“Playful, imaginative, participatory work is not the enemy of education, but its exuberant and vital engine.”
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 3.
I found this quote at the bottom of page 24. In context, it makes a strong point, but it was this quote alone that stood out to me. It’s more personal than intellectual, but it reminded me of how I became interested in archaeology. I was about seven or eight and consuming National Geographic documentaries like water when I was introduced to LiDAR. Standing for Light Detection and Ranging, LiDAR is commonly used by archaeologists to conduct survey work by digitally stripping away vegetation to reveal the topography of the ground underneath. It was like magic, a whole new way of looking at the world. Soon enough, I was reading about new settlements found underneath the jungle in the Amazon, new temples in Cambodia, and even more Mayan cities. The world just seemed so much wider than it was before. In a research paper reporting the LiDAR results from the Mayan city of Caracol, figure 3 really shows how extraordinary the difference in visibility is. I’ve linked to the paper here. (Chase et al., 2011) The documentary that started it all used those exact pictures.
That feeling I had watching and reading about these finds, that there are still more things out there to discover, to know, and to share with the world, is what powered my love of learning. Archaeology is a participatory discipline (we all have to put in the work or everything falls apart!), one that requires imagination and, yes, that sparking feeling of discovery. The quote really hit home to me, and ever since I saw these images I’ve had a fascination with what technology can allow us to discover.
I’m excited to gain the technical skills to complement the base knowledge I have of digital methods. I’m interested in a wide range of topics and uses; photogrammetry and modeling, mapping, text analysis, and how to democratize scholarly results. I attempted to do many of these things in Archaeological Methods last term. My final project was the Digital Artifact Collection on the Archaeology in the Arb website. I already want to go and change it! I’m sure by the end of this term I’ll be asking if I could please make it better, free of the final project time constraints this time.
