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Making a Game Out of It: Gamification and Ethical Issues - Episode 6
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On today's episode, the recent release of GlobalXplorer, a project to combat looting and archaeological site destruction, prompts a discussion on the ethics of gamification for archaeological researchers. The panel talks about ethics as they apply in digital archaeology and the archaeology of video-games.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. The Archaeology Podcast Network is sponsored by Codify, a California benefit corporation. Visit codify at www.codifi.com. Welcome to the 8-Bit Test Pit, Episode 6. I'm Andrew Reinhard. Today, Megan Dennis, Tara Copplestone and I are going to be talking about the ethics of gamification
00:00:30
Speaker
for the main campaign. Alright, this is 8-bit test pit and it is February 13th, 2017. We have Megan, Tara, and Andrew.
00:00:56
Speaker
Hi! Hello!
Ethics in Space Archaeology
00:00:58
Speaker
Right, so we're gonna start off this podcast with the happenings in archaeo gaming over the last wee while. This is a new thing that we're testing out, but there's so many interesting things starting to pop up that we thought maybe it would be cool to kind of highlight some of them.
00:01:13
Speaker
So the first thing on our agenda, which is going to be a bit of a running theme and discussion point throughout the episode today, is space archaeology and specifically the ethics of it. This is in the form of the Global Explorer Project, if I could get my words right, which has been making headlines again. It became quite famous a while ago due to a TED Talk, but has kind of come straight back into hot discussion.
00:01:37
Speaker
quite recently. It's a gamified platform for crowdsourcing, archaeological site identification, and it's gone live very recently to critical feedback from both academic and public audiences. You can see the site for yourself down in the links below.
00:01:54
Speaker
Second point is that the EAA call for papers on archaeogaming including a roundtable and a discussion session like a paper session has gone out. If you are interested in archaeogaming you should think about going to EAA or submitting a paper if it's your research area. Again that's down in the links below and we can have a bit more of a talk about that later because Megan is on the committee which is making that happen which is awesome.
00:02:18
Speaker
Sticking with the Megan theme, our wonderful lead presenter has had her project on Arceo Gaming and Ethics go live online, which includes a survey and some updates. You can follow along with that project with the links below as well. I strongly recommend you check it out. It's pretty awesome.
00:02:37
Speaker
and also the theme of today being ethics. Ah ha! Finally, two last points.
Archaeogaming and Upcoming Projects
00:02:43
Speaker
The Value Project, our friends over at Leiden, have done a couple of streams recently, critically assessing the archaeology in games, one of which featured our very own Megan again, sticking with that theme very strongly today. And the links for this project as well as those videos can be found below. They're really awesome. The one that Megan did was on the ethics of Tomb Raider and was a lot of fun. And recently there have been some other game-specific ones that they've done.
00:03:08
Speaker
So they're well worth checking out. And finally, the value book about archaeogaming and interactive pass is almost available now. There's a really awesome array of articles from both developers and creators and archaeologists, which are going to be in there. So have a look below, check out the details for that. I have a chapter in there. I believe Andrew has a chapter in there as well. I do indeed. Excellent. So yeah. That's me. Turn. Mic drop.
00:03:39
Speaker
It's an expensive mic, so let's don't. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on right now, and I think it artificially sounds like I'm doing all of it. All of it. But that is not the case. This just happens to be a brief spurt of productivity before I go back to writing.
00:03:59
Speaker
endless chapters yeah and endless chapters um yeah there's a lot of good stuff though the uh the eaa session is actually we have essentially a full day worth of programming that we're going to offer at the conference not computer program not computer programming just going to sit down and like get bang out some c-shop because that's no one's idea of a good time except for mine
00:04:22
Speaker
We're going to let Tara sit in the corner and do that. Talk to my own. Yeah, the sessions, we're going to be running back to back, so we will have a full half day of papers and a half day of
00:04:38
Speaker
roundtable and the roundtable is open to all conference attendees. We're asking people if you're in the discipline and your research relates to this, relates to Argo Gaming, that let us know. We'd like to get you formally on it so that we know you're coming and so that you get a line on your CV. So for the EIA, for those of you guys who are scoring at home, it's the European Association of Archaeologists. And where's the meeting this year?
00:05:11
Speaker
I pronounce it in a very American way. Mine's in a New Zealand way. We've got the face covered here. This is August.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yes, it's the 30th of August through the 2nd, 3rd of September. And it's going to be a good conference. It's very big. So for American audiences used to the SAAs, it's the equivalent, but is anything really the equivalent in terms of sheer
00:05:44
Speaker
mass of archaeologists than Saturday night at the SAAs. I don't think so. Yeah, so that's coming up. Value is also very involved in that, as are some of our other colleagues, and we're excited about it. And I'm excited, obviously, about
00:06:01
Speaker
releasing my survey data, not releasing the data, collecting the data because I'm just jumping myself six months into the future so that it's all done. Yeah, I'm really excited about that. Today was a big launch day when very few things actually broke down, which is nice. So we'll see how that goes.
