Huggett, J. , Reilly, P. and Lock, G. (2018) Whither digital archaeological knowledge? The challenge of unstable futures. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 1(1), pp. 42-54. (doi:10.5334/jcaa.7)
In the article at https://journal.caa-international.org/articles/10.5334/jcaa.7 the authors wrote:
A popular approach is to integrate expensive infrastructure, such as national monuments databases, national museums, galleries, libraries, and other national archives and collections to create synergy by combining previously separated data (for example, Bernardou et al. 2017). From their inception such projects have prescribed deliverables, milestones, and standards of documentation and publication. They usually also have large international, multidisciplinary project teams who on the whole share a common knowledge culture and adhere to its norms. These collaborating institutions like to see themselves as helping to democratize data; however, non-members of these elite clubs may regard it as a form of knowledge colonialism and may not fully endorse these programmes, underlining that providing access to a robust, properly supported, open infrastructure does not guarantee engagement. Even with an elegant ontology, the knowledge base can be undermined by semantic drift and inadequate digital literacy in the general (potential) user community, and, of course, this presupposes that potential (re)user communities know what resources are available and how to discover and evaluate them in the first place.
In the original conference (CHTA2013, Copenhagen), the major finding, I thought, was the opposite: how important users and iterative design was, rather than elaborate infrastructures. And in the original introduction Costis Dallas was considering reviewing a paper he wrote 20 years ago about the then challenges in Digital Humanities and how now 20 years later those old challenges were still an issue.
I recall in the final talk, mine, which was about 7 minutes, I argued that infrastructure without people using it, is just infrastructure (and I gave a talk at Sheffield in 2013 entitled Research as Infrastructure on this very point).
Interesting how so many chapters could be seen to take on one overall argument, as the person who wrote the grant, organized and hosted the conference, wrote the book proposal, organized the authors, the above quoted viewpoint is one I never contemplated, and still don’t!
Conclusion: Review all publications before publication to check if they may lend themselves to strawman (straw people?) arguments, then rinse and repeat.
Reference
Benardou, (not Bernadou) A, Champion, E, Dallas, C and Hughes, L. 2017. Introduction: a critique of digital practices and research infrastructures. In: Benardou, A, Champion, E, Dallas, C and Hughes, L (eds.), Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities, 1–14. Abingdon: Routledge.
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