Publications by Costis (Konstantinos) Dallas
Semiotics and Visual Communication IV: Myths of Today, Jul 10, 2024
The rising global importance of social networking sites (SNS) transforms them into a relevant new... more The rising global importance of social networking sites (SNS) transforms them into a relevant new theatre for negotiating and constructing perceptions of reality. Aiming to bridge the material-semiotic divide, this study harkens back to Lotman’s semiosphere theory and Gell’s theory of the art nexus to shed light on fundamental mechanisms of SNS interaction involving human and non-human actors and communities holding different norms, perceptions, and presuppositions. It asks: How are messages and meanings created, shared and translated in communication involving diverse points of view on social networking sites? How does semiotic agency circulate between human and non-human entities (messages, their authors and readers, other affected bodies, as well as underlying norms, perceptions and presuppositions) involved in SNS communication? How could communication on social network sites be formally represented to account for processes of semiotic translation and distribution of agency between human and non-human actors in actual SNS interactions? To address these questions, it uses as case study an SNS conversation on the removal of a public monument to a controversial author of the Soviet period in contemporary Lithuania. It applies the Connective ontology, a formal conceptual domain model of SNS communication, to represent interactions between users in this conversation as a process of semiotic translation involving opposing semiospheres with very different assumptions of what is real, what is important, and what is right. It illustrates how key ontology entities can serve to represent the circulation of meanings in an SNS conversation and the role of semiospheres in blocking interpretations and catalysing meaning-making. Following Gell, it elaborates a conceptualisation of SNS interactions as a communicative nexus, involving authors, indexes, prototypes, and recipients in binary relationships where semiotic agency circulates between them in a process of recursive abduction, demonstrating how agents of meaning involve not just human but also non-human actors in situated contexts of SNS interaction that are affected by and have implications across a blended, virtual-physical reality.
International Perspectives on Museum Management, 2024
The recent explosion of social media and data analytics provides museums with new challenges and ... more The recent explosion of social media and data analytics provides museums with new challenges and opportunities to develop enhanced knowledge and establish more effective strategies for visitor relationship management and service quality. In this chapter, we introduce a methodological framework and applied case study demonstrating how museums can establish an evidence-based quality evaluation process, based on a systematic analysis of large-scale visitor responses in online social media platforms, and use it to improve the quality of their offering to local and global communities. We introduce MUSEQUAL, a five-dimensional model for museum quality assessment, extending the HOTELQUAL standard for quality evaluation in the hospitality sector, and show how it can leverage an analysis of social media content extracted from TripAdvisor and Facebook to provide evidence-based insights for improving museum service provision in the dimensions of Display, Subject matter, Facilities, Services and Staff. Based on this model, we present, firstly, an automated analysis of several thousand user comments on TripAdvisor from three European museums using software and, secondly, a qualitative data analysis of visitor reviews of these museums on Facebook. Finally, on the basis of a critical summary of findings, we identify challenges and offer guidance on how such an approach may be used by museum professionals without specialised training in complex research methods and tools, to conduct a practical evaluation of complementary dimensions of museum provision, pointing to potential improvements in different aspects of museum work.
New Media & Society, Sep 29, 2022
Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested an... more Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested and dissonant heritage, on the heritage of excluded and subaltern groups, and on the heritage of collective traumatic past events. Situated at the intersection between heritage studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, social media studies and digital heritage studies, a growing body of scholarly literature has been emerging in the past 10 years, addressing online communication practices on SNS. This study, an integrative review of a comprehensive corpus of 80 scholarly works about difficult heritage on SNS, identifies the profile of authors contributing to this emerging area of research, the increasing frequency of publication after 2017, the prevalence of qualitative research methods, the global geographic dispersion of heritage addressed, and the emergence of common themes and concepts derived mostly from the authors ‘home’ fields of memory studies, heritage studies and (digital) medi...
SAGE Open, 2023
This study presents the construction and validation of a formal conceptual model, or domain ontol... more This study presents the construction and validation of a formal conceptual model, or domain ontology, useful for the formal representation and analysis of conversations on heritage, memory and identity (HMI) on social network sites (SNS), of interviews with participants in such conversations, and of scholarly works engaging with such phenomena. The ontology provides for the first time a conceptual framework for HM interactions on SNS addressing the semiotic and discursive nature of such interactions in the context of cultural-historical activity theory and semiosphere theory. Part of the Connective Digital Memory in the Borderlands research project, it is developed using an evidence-based knowledge elicitation and domain modeling approach. The study presents the three components of the ontology: an event-centric core conceptual model, an inductively derived concept taxonomy, and a meta-theoretical conceptual scheme, based on a combination of conceptual analysis and lexical analysis ...