00:06:22
Speaker
But shall we jump in now? We've kind of talked a lot about Megan and her ethics. They're not my ethics. They're ideological ethics. I feel like I own them some days, but I don't. You're kind of pioneering the explicit application of them and development of them in archaeology.
Ethical Codes in Digital Archaeology
00:06:40
Speaker
So it'd be kind of interesting to have a bit of a discussion to prime this session, so to speak, on our ethics in archaeology.
00:06:49
Speaker
So is this just archaeological ethics? Or are you doing ethics in digital archaeological space? Or where do you find yourself? What niche do you occupy in doing it? It's an archaeology.
00:07:01
Speaker
What I've done so far is I've looked at where are we positioning ourselves with ethics in archaeology? What do we have as existing guidelines? What do we have as existing standards of practice? And how are those being adjudicated or not for professionals in the field? And I've looked at lots and lots of professional societies and organizations. And one of the big things that I determined was that
00:07:31
Speaker
One, there's not enough codes of ethics in archaeology. We still have some really big groups that I'm not going to shake my finger at right now, but you know who you are and you don't have any sort of code of conduct or written professional standards. And I don't understand how that can be in 2017, but it's one of the things that hopefully I can
00:07:58
Speaker
can work on figuring out and rectifying. Where I go from there is then looking at the existing codes of practice and how much or how little do they actually talk about digital issues. And for the most part, most of them don't. Most of them don't have any
00:08:19
Speaker
any explicit mention of digital archaeology or digital methods or digital recording or technological issues. So it just isn't there to begin with.
00:08:34
Speaker
And then the third part of that is then looking at what little is there and looking at the existing archaeological ethics as written and figuring out what do we actually need in a code of practice for digital archaeology. What standards should we be
00:08:51
Speaker
expecting from each other as professionals in our work, in our research, in our outputs, in our communication with the public, in our working with the public. And how do we address digital issues that can be very quickly changing because of technological changes? How do we continue to address those in ways that are meaningful? And
00:09:29
Speaker
It seems like, like I studied ethics like back when I was in my undergrad, but it's like, okay, so how do we then go about applying these two systems like games which have like change or which have these kind of like distinct possibility spaces which are quite different and that the game can be like replayed and re-operated and like, are there specific things about games, I guess is what I'm trying to ask, that are different
00:09:42
Speaker
don't just say be nice to everybody and don't abuse your students.
00:09:54
Speaker
to that all that required different codes or different understandings to if we were to be archaeologists operating in a professional capacity digging stuff or analyzing stuff. When we look at this as specifically in games we have a couple different ways we can look at it. We can look at it purely as what is the
00:10:15
Speaker
narrative content that's going on in the games? And how does that work in a representational sense? How right or wrong? And we've talked before about authenticity and why it may or may not matter. You can look at it that way. You can look at it in terms of how
00:10:36
Speaker
And that's more how are players being influenced by games. You can also look at it in terms of how are we being influenced? What feedback loops are we going through as archaeologists when we are either seeing how we're being represented or seeing what is being privileged as science or what's being privileged as archaeology in games. And those are the narrative and aesthetic content issues.
00:11:04
Speaker
The other issue we have to deal with, and the one that a lot of my work is focused on right now, is if we as researchers are using that space, what ethical constraints are we under? What should we be considering about the very different nature of the place that we are excavating or collecting ethnographic data or
00:11:26
Speaker
looking at code or any of the things that we're doing, how does that particular space influence what we do and how we should be behaving?
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, cause I mean like, I do this all the time and it's like probably horrifically unethical. It's like when I get a game, I basically spend a lot of time going through like the non-compiled or like trash files that exist in the code still to figure out like, I don't know, I'm just really interested by like what a developer is doing. But on the other hand, as a developer, I am horrified by the thought of someone going through this in my games. So I'm like, please don't look at the things I don't want you to see.
00:12:06
Speaker
And so it's like, and it's even down to like really mundane things like comments in my code, which you can still rip out of like the compilation and it's...
00:12:15
Speaker
I don't know, it's like, when I think about it, I kind of treat these things as if I own them because they're a play space which I'm used to being, like, in control of it in a way. Like, obviously the world is still created and, like, parameter'd, but there's something quite different about the way which I think about, like, doing archaeology on a game versus doing it in real life. I guess actually not that dissimilar to how people did archaeology a while ago, but...
