ADS management committee member Jeremy Huggett has recently published an article with Current Swedish Archaeology to discuss the nature of digital infrastructures and how placing them at the centre of analysis can help understand and improve the ways that digital archaeological archives are operated and maintained.
The article, Deconstructing the Digital Infrastructures Supporting Archaeological Knowledge, focuses heavily on the history of the ADS and the adaptations that have been necessary over the years to create a more efficient, sustainable, and interoperable model.
Huggett argues that infrastructures are not the rigid foundation of an organisation, but rather are an emergent and ever-evolving answer to unanticipated issues and demands as technology and the industry continue to change. Huggett highlights that the driving factors in the development of digital infrastructures, including that of the ADS, is the inter-personal networks made across organisations and the ability to secure appropriate funding. These social elements of development are rarely included in critical examinations of infrastructures and may help to explain their organisation methods.
Huggett suggests that ethnographies can be useful in the analysis of infrastructure development. In identifying social groups and stakeholders that underlie the creation of an infrastructure, he argues that the use of archives for knowledge production and curation can be better understood. The evolution of the ADS serves as an example of how technological, social and financial factors shape the infrastructures through which we create and disseminate archaeological knowledge.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.37718/CSA.2023.01
