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Peer Comment

Seren GriffithsORCID logo

Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. S.Griffiths@mmu.ac.uk

Cite this as: Griffiths, S. (2015) Peer Comment, Internet Archaeology 39. http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.39.3.com1

The paper by Tong et al. provides a timely assessment of the role that vlogging can play in research excavations, as a form of public archaeology. I was particularly struck by three points.

Firstly, the paper rightfully emphasises the importance of digital media as aspects of public archaeological programmes, which incorporate a range of media. Archaeologists, as inherently interested in the multi-media remnants of the past, should be the first to recognise the multiplicity of approaches both for allowing people to find us, and as a means to get our message across. By this I don't just mean media as ways of satisfying the intrinsic impact statements that are associated within university archaeology, or for project publicity within commercial archaeology. I mean the message that we should all be pitching. That archaeology is a good and estimable thing in itself; as people form attachments to their national collections of fine art or natural history, so too they have a right to be engaged with the historic environment, and we should be unashamed to promote this as an intrinsically good thing.

Secondly, the paper emphasised the importance of having a concept of the design and aims of the digital engagement strategy in advance. Having visited the Bristol University Berkeley Castle project, I am aware of how involved and resource-heavy digital public archaeology work can be. I was impressed by the emphasis on this in a much smaller scale excavation (with, one presumes, proportionally smaller resources) at Project Eliseg. As this paper notes, arguably the success associated with digital public archaeology is directly proportional to a time-on-task approach, for a small team this presents a raft of logistical issues.

Thirdly, I was struck by one of the observations in the open review by Ben Marwick. Marwick states that part of one of the vlogs was unclear to him and others "… especially by viewers who are not familiar with popular depictions of archaeological fieldwork on British television." This for me emphasised one of the immediate challenges in a post-and-respond world, where an offensive comment or ill-thought out remark can result in an individual's censure by a global audience. The challenges and strengths of the web are one and the same. As archaeologists, the audience that we are used to engaging with on open days, in local societies, in lecture theatres, in museums and so on, are not the audiences our vlogs will (we hope) garner. There are risks with a potentially global audience — that we offend through clashes of culture, and that our intentions are misconceived. How then to play, to point and to dig live on the world wide web? As archaeologists we might be expected to be particularly concerned with cross-cultural differences. One of the best aspects of international archaeological conferences is the common understandings achieved (despite different languages) through the lingua franca of archaeology. Differences in practice and research emphasis for example can be acknowledged, but the wider discourse is about doing better collectively, or enjoying other people's discoveries, successes and findings. I think because of the almost inevitable problems of communication on an international platform, we have to accept errors in translation, and try and do our best to be responsible, thoughtful and engaged archaeologists, and move on. Part of this includes asking people to come and work with us on all aspects of archaeological research from project planning, through to fieldwork, and post excavation analysis. Public archaeology does not begin and end with the trowel edge. But part of this also includes actively taking our message out of universities, commercial archaeological units and museums, and out of the narrow confines of field practice. Part of this means taking our message to as many folk as will hear us. To my mind vlogs provide one of a range of ways in which we can do this.

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