00:12:41
Speaker
This is interesting, too. If you look at William Rasche's garbage project at the University of Arizona, when he was taking a look at the trash that people were throwing out and then interviewing them about this to see what they were thinking and stuff, and people would be mortified to tell the truth about what they're disposing of. Their secrets are in the rubbish bin. It's much like having that commented code kind of squirreled away somewhere where hopefully no one will see it, but people do. Yeah, you're right.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that's one of the things that we have to balance when we're doing this work and considering what our ethical obligations are as researchers because it's
00:13:18
Speaker
It's not necessarily always right and it's not always necessarily wrong to put those things like your commented code out into the public for people to see. They were intended to be a functional, private-facing aspect of the creation process. But if we take that as an analog in something to do with individual family practice or ritual practice that we're looking at,
00:13:45
Speaker
in an archaeological, traditional archaeological context, then we certainly have no problem looking at those things and we look for those things. So the public versus the private and the rights of the developer to privacy in their creation, those are interesting issues. And they're not necessarily issues that we have come up with a good idea of how to deal with yet.
00:14:11
Speaker
And we have to. I mean, going forward, even if you're not working in games with archaeology,
00:14:18
Speaker
I cannot see a future where archaeologists are not going to have to be interacting with digital outputs that were not generated by them. They're going to have to be looking at somebody else's private outputs. And this is already happening, right? I mean, starting to check that it's like, we're already using proprietary software to generate data outcomes and understandings. And this is no different to what we do in games where we use proprietary software to, like, see representations.
Crowdsourcing Ethics in Archaeology
00:14:45
Speaker
And it's like, there's a whole lot of baggage that goes along with that, which I mean, it's okay for us to sit down and take a picture of an artifact, because that person's no longer here to mediate what we do with it in a lot of ways, so it's a lot more straightforward. I mean, obviously there's still governmental controls and ethical concerns as to whether we should or should not do this, especially around things like skeletons and bodies and personal ephemera.
00:15:09
Speaker
But it's like, in games, the person who made this, they might not be identifiable, but they're still here. They're still, I don't know. It's interesting. I guess my question with that is, since we're dealing with built digital environments, like video games, and these makers are still, most of them are still with us,
00:15:33
Speaker
Do we have to follow any kind of ethical guidelines that are set up for contemporary archaeology or archaeology of the recent past? Yes, I think so. I've been looking at
00:15:45
Speaker
because we don't have this in our we don't really have this in our own you can use contemporary archaeology i've been looking to to allied fields to figure out how we should do this i've been looking at how sociologists handle these things and i've been looking at to a degree how
00:16:06
Speaker
media studies are looking at these things. Because some of these fields have been touching these worlds that we're just starting to get our our travels into. They've been doing it longer than us and they have constrictions and guidelines and a canon of practice for what's acceptable and not acceptable.
00:16:32
Speaker
And the difference, of course, is that for the most part, they are all looking at the people as users. Yeah, exactly. The communities of play and not the space within which the community of play exists. So we have to figure out how to get at the material culture of these communities of play in a way that's responsible. And I think it's gonna take practice, honestly, and I'm, as much as I like
00:17:02
Speaker
working out the theoretical of it and writing the ethical codes for it, we do need to have more hands-on
00:17:11
Speaker
trial and error, and there's going to be error. There's going to be places where we mess up. So for me, it's very important that we think about the ways that our ethics fell down in past archeologies to figure out how do we not replicate those mistakes going forward. I think you raised a really interesting point about this, like going beyond reception studies. It's very easy to, I mean, I say it's very easy, broad sweeping statement, but it's like, it's very easy to identify, like,
00:17:40
Speaker
sexism in a representation? Bad. Gender stereotypes? Bad. Racial stereotypes? Bad. And this is like a good ethical representation. What's more difficult, and what I find fascinating about your work, especially with games, is how do we create, as you say, these constructs for assessing the community of practice and the materiality of these things, which is beyond
00:18:03
Speaker
just aesthetically what we see or what we read like it's quite new even within like media studies for example like I mean these things are only just really signed come to the fore now I think we're gonna take a break and when we come back we're gonna talk about an example of what could be considered archaeo gaming but we're on the fence still if it is or not are we?
00:18:30
Speaker
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Global Explorer Project Overview
00:19:20
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to 8-Bit Test Pit. The next section is going to be talking about
00:19:25
Speaker
ethics and gamification within archaeology and video games. One of the newest examples right now is one that was created by Ted Prize winner Sarah Parkhack. It's called Global Explorer and basically what it allows you to do is
00:19:46
Speaker
become a member of the crowd that takes a look at images taken from on high from satellite to see if you can find any evidence of looting. For those of you who are interested in taking a look at this, the URL is in the show notes down below. And it's also a global explorer and that's spelled G-L-O-V-A-L-X.
