The setting
Archaeology at Cambridge is a significant academic landmark in the discipline with a long-standing research tradition. There are 18 teaching staff, and also a larger number of research staff and Museum curators who also teach. Together they cover a wide range of areas, eras, theoretical approaches and special interests. The Department is closely associated with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which has an extensive collection, the Haddon Library and with the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. There are also five related research laboratories. In the first year of the undergraduate degree students may study archaeology, physical anthropology and social anthropology before specialising. All labs, departments and the Museum are housed close together on the Downing Street site in the centre of Cambridge. Archaeology has close links with other Departments, particularly Classics, Oriental and Norse Studies and with Continuing Education, and is closely associated with the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, which conducts local investigations. There is an extensive and wide ranging seminar program.
What is the nature, scope and role of cases in this setting?
‘Cases’ are used in different ways in Archaeology teaching, often to bring the students close to research. For instance:
- Case studies within lectures may describe a particular excavation site or research project bounded by geographical area and historical era. Often these presentations take the form of personal narratives given by the researcher.
- In Museum-based classes, artefacts such as pots or shards of pots are displayed and described by the lecturer. Here the artefact acts as a case around which the lecturer constructs a narrative that displays the expert thinking process involved in interpreting details of the pottery.
- There are also much larger scale ‘cases’, for example, field work sites or sites of special archaeological interest that students visit as part of their courses. They are guided round those sites by lecturers and researchers who describe the research processes and the findings associated with that area.
- ‘Cases’ may also be critical phases in the history of the subject, for instance when a lecturer or museum curator refers to the way in which one interpretation is replaced by new evidence and new ideas (for example, key moments in the emergence of ‘processual’ archaeology).
Note that a ‘case’ is often both a segment of content and its form of presentation. We have seen cases used as a way of focusing and contextualizing expert narratives and dialogue in a way that displays their thinking as Archaeologists. This form of pedagogy requires lecturers to have active involvement in research, and able to use their academic biographies as a source of personal narratives that relate directly to the history and shape of the discipline. Students are taught, not just about archaeology, but are given insight into what it means to be an archaeologist.
As a further step in this educational process, in the second and third years, students are given the opportunity to construct a case around an object as a piece of coursework. Students focus on one artefact or group of artefacts from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, or a building or stone associated with their chosen module theme. They gather information about the artefact from multiple digital, and non digital sources and write a report summarizing their findings in a structured way. In this way students are introduced to a practice that matches that of professional Archaeologists.
How are cases designed, developed, described and reconstructed?
In archaeology, we have encountered:
- Cases as personal narratives and recounted experiences,
- Cases as anecdotes (for example, stories from the field),
- Cases as objects, artefacts, cultural features, technologies and typologies (for instance in the design and shapes of pots),
- Cases as sites,
- Cases as incidents in the history of the discipline,
- Cases as projects, particularly student projects.
The notion of ‘the case’ is not made explicit or problematic in archaeology teaching. It is mostly implicit and taken for granted as a natural way to talk about the subject. We have seen cases described through expert narratives associated with an object or field site that display expert thinking in relation the case itself. Case studies presented in lectures are more structured and pre-prepared and bounded by a particular time and place. Students are also involved in the construction of cases in the artefact projects that they produce, which involve selection, description and structuring of data and information associated with the artefact as a case.
What new tools have been developed and how?
In archaeology, cases are not just ways of displaying information but about the nature of archaeology itself. The challenge for Ensemble is how to construct and work with databases that embody the personal and biographical narratives that are a feature of archaeological cases. Some of the existing databases (for example, Museum catalogues) are protected against non-specialist use to prevent error or misrepresentation. The student artefact projects appeared to have the most potential for support through semantic web applications because of the variety of sources and media that are integrated within the project reports and their relatively low visibility within the discipline. Examples of the project reports confirm that the narrative structure of the reports is integral to the construction of the case. An exhibit that takes the data out of this context would not be as rich and contextualized as the original reports.
As a solution to this issue, the Data-Aggregating Document (DAD) was developed by Ensemble. This is a replica of the project report format with a rich text narrative divided into chapters with topic subheadings. Many of the static diagrams from the original report format can be replaced with small semantic exhibits displaying the information in a more interactive way. In some cases the data can be linked-in live to the tables or timelines displayed within the report. This DAD therefore allows for a more animated and interactive display of the data relating to an artefact, along with a rich narrative that shows the students’ ability to structure , filter and interpret information relating to the case.
What are the pedagogical advantages and opportunities of using semantic technologies?
Potentially the main advantage is that archaeology deals with large, complex databases that include many different forms of information (from landscapes and grand historical narratives to molecular analysis and genetics). Much of this information is spatial, visual and related to maps, site plans and timelines. Students face the task of both working within databases that may be incomplete, and across databases that may be built on different assumptions. An example would be using climate change data, biological data such as pollen counts and bring both to bear on the task of interpreting artefacts and field data from a particular site.
The integration of small semantic exhibits into the text of student artefact projects allows extra flexibility and interactivity to be in-built in the project reports. The kinds of visualizations that are available through the use of online tools can display complex data more effectively than a static table or graph. Online databases can be linked into the exhibits to show details from archaeological records associated with the artefact. However, the scope of semantic web tools is restricted in this discipline because many collections remain un-catalogued and museums will often contain large stores of artefacts that are awaiting sorting, description and analysis. Much of the data and literature that is used is currently partial and in a non-digital format. This reflects the situations frequently faced by professional Archaeologists, where collecting and managing non-digital information is an important process in writing the artefact project report.
What are the theoretical framings that help us understand this?
The central design problem is how to incorporate such diversity and eclecticism of content and variation of pedagogical purpose within a manageable application. Archaeological cases are not of a single type or built on similiar variables (as, it could be argued, are many Business cases). This could lead to a large set of one-off solutions, which would be resource intensive and of limited general applicability. Exhibit is a useful application in this context because it can be rapidly prototyped, adapted and put to use without extensive preparation.
Archaeology also lends itself to high levels of user participation in the design process, but this too leads to many individual solutions that may have limited application beyond the immediate case. The nature of scholarship in archaeology is predominantly individualised and while there are intense theoretical debates that draw on critical cases, much of the work that archaeologists do in the field involves expertise that is fine grain, long term and specific to the case.
