International Forensic Assistance, has searched sites in Iraq and Kosovo for evidence of war crimes but has now turned her attention to a disused quarry, 12 miles from the Highland capital.

For the next few weeks a team of experts will comb the site just off the main A9 trunk road where it is thought the bodies of Mrs MacRae and her son may have been dumped.

Some 2,000 trees have been felled to clear the site for a fresh investigation at Dalmagarry, near the spot where Mrs MacRae?s burnt-out BMW was found nearly 28 years ago.

A mechanical digger was brought in yesterday to start excavating 20,000 tons of soil and rock ahead of a painstaking search for clues and, it is hoped, the discovery of remains of the missing pair.

The police file on the case was reactivated after former officer, Det Sgt John Cathcart, said he was convinced the bodies were in the quarry. He said that a few months after Mrs MacRae and Andrew disappeared he detected the smell of rotting flesh in the quarry, but a full search was never completed.

However, last month Ian Latimer, Chief Constable of Northern Constabulary, announced that after a cold-case review of the deaths, he now had a “specific reason” to carry out a further search.

Prof Black, who works at Dundee University?s anatomy and anthropology department, said her task will be to identify any remains found, but with the passage of time and a three-year-old possibly involved, the team could be looking for pieces of evidence “no bigger than the end of your thumb”.

In a piece called Three Rooms - published in the Journal of Social Archaeology June 2004 issue and as a traumwerk/wiki, I tracked the case of David Rodinsky. He walked out of his one room apartment in Whitechapel, London one morning in 1969, and never returned; the door was unlocked over a decade later to reveal the strangest of cabbalistic remains … or the everyday detritus of a simple life.

Philip (D of philosophistry.com) and Christine Morton have found another case in San Jose.

He left his apartment suddenly over a year ago and nothing has been heard of him since.

He seems to have been a Vietnam veteran turned truckdriver. All his stuff is here. He has paid no bills since he went, left no contact address. The apartment is about to be cleared.

Philip and I talked today of the dust accumulating on the mundanity of his life, his absence, but uncanny presence in everyday and quite unexceptional items, the awkwardness and guilt in confronting these remains …

I am reading Brenda Fowler’s Ice Man at the moment - another take on that lonely bronze age corpse found in the Alps … and I think of that scene in Silence of the Lambs when Clarice Starling is directed to a garage store by Hannibal Lecter, to find the gruesome remains of a serial killer’s early life …

I am to visit the apartment on Wednesday …

and it will feature in our new photoblog - archaeography.com

See also some recent comments on the 1947 Graflex [Link]

Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter, Paul Cloke and more) and one of their colleagues, Derek Gregory (British Columbia, Vancouver) was publishing his book called Geographical Imaginations. Like some other archaeologists, we saw very strong connections between geography and archaeology. And of course we were all very familiar with Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination from 1959.

(Have a look at the 2002 meetings of the Association of American Geographers - [Link] [Link] [Link])

The notion of an archaeological imagination has become well established - a hard fought success for us. It appears as a main theme in Clive Gamble’s excellent book from Routledge - Archaeology: The Basics.

So what is the archaeological imagination?

The point is a simple one - archaeology is not just an academic discipline producing knowledge of the past. Archaeology is part of a range of values, aspirations, desires, dreams, attitudes, stories that share an archaeological character. Ideas that digging deeply into something establishes authenticity; a fascination with ruin and morbidity; locating senses of identity in remains of the past; connecting collection with place in the pursuit of historical meaning; notions of the sacred aura of the artifact; attitudes towards garbage and leftovers; the uncanny sense of presence found in material remains; stories of deep origin, and the cyclical rise and fall of cultures.

The archaeological imagination takes us into the heart of the modern condition and its relationship with the past.

From Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past

David Lowenthal had gathered a fascinating compendium in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country.