00:20:07
Speaker
P-L-O-R-E-R dot org, so that you can take a look. It's free to try, free to play, and let's, I think all of us here have actually taken a look at it and have accounts that have played it. Oh boy! And played it, I use loosely. Oh, one thousand! What have you just done so far?
00:20:27
Speaker
You've done a thousand? I've done a thousand and I've done a thousand tiles as well. I have not done a thousand yet which is probably I should have but I'm not gonna lie I got to 200 and I'm always like oh my god. They've reduced the requirement to unlock some of the other stuff that you can do on the platform like looking at encroachment for example you know basically civilization pushing up against antiquities
00:20:51
Speaker
to 250 tiles as opposed to a thousand tiles which unlocks this other area. And right now they're focusing on TU. The UI still says a thousand though, which is a design problem. It is. Yeah, if you're on the mailing list for the thing, they said that they reduced it to 250 but they haven't updated the UI, correct?
00:21:13
Speaker
With Global Explorer, this TED-funded gamified archaeological project, the goal, and there are a few of them, the first goal that quote-unquote players are asked to do is to look at tiles taken from satellite photography and see if there's evidence of any kind of looting going on in the square that you were given.
00:21:36
Speaker
You go through a little tutorial, and you're told, well, this is what looting looks like from space, and this is what looting doesn't look like from space, and you're given some coaching tips. And then you're left here on devices. In play, I've done a thousand tiles so far in anticipation of this episode. And it takes maybe a second or two for your brain to kind of recognize patterns in the landscape, and then you can click a button. Yes, for signs of looting, or no for signs of looting, and then you are brought to the next tile.
00:22:07
Speaker
And I noticed right now this is being focused in Peru for the next six weeks or so before they switch to another country or another environment. I noticed that there appears to be repetition in the tiles that you were given, I guess just to check your work and to see if you're seeing ghosts or if you're seeing something that's real and then other people are also seeing similar tiles as well so that there's kind of a check and balance. Yeah, it gives you sort of a
00:22:36
Speaker
an accuracy score of yourself? Well, it gives you like a like confirmation source. Like how many other people agreed with you on this? Are you in the majority or not? Yeah. So it's like mine was incredibly low, which I take to mean that everyone else was bad and that I'm really good. And they just didn't, I'm kidding. But like, like, I don't know. Can we first discuss whether this is gamified or not? Because I have a problem with that title. It's not exactly Counter Strike, is it?
00:23:05
Speaker
Well, it's not even like, like it's like gamification kind of refers to this idea of taking a ordinary task, whether it's like writing an essay and giving you like waypoints of achievement or some kind of reward to inspire you to like want to do it. Which this is doing. Yeah, but it doesn't do it within the UI and the UI is like, okay, so
00:23:28
Speaker
First of all, I hate gamification, or I hate the term gamification, and what it's applied to usually. I just don't really, like, if you're gonna make a game, make a good game, don't cover broccoli with chocolate, like, you just have the chocolate. Which is kind of what I think about gamified games, like, it's just, it doesn't make any sense to me. But that aside, like, there are some valid ways of gamifying things.
00:23:50
Speaker
This, like, if you want to talk about gamification, the tutorial is like you watch a video for 15 minutes and then you get dropped into yes no questions. And I kind of feel like with this, like, if you were willing to accept that this is a game, then you're also willing to accept.
00:24:05
Speaker
that like answering Google surveys is a game and so far as you get a progress bar towards like a goal which is completion. Right it's task but it's not game. Yeah and so it's like even like the gamification even if I'm willing to accept that they've added levels so it's like at 250 ones you turn to being a traveler or something
00:24:25
Speaker
And then at like 50,000 you turn to being a space archaeologist. It's like kind of like sitting at a customs office checking passports and it's kind of like... Not lately. But not lately. But it's like you kind of just do an arbitrary amount of repetitive tasks. And they did that better in papers, please. Exactly. Papers, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's no feedback on the images. There's no ability to add any information. You're literally just saying like,
00:24:52
Speaker
yes I think there is or no I think there isn't which like it's it's a valuable and interesting task in its own right but I think this idea of like going after it as gamification is like hugely misleading that's the way it's being sold sold to the public or at least and that's what I'm not sure is that the way it's being sold to everyone in the public or is it is this a bubble that we're in where this is how it's being sold
00:25:17
Speaker
to those we associate with in internet spaces in public. Well I think it's kind of following up these like these other great citizen science gamification projects which have kind of been out there for a while and there's a few of them around so you can kind of like have a browse for them but those kind of I mean like I'm thinking of one called Zoo and I think it's called Zoo from memory it's called Zoo but it's like those projects the gamification aspects lead to
00:25:44
Speaker
for the user to get real world rewards or alternatively for them to have access to information in a different way or to collaborate on information. With this it's like there is these great like Peru National Geographic things but they unlock on time, they have nothing to do with the gamification.