The emergence of online social networks such as Facebook provide new opportunities for communicat... more The emergence of online social networks such as Facebook provide new opportunities for communication between archaeologists, and between archaeologists and communities. In this study, we used qualitative text analysis and conceptual metaphor analysis of conversations with eleven European archaeological Facebook site administrators to understand their motivations and ideas. We found that altruistic motivations coexist with emotional, career, and social capital expectations, that pseudo-archaeology and political weaponization of archaeology are major concerns, and that participants' conception of themselves and the archaeological Facebook sites they manage are based on multiple conceptual metaphors, revealing different, deliberative vs. agonistic, conceptions of social media community interaction, while top-down metaphors are contested by participatory, bottom-up metaphors, pointing to important dilemmas for the poetics and politics of contemporary public archaeology.
This paper presents a biographical account of a second generation computing archaeologist’s engag... more This paper presents a biographical account of a second generation computing archaeologist’s engagement with seminal methodological and theoretical perspectives of arcaheological computing. On this basis, it advances the view that the seminal work of archaeological computing pioneers such as Spaulding, Gardin and Clarke in the field of artefact description and typology, and the complex and fluid insights it created on the emerging nature of archaeological knowledge, remains an essential source of intellectual stimulus for the development of adequate conceptual representation models of material culture.
the context of digital infrastructures for knowledge and communication in the cultural heritage disciplines, as shown from current research digital heritage projects.
Archival Science, 2016
This paper advocates the necessity of developing a pragmatic alternative to the dominant custodia... more This paper advocates the necessity of developing a pragmatic alternative to the dominant custodial theorization of digital curation as an "umbrella concept for digital preservation, data curation, electronic records, and digital asset management". Starting from a historical account and an examination of prevalent definitions, it points to the current dependence of digital curation on a prescriptive approach rooted in its cognate field of digital preservation, and aiming to serve the needs of professional stewardship. It demonstrates the disconnect of this theorization with the rich historical traditions of museum curatorship where the notion of curation originated, and its inability to act as a framework for understanding the diversity and pervasiveness of contemporary digital curation practices "in the wild" (such as content curation, personal archiving, and pro-am digitization), and its dependence on a "wild frontier" ideology dissonant with contemporary critical cultural heritage scholarship. The alternative, pragmatic approach proposed views digital curation as a "contact zone" practice, routinely performed by a broad range of actors including researchers, artists, users and communities, on dynamically evolving objects, domain knowledge representations and interactions, beyond the curation lifecycle prescribed for custodial environments. On this basis, it calls for a formal re-conceptualization of digital curation, adequate knowledge representation of its objects, evidence-based research on curation practices, and establishment of curation-enabled digital infrastructures suitable for curation in the continuum. Reaching beyond a custodial view, this approach aims to establish digital curation as a field of intellectual inquiry relevant to emerging pervasive curation practices in the digital environment.
… on Information and Communication Technologies in …
Digital curation emerged as an important new concept in the theory and management of cultural inf... more Digital curation emerged as an important new concept in the theory and management of cultural information, not least because of its broad applicability and promise of a universal approach to ensure future “fitness for purpose” of digital information. This paper explores curatorial traditions in the field of museums and cultural heritage, in order to contribute to the active current debate on the nature, scope and methods of digital curation. It uses an approach inspired by cultural-historical activity theory in order, firstly, to understand current digital curation practice, its achievements and limitations; secondly, to explore key activities in the cultural heritage field, i.e., knowledge production in archaeological fieldwork and publication, museum curation, and meaning interaction in exhibition visitor experience. On account of these insights, it concludes that, in order to ensure the declared objective of future “fitness for purpose”, and avoid the risk of epistemic failure, more effort should be dedicated by the digital curation community on developing adequate knowledge representation of digital information in specific epistemic and pragmatic contexts; that an agency-based approach, using event-centric approaches to represent knowledge on the content and context of information, would be particularly useful in some application domains; and that formal methods to curation lifecycle based on belief change and ontology evolution could also be used in modelling the co-evolution of the epistemic content and context of curated knowledge.
