Today was the day for the keynotes for the Public Archaeology Twitter Conference; the main papers unroll tomorrow, so set your Twitters to #PATC and enjoy! This conference I think might well be one of those landmark conferences we discuss in years to come.
For convenience, I’ve copied my keynote tweets below.
1 For the longest time there was a theory current that I, Shawn, was not actually a real person but a bot https://t.co/bwGvRmjsv1 #patc 1/25
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
2. Bots have long been on the web. In 2005, Wired was telling us how to buy our own pokerbots for fun &profit https://t.co/xaCECvXA2v.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
3. & let’s not even broach the bots tweet for political partisan purposes. Not as recent as you might think – https://t.co/9xtffauxna
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
4. No, I want to know how you can tell if I’m a real human or not. Let’s run myself, & bots @tinyarchae & @glitcharchaeo through Bot or Not.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
5. Or just click on these links https://t.co/pQ5Hz5ehXQ https://t.co/Es0RWpbBGh https://t.co/AUs58AgwUd
I may well be a bot.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
6. To a bot-detecting algorithm, my performance on twitter makes it 1 in 4 that I’m a bot. @Tinyarchae has 1 in 3 chance of being a bot.Hmm. pic.twitter.com/wJjqgco1xP
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
7 And @archaeoglitch has 1 in 5 chance. P’haps I am a bot after all. Or maybe, performing here means we take on algorithmic characteristics? pic.twitter.com/GibiLgmQvm
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
8 So what does this mean for public archae on twitter? We talk about twitter as 1 of many kinds of socnets, in digital platform sense.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
9 Network’ describes a system of relationships; but a better word is ‘meshwork’ in Tim Ingold’s sense: lines that parallel, intertwine
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
10 Meshworks are defined by knots; knots leave loose ends. Lines in this case are our own lives,each tweet p’haps a knot in larger meshworks
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
11 a knot tying us together through the digital aether, whether we react to it, view it, click on it, respond to it, reflect on it
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
12 in which case it doesn’t matter if the agency behind the tweet is human or algorithmic. We respond to the tweets, and they respond to us.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
13 We _correspond_. Co – respond. We go along together.
This isn’t ‘interactivity’. Consider Ingold’s kite flyer, the kite, and the air.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
14 ‘It is not that you need air to interact with a kite; rather you need a kite to correspond with the air’.
So,Tweeter – tweet – platform> pic.twitter.com/kL55UcZdJT— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
15 It’s not that you need the platform to interact with a tweet; you need the tweet to correspond with the platform
(Ron & Harry: fail) pic.twitter.com/1qAdWB36BK
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
16 That is to say, we are changed in particular ways by our interactions with twitter.
We are made bot like and algorithmic. pic.twitter.com/CyhUWyLOif
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
17 so let us use this idea to turn tweeps into archaes & put bots into human context. Here's source for @tinyarchae https://t.co/v8CI3JV4ez
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
18 It’s a jumble of json, keys & values. I use tracery.io. The code is a layering of intentions and knots, cuts & fills of semantic spaces
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
19 surface is what you see as a tweet, so natural soil, as it were, has to be the ‘origin’ point that specifies all which can be created.
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
20 nice thing about the tracery.io editor, is that it takes the .json that drives everything, and lays it out *like a section drawing* (ish) pic.twitter.com/sDdHzhGKsv
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
21 then it’s just a matter of figuring out what counts as a cut, and what counts as a fill, and where the natural is versus the top… pic.twitter.com/RQjvTfViHY
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
22 & its harris matrix looks like this. So if I can go from generative procedural grammar to some output mediated as section & matrix, pic.twitter.com/YGGgxokM2H
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
23 I can take a *real world* site & reverse engineer to its procedural grammar. & I can get a bot to perform it & you will correspond to it. pic.twitter.com/gukqNrjjDV
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
24 twitter is fundamentally correspondences through time. It’s not just humans here. The act of corresponding changes us algorithmically
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
25 so final q to you: how does this human-bot meshwork change public archae? Is archae fundamentally algorithmic?
Are we all archaeo-bots? pic.twitter.com/N8lHxbpD5G
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
….thank you; have a nice day. Right, @tinyarchae?
Thanks also to @lornarichardson @clmorgan @ekansa & @adreinhard #patc #keynote2 #out!
— Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) April 27, 2017
…and if you’re wondering why the featured image (and final image) are shots from the tv adaptation of ‘Going Postal’, by Terry Pratchett, see this.