00:26:02
Speaker
So that, like, I just have a system. You're not really collaborating in a sense either. No, you're clicking yes or no. It's kind of Manhattan Project-like in that everybody is doing something, but you're not quite sure what everybody else is doing. You know what your job is, but not something elsewhere. Taking a look at the about section, you know, for Global Explorer. It doesn't mention gamification. It doesn't mention game or even fun, you know, in the text. So this may be something that we're applying as, you know, RTO gamers to this.
00:26:30
Speaker
Even though it does have hallmarks, a lot of hallmarks of gamification. Someone somewhere in the process.
00:26:43
Speaker
cut onto the idea of making this a game to advertise to people, at least due to promotional material. Yeah, well it's kind of like the cornerstone of gamification, right? It's like take something which is an inherently boring task, like clicking yes or no as to whether you identify something in an image, and by adding some kind of reward in this case, like getting a badge to say that you've done this 50,000 times, like that's somehow supposed to inspire you.
00:27:09
Speaker
I haven't done it enough yet to know where are these badges? What is the reward system for this? Is it tied into anything? Is it tied into social media? Is there anything if I spend the next two weeks instead of writing my dissertation just looking for this, looking for sites that have been looted, apart from the glow in my own heart, which I would clearly have, what outward facing reward is there?
00:27:39
Speaker
No, there's, there's, there's not that I can tell either. No integration into sort of promotional material, like to self promote yourself as participating in this.
00:27:52
Speaker
You get it on your page. But the page is all internal and you have to sign up and have an account. Exactly. So anyway, I've been quite negative about this, but my negative points are design-based, not the research orientation or what this project is trying to do. I think there are some ethical concerns. The musical project is super noble, you know?
00:28:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's get to that in the next segment. Because I think that whether it's super noble or not is actually something we need to tear into a little bit. Yeah. I think the idea is, I don't know, next section. Gamification, stick with that for now. Are there any other issues of gamification with this or...?
00:28:35
Speaker
beyond the UI. Well I think for me it's this thing where it's like the as an archaeologist I can see immediately the value of this project in terms of like what is the what is the data they're getting out of this how do they use it how do you contribute as a user of this thing like as a player I found it really hard to understand like
00:28:53
Speaker
I'm identifying some different coloured blockages on the ground and I get that. But it's like the ability for your player to have meaningful interaction or meaningful understanding is just completely separated from the action that they're doing.
00:29:07
Speaker
And I kind of, I don't know, like I was thinking from like a design perspective of how we could use gamification more interestingly. So it's like, or how we could use it more intelligently even. So like I got confronted with like literally hundreds of pictures of like fog and trees and random assortments, but I could never like my only options were yes or no. And I'm like,
00:29:29
Speaker
Well, surely it's more interesting to understand what are people seeing here? How can we use this data to do interesting things or train the computer to recognize these patterns or to understand them or to get people to check them? At the moment, it seems to me like it might be going on under the hood, but it seems like a dumb system. It seems like here is a bunch of images and click yes or no. And then if enough people click yes on it, we'll flag it up to let the real people look at it. Yeah.
00:29:59
Speaker
We've seen this done maybe the better effect through the Bridge Museum. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago, they had the Kanaya Form Project where they were looking at fragments of papyrus and then you learned the alphabet a little bit and you learned how to identify letters and you could drag and drop and stuff and then share the things. And you still get badges and I guess there's more active community participants there or something. I'm not quite sure.
00:30:20
Speaker
if there are any kind of other kind of outward facing rewards or anything, but it just seemed to be more fun. Because you're looking at alphabets as opposed to looking at treetops.
00:30:32
Speaker
And this is to kind of go to that thing where it's like, the issue that I have with the gamification on this is that it's dumb gamification. Pure and simple, it's just like, oh, whack us over the top to try and make it more attractive, rather than creating a community of practice or any kind of meaning to it, aside from what the archaeologists get out, which I think then raises some interesting ethical considerations.
00:30:53
Speaker
Let's take a break for a minute and then when we come back let's talk about those ethical considerations and let's talk about what this project means to the archaeological community. Yes. Okay.
00:31:33
Speaker
Now let's get back to the show.
