i-ing the past: digital archaeology and digital heritage

Hey all,

To give you a little taste of the range of digital archaeologies practiced around the world today, there are a number of sites you could explore beyond blogs, all wielding some iteration of a "Digital Archaeology." Commercial companies/academic centers come to mind off the top of my head. One of the slicker company sites that master a full range of digital imaging technologies is Digital Archaeology, (that's www.digital hyphen archaeology with an .eu suffix, and originator of the image i grabbed!), run out of Poland. They've been around a few years, but their web presence in English has become quite slick. With a strong emphasis on marine archaeology, they offer up some nice digital archaeology eye candy for you to explore. Likewise there is the Digital Archaeology page of L!nk 3D in Germany (that's www.digital hyphen archaeology with a .com suffix). They've been around quite awhile longer but you have to "dig" their site to get at nice content. I should also throw in a few other service providers who have pretty impressive abilities and websites, Including the Center for Digital Archaeology in California, and the Institute of Digital Archaeology (those of the Palmyra Arch), in the UK and US. Ethan Watrall has previously directed a more scholarly learning, training and mentoring focused Institute on Digital Archaeology Method and Practice out of Michigan State University. And of course there are very slick places like CyArk, that talk about Digital Archaeology, or used to, but really have become something so much more.

And as I mentioned in class, there is an entirely separate concept of a Digital Archaeology as archaeology of lost languages and sites of the internet. That's what Digital Archaeology (that's www.digital hyphen archaeology with an .org suffix... really someone should have bought up all those domains, way back when!), run by historian Jim Boulton is all about. We won't really get into this digital-archaeology-as-internet-based-metadata-metaphor, but if you are interested, you can read a couple of blog introductions to the topic here and here. And, of course, where the two concepts overlap, the reading is quite interesting, as in Matt Law and Colleen Morgan's article, here.

Lastly, there is Archaeological Analytics, which is more about promoting and highlighting the digital archaeological efforts of archaeologists to increase the profile of archaeology in social media.