Reversing the scope: Archaeological action shots as paradata on archaeological practices

Presentation at the symposium Working with small data: photographic archives and AI at Linköping University Campus Norrköping Organised by prof Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Bodil Axelsson.

Abstract

An exemplary of archaeological photography is a cleaned view of a clearly lit feature or artefacts shown together with a photo scale. Anyone who has been participating in fieldwork or researched into archaeological archives knows, however, that archaeological photographic archives contains a lot of other types of images as well. A category of images that has received little scholarly attention in archaeology and studies of archaeological practices are the so called action shots that represent archaeological work in action. They are frequently used as illustrations in reports and public presentations but seldom featured as a part of the formal fieldwork record even if they contain a lot of information, perhaps not on the findings, but on often rudimentarily documented fieldwork practice. This presentation inquires into how situated and contextual micro-scale analysis of archaeological action shots can inform the understanding of archaeological practice and its outcomes forming an invaluable source of paradata i.e. information on the practices and processes of archaeological fieldwork. Approaching such images as big data is possible and opens interesting paths for understanding archaeological work but their contextual and situated nature makes them much richer source of the very specific context they are depicting than a source for large-scale inquiry. The presentation suggests further how much of paradata is in the micro-relations within the small data and their relations to macroscopic phenomena rather in the capacity of the macro shed light on the micro.