00:31:40
Speaker
Okay, we are back and we are still talking about the gamification issues with crowd sourcing projects. Tara, you had some more feelings. I have a lot of feelings. I mean, I'm going to try to be slightly less ranting now. Otherwise, this will be me talking for a long time. But anyway, so we're talking like a little bit in the break between ourselves about this.
00:32:04
Speaker
like some of the ethical considerations of gamification platforms or of kind of crowdsourcing in general. And I think one of the things that really strikes me about this project is that you're basically saying like, hey people, like space archaeology is really cool. Come look at archaeology, which is also really cool. And like click yes and no on pictures so we can find where looting is. And then like the project might go somewhere in the future with this and might make it much more evident what they're doing.
00:32:29
Speaker
But then that's it. As a user, that's the extent of it. You get cut off at that point. You've been used and abused. You've created the data. And there's an issue of expertise in this that you're good enough to, as the casual user, you're good enough to identify this and to provide the baseline data.
Concerns and Critiques of Crowdsourcing
00:32:47
Speaker
But you're not privy to how it's going to be analyzed. You're not privy to what's going to be done with the information. Or even what is the larger action
00:32:59
Speaker
of what's going to happen with your clicking yes or no. And you're not going to be credited. The platform might be credited thanks to the users for creating the data, but you are not going to do it. There's like 29,000 active users on Global Explorer when I checked, so that's a lot of people to credit.
00:33:19
Speaker
And I'm not saying the credit's bad, you know? Being acknowledged is a good thing. It's just a ton of us right now. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, but this is kind of like a wider issue with crowdsourcing, right? With an archaeology. That it's like, I don't necessarily think that there's an ethical responsibility to credit every single person. I do. But I think it, we can talk about that. But I think that there's a, I think that there's a, there's a tension, an ethical tension with how we deal with this. And we've like, we've done this a lot in the past about kind of like,
00:33:49
Speaker
want to say like masquerading around being like, it's for the good of everyone, like archaeology is in everyone's interests, therefore you're helping humanity, but what we're actually doing is serving someone's like distinct research interests, and in this case it's evident who that person is. Now that's not necessarily
00:34:05
Speaker
wrong, or bad. But I think that there's an ethical responsibility to state what those aims are, rather than just backhanding it and saying like, you, the user, are helping to manifest humanity. Which is, I don't know, it's this like idealistic utopia which isn't
00:34:23
Speaker
Sounds better than the alternative. So my issue with crowdsourcing this sort of thing is that it's a replication of a systemic problem that we had already. And the systemic problem was that there were not enough, quote unquote, educated archaeologists. There were not enough people to be in charge.
00:34:44
Speaker
and analyzing the data. Or rather, there were a finite number of them, but there weren't enough people to just do everything else. So you go into the field and you bring students and you use students for labor. And students are rarely involved in the writing up process or the actual analysis. They're involved in the rote physical labor. And I'm not denigrating the physical aspects of archaeology or how important
00:35:12
Speaker
the on the ground processes. I was in field archaeology for over 10 years. I get that it's hard and I get that it takes skill and I can tell you the difference between someone who is good at excavation and someone who is not. But students are frequently misused in this way. Indigenous labor is frequently misused in this way. We go into countries and we hire big crews of people and sometimes we pay them well. Most of the time we don't. It's generally
00:35:41
Speaker
their land or their area of cultural patrimony. And we have not until very recently been very good about integrating them into the research process or asking what they cared about or whether they thought we should be doing this at all. And we're doing the same thing now with crowdsourcing. We're saying all of you out there, all of you 31,000 people, you are good enough to look at this stuff, to look at these images and identify if something's being looted.
00:36:10
Speaker
but we don't think your expertise is enough to put you into the next level of knowledge production. And this is what I was talking about with the gamification, which is that the level which people are operating at is literally, yes, no. And then they kind of like take an average of our responses. You're not actually contributing, like you're not tagging or saying what you think we're doing anything. And like, and this is getting very like post-prosessional. It's like not necessarily that everyone needs a voice, but how do you make meaningful contribution?
00:36:38
Speaker
Okay, that aside, I'm gonna box that for a minute. What are you doing, Rox? Bury it way down deep. But I think that there's another question, or another interesting point that Megan's brought up, which is about the coloniality of this. So it's like... Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Andrew. No, I mean, we might be making assumptions there with the coloniality-ness of what's going on. We don't know what the next level up is. We don't know if everybody on the planet is clicking on Peru,
00:37:05
Speaker
if that the data for Peru goes to Peruvian archaeologists as the next step. But it's not being, the initial level of data collection is not being done by Peruvians, it's being done by us. And I have dug in Peru, but I still don't feel like I should be making all the decisions about what's going on with this data set.