Julian has done a great job of exploring some of the philosphical aspects of the archaeological imagination, particularly in his studies of Heidegger [Link], and now in his new and first rate book on archaeology and modernity - [Link] Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Chris Tilley have explored the archaeological imagination wonderfully in their excavations at Leskernick. There is much more - Ruth Tringham’s work out of Berkeley, Carmel Schrire in her research in South Africa. Gavin Lucas is pursuing the archaeological imagination in his fieldwork, and Ian Hodder here at Stanford has always been a great and active supporter of projects that pursue the edges of the archaeological. Cornelius Holtorf, another great colleague of mine at Lampeter, now in Sweden, is about to round off so much of this work with his fabulous forthcoming book on archaeology and popular culture.

And me? Well, since ReConstructing Archaeology, written with Chris Tilley back in the 80s, I have been plotting my own track through matters archaeological. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s ruined histories, Benjamin’s fragmented re-collections, to recent explorations at Stanford with Bill Rathje and David Platt [Link] I have always thought that my 1991 Experiencing the Past, seen by many as a heinous attack on the foundations of archaeological knowledge, was actually a useful summary of the archaeological imagination. Mike Pearson clarified a lot of my thinking on what we saw as a critical romanticism and poetics at the heart of the archaeological project in our Theatre/Archaeology [Link] [Link]. The remains of all this interest are scattered through this blog and my website, never mind numerous articles, books and conference sessions.

I am sounding defensive. Feeling a need to set the record straight. Why?

I got sent an invitation to a book launch in London for Jennifer Wallace’s recently published Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. The book is not yet out in the US. I ordered a copy from the UK and read it this evening.

It is a good read. Covers the themes I have just outlined in a lively way with lots of references to literature and some history of archaeology. She has clearly come across our work - Hodder, Rathje, Tilley and myself get mention in the section on further reading, and sometimes in the main text. One side of me is delighted that our work has reached beyond archaeology.

But for the most part Jennifer has chosen to ignore twenty years of analysis of the archaeological imagination, the archaeological condition.

I wonder why.

Maybe because her book is a literary reading of “the archaeological imagination”. Yet she liberally discusses archaeological history (totally omitting Alain Schnapp’s marvellous and standard book Discovery of the Past), excavations, and what she sees as current trends in the discipline.

Maybe she just hasn’t done her homework, reading what has come before her.

Maybe her publisher, Duckworth, didn’t want footnotes or bibliography - they often look to a cross-over market between academic research and broader interest.

Maybe it doesn’t matter - it’s only the ideas that count. Cornelius is always telling me to lighten up.

Am I getting to be an old reactionary shouting out the standards of scholarship? That you should always recognize the work of others. Perhaps I would simply have celebrated the book’s effort to cross disciplines - a very difficult task - if it wasn’t for an email sent round my department by Maud Gleason recently. She was calling for standards of citation and referencing to be reasserted and upheld in academia, because, like many, she is witnessing a growth in selective, thin and downright false citation - saying (or rather not saying) where your ideas have come from. The matter is really not one of standards for the sake of standards. Maud got me thinking about academic community.

Shoddy research and scholarship often hides behind the publisher’s desire to have a clean read without all the distraction of saying where your ideas come from. The pressure upon academics to deliver publication is considerable and I am suspicious that a lot of what Jennifer discusses is too familiar to be the result of convergent thinking - her coming from literary studies and the reception of classical heritage. And it does look good to appear to be the one with the insight to pull together the big picture.

There is a profound danger in the celebration of the individual that this sloppy work represents. This is what bothers me. The intellectual freedoms of academia depend upon us being a group of colleagues with standards, and principally standards that refuse to have our efforts divided. Say where your ideas come from because linking them with others makes them stronger and lends them impact. Plagiarism is a threat becasue it divides; it hides the connections between people and their ideas. (Though I am not accusing Jennifer of plagiarism.) All too many people want to promote division and dissent because it weakens the power of ideas to change - ideas become simply the possession or opinion of one detached academic.

Jennifer Wallace - you should have connected your work with the efforts of others that you clearly know of. Because these are not just entertaining stories. They go to the heart of the contemporary world’s sense of history, of identity, of direction. They matter.

The power of independent research and criticism lies not in the abilities of an individual, but in the collective effort, collegiality, and democracy, the community of scholarship that alone can give force.

How about that for an enlightenment ideal!