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I think this will be a huge hot topic going forward as the world goes digital. As more and more aspects of our lives become wrapped up in the intangibility of cyber-realms- we, as a world culture, will have to face large questions of authenticity. Specifically, in a global society that is inevitably running out of physical space to live in, how important and efficient is it to physically preserve the past which it has also preserved digitally?

And we may have to face the tragic possibility that the architectural artifacts of the past might have to be converted or supplanted in order for the world to move forwards, that we cannot hoard everything without it inevitably hurting us.

Cyberarchaeology, as an emerging, interdisciplinary tradition, must balance its push for the implementation and innovations of technologies, while simultaneously addressing the anthropological questions of this unfortunate predicament. The existential and practical arguments must be made clear for policy-makers so that as these questions of digital vs. physical become more and more predicated on a global scale- there are philosophic arguments that can be dialectically debated in order to decide what is comfortably best for a global community and how tangibly we hold onto the past in the future.

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Yes, as partially discussed in my above response to Judge Sandra Pinel, I think there is an inherent global threat to all things that can become digitized and that international policy makers will have huge considerations of anthropological authenticity and tangibility to face in the near future. Digitization, while preserving the site, does accidentally endanger the object it is replicating.

However, at the same time- modern technologies for digitization and visualization are nowhere near comparable to the actual space, and until the technology catches up entirely with full, phenomenological replication so that a space can be fully, sensually experienced as if it were the real thing (i.e. the Star Trek holodeck)- the argument that a site can be destroyed now that it has been digitally copied should be vehemently shouted down. As I indicated above, though it should be stopped now, spatial destruction as justified by digitization, should not be ignored as a possible concept – on which global culture will have to debate at length before coming up with a system for dealing with the ethics of the situation.

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My wider program at the University of California, San Diego is attempting to create a larger surveying mechanism or infrastructure through which the world can be diagnostically surveyed, the disparate data sets processed into meaningful correlative informatics systems, and the information disseminated into dynamic and significant visual systems. We are attempting to create efficient surveying technologies and methodologies for air survey, landscape survey, underwater survey and elemental compositional survey which work on a flexible digital infrastructure which can be displayed in a multitude of visual realities.

Though I work on implicit methodological questions for all of the different types of possible survey data (i.e. land, air, water, element), I primarily deal with landscape data. But my wider role in this is two-fold as I work on both the initial data acquisition aspect as well as the dissemination end. As an archaeologist and “cultural heritage engineer,” I take the challenges of field archaeology and apply them to diagnostic imaging equipment (in particular terrestrial laser scanners) to create surveying solutions which bring in effective, data of increasingly higher and higher data quality. At the dissemination end, I consider the anthropological questions of digitization, transparency of cultural heritage data, and the means by which it should and could be effectively, cognitively engaging the past- on the wider, long-term global level, as well as in terms of short-term media and education outreach for archaeological and technological initiatives.

Yes. I do think digital conservation may one day play a negative role on physical conservation. As I discussed in my responses to Judges Pinel and Morse, I think issues of tangibility and anthropological authenticity will be huge upcoming debates society will need to face as it considers whether to replace physical entities with purely digital ones.

In terms of assessment tools to determine the effectiveness of digital investigations vs. physical investigation- this is exactly the concept my double prong integrated technologies for surveying and anthropological questions of digital cultural heritage research is attempting to address. The accuracy of digitization is dependent on these technologies and their quality of data capture. Digital recreations of space which can fully and entirely replicate the actual physical environment are not here yet, although hopefully not far off. But we need to be able to properly gauge the quality of these systems as we are developing them so we can assure that sufficient quality and phenomenological replication can be met (if possible). Many of my projects, like Sandcastles for Science, have been geared towards evaluating the quality capacity of these technologies alone, and the quality capacity of these technologies as part of integrated systems. This also applies towards the methodologies with which these systems (singular and integrated) are used.

These all serve to build a data collection system which takes place in a replicable, scientific fashion so that its results can be quantitatively compared to each other as well as to the real thing.

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Yes, aerial LiDAR for archaeology is a much more prominent movement in diagnostic imaging for field archaeology than the terrestrial LiDAR that I have been applying towards it. This is primarily with reference to the time and physical constraints imposed by terrestrial LiDAR which I have been attempting to solve so that field archaeology can start making pervasive use of terrestrial LiDAR for high quality data capture for surveying.

Aerial LiDAR is extremely useful for wider surveys, particularly in dense environments and is particularly popular in Meso and South America where it is helping archaeologists properly survey jungle sites, often leading to the discovery of new ones. However, aerial LiDAR does not allow for the same level of ground detail terrestrial LiDAR has the capacity for, and therefore provides more capability for the potential of digitally replicating the site.

Thank you! Glad you like it! x

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Thank you! I’m glad you liked it!

Thank you and agreed! Its super important that as new technologies and ways of handling data enter into the zeitgeist we are constantly evaluating how well they work and the plethora of things they can be used for. x

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Thank you!!

Cheers!