00:37:29
Speaker
Yeah, and this is like kind of when I was playing I was thinking about it. Like I worked out in Egypt and we had a lot of looting and digging problems out there. And it was like for us to go around and have this kind of idea that it's like we know where sites are because we use space archaeology and we know where looting happens because we use space archaeology. It's not that it demeans the knowledge on the ground but it ignores it.
00:37:52
Speaker
And privileges architecture and physical above ground material remains more than, I mean, there's no landscape archeology in this whatsoever. But, but I mean, like, I don't know about that. I mean, you know, we're looking at pattern recognition here, which is independent of everything else. We can recognize patterns and this gives us something to look at, you know, at the next stage and.
00:38:16
Speaker
It is part of the landscape and it's not giving priority to built environments. It's basically looking at stuff from the top down and seeing if there are human-made patterns that perhaps shouldn't be in the landscape and then those could vet it next.
00:38:31
Speaker
Absolutely, but it does have a very specific set of things that it looks at, like, for example, where I was working out in Feiyum was like, surface scatter, complete surface scatter, there's no built environment, there is no touch landscape, like there's still looting that happens there, but it's like, you can identify that, but it does have very particular privileges and I think that
00:38:52
Speaker
to kind of like go back to the ethics of this thing, it's like that the coloniality, I mean, like, this project has very specific research aims. And it's not that the way that approaches it is wrong. It's the fact that I think, well, for me, the part of the problem is that it makes it seem like this is the way and like the future and the kind of like, this is how we identify looting, this is how we make things better. And it kind of doesn't really fit in with a lot of the stuff on the ground.
00:39:19
Speaker
uh... it doesn't it doesn't mean you're sure there's high you want to have high because you want to have people come and play even if they only do a thousand files as a thousand files that would have been ordinarily done by by somebody else so so that's one thing uh... the uh... uh... i was gonna say something else that was going to be good uh... i forgot what it is oh
00:39:44
Speaker
Professor Parkak was doing this before the Ted Prize, and this is one of the reasons why she got it, is because she was having so much success rates, specifically in Egypt, and looking at photos and being able to identify sites and identify looting, and it seemed to be enough of a problem or a solution to a big enough problem.
00:40:02
Speaker
that didn't require a lot of overhead. I mean, if you had access to a satellite with a camera, you can see this stuff and she was getting results. But here's my problem with that. This doesn't prevent looting in any way. We're looking at the post. It doesn't prevent it, but it allows us to kind of track it. And I think that's what's maybe the difference here is that we're not preventing looting.
00:40:27
Speaker
per se, by participating. But what we are able to do is identify sites. And if we can identify sites, then we can potentially look at patterns of looting behavior in these particular countries or regions and see where we can go from there. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I will yell and scream that this isn't preventing looting, but we're not preventing it any other way right now. And I don't think it has to prevent looting.
00:40:54
Speaker
But for me, I would like to see, I would like to see, and we're not going to get into the money aspects of this very much, but I would like to see big funded projects not being after the fact dealing with antiquities trading.
00:41:13
Speaker
and trafficking. I would like to see these projects being done upfront as preventative. And there's a lot of people who have worked on a lot of stuff that shows us what we need to be doing in terms of preventative, in terms of ending the markets and ending demand. And this project feels like it's
00:41:33
Speaker
It's after the fact. It's after the, after the bad stuff has happened, then we're going to tell you where it happened, but we're not going to know anything about what was actually still in, on the site. We're not going to know anything about anything related to it. And if you're the public, you're not going to know anything at all because you're not privileged to that information. Yeah. And again, like, like I totally agree with you, but I just like, I kind of have this thing in my head that I do at the core like the project and I think it's doing some good stuff, but I just think that it needs to.
00:42:05
Speaker
I guess reframe itself and be more, not honest, that's the wrong term, but like more upfront with how it's doing it and what it's doing for it to be, it just jars with me is my thing, especially from a like interactive design perspective currently. No. I guess my closing thought here is thinking about next steps because you know, everything is iterative.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah. So what's next? And maybe one of the things I would love to know the time and date stamps of the satellite photographs where they take them last week, last month, last year, because what you could do is actually use this as a preventative measure for looting if one day somebody says, oh, here's a looting image. And then the next team up says, yeah, you're right.
00:42:48
Speaker
And then they can deploy, you know, local law enforcement or archaeologists or something like that to that area within a day or so, you know, to see what happened, what was there and maybe stake it out and see if leaders come back the next day or something.
00:43:00
Speaker
So having something appear in the landscape that is evidence of looting does allow the archaeologists in combination with local law enforcement to go out and see what happened or what's happening and conceivably potentially put a stop to whatever's going on. If the looters there one night, they'll probably come back.
