As of issue 9(1) of Advances in Archaeological Practice, we will transition our Digital Reviews editorship from Dr. Sara Perry (Museum of London Archaeology) to Dr. Peter Cobb (University of Hong Kong). Sara has been the journal's first Digital Reviews editor, and we have worked together for the past four and a half years. Throughout this period, she has brought an open, visionary, and innovative approach to the digital reviews.
At the outset, Sara identified her terms of engagement with us, setting a standard for openness in our work as editors by insisting that these articles be freely available so they could be easily read and shared. And, she wanted openness and inclusiveness in seeking authors. In her invitation to publish, “Deconstructing Archaeology's Digital Media: Announcing Advances in Archaeological Practice's Digital Reviews”, she challenged authors to provide work on a range of topics. This invitation was shared through social media and her networks. She initially sought to promote—and subsequently succeeded in promoting—the work of talented and emerging professionals, including some of her current or former students. In this, she has broadened our geographical and professional scope with authors from university, museum, and independent research settings in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Lithuania, and Germany. As we write this in August 2020, we can quantify the level of interest in the work of 16 of the 18 authors—or sets of authors—with whom Sara has worked (two more reviews are still to be published): digital reviews have been downloaded almost 14,000 times from the home platform on the Cambridge Core website.
The digital reviews have, at one level, been about a product—a museum app that may or may not help locate the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, a MOOC class on recovering humankind's past and saving universal heritage, the use of 3D prints to replicate headdresses from Star Carr for museum display, or the digital reproduction of Greek New Testaments. At another level, Sara has worked with authors to evoke a discussion of the critical elements of that product, embedding the reviews in contemporary theory where possible. An augmented reality app of a cemetery is not good just because it is new and digital, although it may attract some initial attention. How does the digital tool help archaeologists meet their research, educational, and interpretive goals? How are these tools offering more than analog experiences to help evoke the past, to help us engage and relate and understand, to help us expand potential? How were the ideas brought into practice in terms of design? By emphasizing the innovative qualities of digital technologies as well as examining their execution and impact on contemporary practice critically, Sara enabled a unique and balanced set of digital reviews to come to fruition. We thank her for the high professional and ethical standards that she set and for her dedication to making the reviews a well-used and well-regarded part of our journal.
Peter will take the reviews in a slightly different direction as he continues this expansive approach to authorship and the free sharing of articles. He observes that over the prior decade, we have seen an extraordinary increase in the amount and accuracy of digital data collected during archaeological fieldwork and lab work. This has created opportunities to use datasets in new ways through continued technological advancements. We now discuss not if but how archaeology can participate in the “big data” and data science movements. In the coming months, a series of thematic contributions will “review” our field's current relationship to data science. From multiple perspectives, we will look at multiple types of digital data and at the increasing flow and uses of data. The topics we plan to cover include the current state of digital data and data science in archaeology, machine-learning applications in archaeology, mundane data collection on field projects, Indigenous archaeologist views on data accessibility, and big 3D data and augmented reality. For the final review, a nonarchaeologist data scientist will be invited to provide an outsider perspective on our field. Each contribution will be guided by a critical approach to the technology.
Regardless of whether or not archaeology has actually developed a subfield labeled “digital archaeology”—it seems that we are all, after all, becoming digital archaeologists—we invite archaeologists of every stripe to join in the conversation. Each article for Digital Reviews should provide an overview of the topic through a brief introduction to the main activities of specialists, along with important definitions. After presenting this “state of the field,” the review may discuss future possible directions so that readers can ruminate on what will be possible. In this way, we hope these digital reviews can help us envision potential advances in archaeological practice. We will also continue to expand the geographical reach of the reviews as Peter encourages authors from his part of the globe (currently Asia) to contribute. Please consider making a creative contribution to this series creatively. And welcome, Peter!
