Surveying New Sites
Landscapes and Archaeologies of the Internet
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v2i1.27059Keywords:
critical code studies, digital archaeology, HTML, StonehengeAbstract
This study examines how an archaeological approach can be applied to the analysis of online spaces and websites as a mode of critical inquiry. With a nascent “digital archaeology”, which has emerged within media studies, the role of archaeology can be regarded as being reduced to a convenient metaphor in these discussions as scholars seek to “unearth” and “excavate” connections between technology and society. To counter such limiting and one-dimensional assessments of the discipline, this research highlights how archaeology as a study concerned with space, place and materiality can be mobilised to investigate the digital realm. Therefore, using theories derived from critical code studies, this article highlights the potential of an archaeological survey of the internet by examining the site of Stonehenge within the online landscape.
References
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____.2012. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity.
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Ridolfo, J. and W. Hart-Davidson. 2015. “Introduction.” In Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, edited by J. Ridolfo and W. Hart-Davidson, 1–15. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226176727.001.0001
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Schiffer, M. B. 1983. “Toward the Identification of Formation Processes.” American Antiquity 48: 675–706. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/279771
Thomas, J. 1993. “The Politics of Vision and Archaeologies of Landscape.” In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, edited by B. Bender, 19–48. Oxford: Berg.
____. 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge.
Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg.
Ulmer, G. 1989. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of the Video. London: Routledge.
Wikipedia, 2015. Stonehenge. Available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2009. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games and Software Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bender, B. 1993. ‘Stonehenge – Contested Landscapes (Medieval to Present Day).” In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, edited by B. Bender, 245–279. Oxford: Berg.
____. and P. Aitken. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg.
Berger, J. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC/Penguin Books.
Bolter, J. 2001. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associate Publishers.
Elsaesser, T. 2004. “The New Film History as Media Archaeology.” Cinémas 14(2–3): 71–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/026005ar
English Heritage. 2015. Stonehenge. Available online: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/ stonehenge/
Ernst, W. 2005. “Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines.” Art History 28(5): 582–603. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2005.00479.x
Foucault, M. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books.
Fuller, M. 2008. “Introduction.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by M. Fuller, 1–14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Google n.d. “Doubleclick.” Available online: http://www.google.co.uk/doubleclick/
Graves-Brown, P. 2009. “The Library of Babel: Origins of the World Wide Web.” In Defining Moments: Dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth-Century, edited by J. Schofield, 123–134. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Harrison, R. 2009. “Excavating Second Life: Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities.” Journal of Material Culture 14(1): 75–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183508100009
____. 2010. “Exorcising the ‘Plague of Fantasies’: Mass Media and Archaeology’s Role in the Present; or, Why We Need an Archaeology of ‘Now’.” World Archaeology 42(3): 328–340. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2010.497339
____. 2011. “Archaeologies ‘Now’: Creative Interventions in the Present for the Future.” Archaeological Dialogues 18(2): 180–196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1380203811000250
Hodder, I. 1982. Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Huhtamo, E. and J. Parikka. 2011. “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology.” In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by E. Huhtamo and J. Parikka, 1–21. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kittler, F. 1995. “There is No Software.” CTheory a032 Available online: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74
Landow, G. 1992. Hypertext: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalisation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Latour, B. 1996. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Layton, R. and P. Ucko. 1996. “Introduction: Gazing on the Landscape and Encountering the Environment.” In Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape, edited by R. Layton and P. Ucko, 1–20. London: Routledge.
Marino, M. 2006. “Critical Code Studies.” Electronic Book Review, Electropoetics. Available online: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/ codology
Mehler, A. 2006. “Text Linkage in the Wiki Medium – A Comparative Study. In Proceedings of the EACL 2006 Workshop on New Text – Wikis and Blogs and other Dynamic Text Sources, edited by J. Karlgren, 1–8. Trento, Italy: EACL. Available online: http://www.sics.se/jussi/newtext/working_notes/01_mehler.pdf
Parikka, J. 2007. Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. New York: Peter Lang.
____.2012. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity.
Poster, M. 1990. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ridolfo, J. and W. Hart-Davidson. 2015. “Introduction.” In Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, edited by J. Ridolfo and W. Hart-Davidson, 1–15. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226176727.001.0001
Sample, M. and A. Vee. 2012. “Introduction to ‘The Role of Computational Literacy in Computers and Writing’.” Enculturation 14. Available online: http://enculturation.net/computational-literacy
Schema.org. 2015. Homepage. Available online: http://schema.org/.
Schiffer, M. B. 1983. “Toward the Identification of Formation Processes.” American Antiquity 48: 675–706. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/279771
Thomas, J. 1993. “The Politics of Vision and Archaeologies of Landscape.” In Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, edited by B. Bender, 19–48. Oxford: Berg.
____. 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge.
Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg.
Ulmer, G. 1989. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of the Video. London: Routledge.
Wikipedia, 2015. Stonehenge. Available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2009. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games and Software Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Published
2015-09-02
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How to Cite
Wilson, R. J. (2015). Surveying New Sites: Landscapes and Archaeologies of the Internet. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2(1), 72-78. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v2i1.27059