00:43:21
Speaker
And so knowing time sensitivity of this, I think would be helpful and potentially offer something that is more of immediate use to preserve a cultural heritage.
00:43:33
Speaker
And I think the thing with that is that that data is probably all actually in the meta header already of these satellite images. It's just us as the public can't see it. And like this kind of goes back to this thing where it's like, I don't know, like dressing up what you're like, literally what you're doing is identifying or like yes or no, what do you think? And that's the extent of your interaction here.
00:43:52
Speaker
And the problem which I see is that, I mean, I'm an archaeologist, so it's kind of like, I want to know what data is being collected, how this is filtering, how this is going to be enacted and changed. And that's very vague, like the, there's no explicit kind of thing put out by this other than like, you'll identify looting and that will help us and humanity. And like, that's a very noble and broad aim, but
00:44:15
Speaker
i don't know i struggle to reconcile the interactive design with the ethical considerations of what you're actually getting people to do which is basically like free labor free labor yeah with how you're going to use that data which is to answer your own specific research questions i don't know i don't know man i want to be really enthusiastic about it so do i i'm just having a hard time we're just grumpy academics yeah i think that one
00:44:42
Speaker
I could make a statement for everybody. I think what we can take away from this is that we do not have good standards yet on deciding what is acceptable and unacceptable for intensely digital practice this way. This is digital practice that has ramifications in the real world, but which is for the average user entirely
00:45:07
Speaker
Internet based and we just don't have a framework yet for what that's supposed to look like for us as users or what it's supposed to look like for us as researchers. Yeah, if you look at and I know that the archaeologists many of them involved in this project and they are
00:45:24
Speaker
in professional societies with codes of conduct, and the codes of conduct simply do not have anything to do with this project or their research. Yeah. And that's not their fault. And, you know, full disclosure, I'm on an ethics committee for one of the major societies, this is something we have to deal with. Yeah, I think that's it. The fact that we're being so critical is a good indication that it's like, we don't really actually know
Future of Digital Archaeology
00:45:48
Speaker
what is like,
00:45:49
Speaker
acceptable or not or ethical or not and so we do need to be I mean like you need to always be critically thinking right about these things but I think having frank and open discussions rather than just riding the hype train of like choo-choo awesome but project like this they they contribute to building a canon yeah of a practice and we have to have that in order to do better yeah that that's the big thing I would want people to take away from this this whole enterprise
00:46:18
Speaker
This is true. To add on to that, one of the things that we should be asking for for any project like this is what their publication plan is. Are they planning on publishing the data? Are they planning on doing white papers and stuff? Because that's going to really help us answer these kinds of questions that's kind of meta surrounding the
00:46:38
Speaker
uh, the project itself or projects like this. And for me, apart from the purely scholarly publications, I want to know how are they planning on conveying this to the public that is providing them the data. Exactly. Exactly. What are, how are we going to see this reflected in a way that someone who does not have a doctoral level education could be participating in this and doing really, really well? Because like you said, it's pattern recognition, it's skills-based.
00:47:07
Speaker
none of those things are things you have to have higher education for. What is that person gonna get from this as far as understanding how they contributed? Yeah. Yeah. So that all was incredibly depressing and we're really sorry. It was pretty cool. It wasn't depressing. It was like...
00:47:28
Speaker
Welcome to my days studying archaeological ethics. PhD life. Go on like day-long rants. This is PhD life. Yeah, this is what it's like. University of York. Except usually with coffee. Yeah. I need to send you a light box. I have one. That's a little sad. I got one very soon after I moved here.
00:47:49
Speaker
All right, so we're gonna go ahead and say our goodbyes now and we will see you next time. Yes All right, say goodbye kids
00:48:18
Speaker
If you like what you've heard, subscribe and share us with your social network. 8-Bit Test Pit is available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, or online at the Archaeology Podcast Network site. Be sure to comment and give us a like wherever you listen, and consider donating to the show and the network on our website, archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:48:44
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and edited by Chris Sims. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com
00:49:07
Speaker
If you like this podcast, you might be interested in other podcasts that focus on the humanities. In fact, if you search Twitter for the hashtag Humanities Podcasts, you'll find plenty of shows on history, language, literature, philosophy, art, and more.
00:49:24
Speaker
These are podcasts by people who enjoy telling stories, exploring the arts in our world, and who want to share their knowledge. Some examples of podcasts you'll find are Go Dig a Hole, an archaeology podcast, the Trojan War podcast, which retells the classic myth, and As We Like It, where three friends talk about film adaptions of Shakespeare.
00:49:45
Speaker
Search the hashtag Humanities Podcast today or follow Humanities Podcasters on Twitter. And if you're a Humanities Podcaster, use the hashtag in your tweets so others can find you.