It had to happen eventually.<\/p>\n
When I named this site, I was kind of groping for words, and stumbled on a phrase that seemed to capture this whole timelapse photocollage thing: “Graffiti Archaeology”. It seemed like a good fit, since it conveyed a sense of history, study, and attention to detail. And I felt the work I was doing was at least analogous<\/i> to the most well-known aspect of what archaeologists do: carefully removing newer layers of stuff to reveal the older stuff underneath, and studying it. I did wonder, though, what real archaeologists would think of the project. Would they scoff, or would they gush, or would they engage critically with the idea?<\/p>\n
The answer, apparently, is all of the above.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I got a wonderful email from Sarah May, a contemporary archaeologist working for English Heritage<\/a>. Her field of study, she wrote, was railway lines, and our site had inspired her to start documenting graffiti as well. I asked her what her specific interest was, and she wrote “My interest in railways is rubbish.” I thought that was awfully self-effacing of her, until I read on and realized she was being literal. “The distinctive nature of rubbish on railways, its distribution patterns and what these things tell us about railways as place and non-places. Yes archaeologists are odd.” Odd indeed, but my kind of odd!<\/p>\n Today, Alun<\/a>, a Phd student specializing in archaeoastronomy, brought a different perspective. He critiqued our site for its lack of discussion and evaluation, saying that without that, it can’t be true archaeology. (Others don’t seem as bothered by this: Alexandra Mack<\/a>, an anthropologist, thinks it’s a fair term, and Savage Minds<\/a> agrees.)<\/p>\n Alun’s critique highlights what’s currently missing from the site: a way for us to add metadata to our layers, beyond just place names and dates. Utimately I’d like the photocollages to act as a foundation on which to build all kinds of narratives: for example, the story of one writer’s career, told chronologically by jumping from spot to spot; or the story of an epic battle between crews; or just the story of what it was like the night a certain piece got painted.<\/p>\n This is something we’ve always intended for the site, but it’s not a simple task and we haven’t had time to do a proper job of it. In the meantime, various threads of narrative are spinning into existence over in our Flickr group<\/a>. I hope some day soon we can weave it all together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It had to happen eventually. When I named this site, I was kind of groping for words, and stumbled on a phrase that seemed to capture this whole timelapse photocollage thing: “Graffiti Archaeology”. It seemed like a good fit, since it conveyed a sense of history, study, and attention to detail. And I felt the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grafarc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}