Knowledge Generation in Archaeology through Texts and Graphical Representations

45th Computer Applications and Quantitive Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA)

Atlanta. Estados Unidos
Congreso. 2017

Audience

This session will be of interest to archaeologists concerned about the ways in which we create and use textual and graphical representations of the archaeological record and related entities.

More specifically, the session will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students working on new ways to convey meaning in archaeology, generate knowledge from textual and graphical sources, and disseminate archaeological knowledge to the scientific community or the general public.

Summary

This session combines elements of a panel and a workshop, with the aim to provide a solid theoretical background to a hands-on group activity.

The aim of the session is to gain insights into how new meaning is created from texts and graphical representations of archaeological settings, and how existing meaning is captured into texts and graphical representations as well. In other words, the session aims to explore the full cycle of meaning generation and transmission on both textual and graphical formats.

To accomplish this, the first half of the session will work as a panel, with 3 experts making very short presentations of their respective points of view on each the core topics: text, meaning and graphical representations. A debate will follow. The second half of the session will work as a workshop, by involving all participants in a group activity where texts and graphical representations of archaeological case studies will have to be read, understood, transmitted and re-created. The session will finish with a collective discussion.

The detailed structure of the session will be as follows.

1. Introduction by session organisers. 10 minutes.

2. Presentation of panel experts? positions. 30 minutes.

3. Public debate on experts? presentations. 30 minutes.

4. Introduction to group activities. 10 minutes.

5. Group activities. 1 hour and 45 minutes.

6. Public discussion of results. 30 minutes.

7. Conclusions by session organisers. 5 minutes.

In this manner, the overall duration of the session will be approximately 4 hours.

Panel experts

Panel experts have been invited for each of the three main topics to be discussed, as follows.

? Textual information and language. Douglas Tudhope, pending confirmation.

? Semantics and modelling. Stephen Stead, pending confirmation.

? Graphical representations. Nicoló Dell?Unto, confirmed.

We expect to receive confirmation of the pending experts very shortly.

Group activities

The group activities to be run as bullet point 5 above will be structured as follows.

Attendees will be divided in two, four, or more groups so that each group does not have more than 5 people. Half of the groups will receive a short text describing an archaeological case study, and the other half will receive another text describing a different case study. Groups will have some time to read, interiorise and discuss the texts.

Then, groups having different case studies will be paired. Each group will explain their case study to their peers exclusively through graphical means. This will include sketching on paper, using a whiteboard, or other means as long as they are fundamentally graphical. No speaking or extensive writing will be allowed. In order to assist with this, some graphical ideas will be given to attendees through screen projection.

After all groups have conveyed their case study to their peers in this manner, each group will have to put the received information in text form, by writing a very brief report.

Finally, texts will be interchanged so that each group can compare their textual outcome with the original case study they have been trying to capture.

In this manner, the whole audience will be able to assess what textual and graphical techniques and resources have been the most useful to convey the relevant narrative contents.

Related activities in the past

The organisers of this session have run 12 workshops and paper sessions at CAA since 2010. The workshop now proposed fits into their general line of work on conceptual modelling, knowledge generation and visual representations in archaeology and, in particular, the area of expressing and understanding the archaeological discourse.

Knowledge. Graphical representation. Text. Information. Archaeological discourse. Expressing. Understanding.