Open Archaeology, 2021
Archaeological practice is increasingly enacted within pervasive and invisible digital infrastruc... more Archaeological practice is increasingly enacted within pervasive and invisible digital infrastructures, tools, and services that affect how participants engage in learning and fieldwork, and how evidence, knowledge, and expertise are produced. This article discusses the collective imaginings regarding the present and future of digital archaeological practice held by researchers working in two archaeological projects in the Eastern Mediterranean, who have normalized the use of digital tools and the adoption of digital processes in their studies. It is a part of E-CURATORS, a research project investigating how archaeologists in multiple contexts and settings incorporate pervasive digital technologies in their studies. Based on an analysis of qualitative interviews, we interpret the arguments advanced by study participants on aspects of digital work, learning, and expertise. We find that, in their sayings, participants not only characterize digital tools and workflows as having positiv...
This paper presents Jean-Claude Gardin’s distinctive approach to archaeological data, representat... more This paper presents Jean-Claude Gardin’s distinctive approach to archaeological data, representation and knowledge in the context of his early engagement with semiotics and structural semantics and his grounding in fields as diverse as documentation, classification theory, material culture studies, argumentation theory and the philosophy of the human sciences. Pointing at Gardin’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the promises of automated classification and machine reasoning in archaeology, it shows that his approach goes beyond a normative, positivist conception of archaeological research, recognizing the contextual, theory-laden nature of archaeological data constitution, the priority of focusing on actual archaeological interpretation practices and the complementarity between narrative and formal representations of archaeological reasoning. It connects his early development of archaeological descriptive and typological metalanguages with his later elaboration of a theoretically informed approach to archaeological argumentation, analysis and publication, situates his logicist programme as a relevant contribution to the development of an archaeological “theory of practice”, grounded on reflexivity and modesty vis-à-vis the possibility of knowledge and the limits of scientism, and highlights aspects of Gardin’s work that point to potentially fruitful directions for contemporary research and practice in the field of archaeological informatics and digital humanities communication.
Open Archaeology, 2016
I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation... more I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making, as a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence, as exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the screen” in a variety of archaeological situations, I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. Its potential value is in helping establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agency-oriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.
This multi-authored report summarizes the results from a transnational questionnaire survey condu... more This multi-authored report summarizes the results from a transnational questionnaire survey conducted in 2015 by a research team within the DARIAH-EU Digital Methods and Practices Observatory Working Group (DiMPO). The Introduction offers a background to the study in the context of digital humanities work and scholarly practices research. Chapter 1 introduces the methodology, methods, and research design of the study. Chapter 2 presents and discusses the descriptive statistical results of analysing the full dataset of 2,177 valid responses of researchers who reside in Europe and identify one of the human sciences as their primary discipline. It summarises respondent profiles, and findings related to use of research materials and digital access, digitally-enabled scholarly activities, methods and tools, digital publication and dissemination of research results, use of software and services, and respondent assessment of digital needs. Chapters 3 to 9 present a similar analysis for respondents from European countries that have yielded more than 100 valid responses, in the form of national profiles for Austria (Chapter 3), Finland (Chapter 4), Greece (Chapter 5), Lithuania (Chapter 6), Poland (Chapter 7), Serbia (Chapter 8), and Switzerland (Chapter 9). Finally, the study questionnaire is included as an Appendix. The report will hopefully provide a useful baseline for further, timely longitudinal research on the shifting practices and needs of European digitally-enabled researchers in the human sciences.
Digit. Humanit. Q., 2020
This paper presents a multicase study protocol for meta-research in Digital Humanities, prepared ... more This paper presents a multicase study protocol for meta-research in Digital Humanities, prepared by Digital Methods and Practices Observatory (DiMPO) Working Group of the Digital Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities in Europe (DARIAH). The protocol is intended to help researchers in conducting meta-research and adopting this methodology for different purposes, disciplines and approaches. As many of the issues raised here are already covered in manuals for social research, our focus is the specificity of meta-research in the DH environment. The specificity of DH in this respect relies on an intrinsic challenge of bringing together generally undertheorised approaches of the humanities with very formal and process-driven ICT approaches. The main assumption behind this research is that a meaningful change in scholarly practices is taking place and is worth investigating. Moreover, a full assessment of this transformation should not focus exclusively on pioneering research, but rat...
Archaeology and the Information Age, Jan 1, 1992
Computer applications and …, Jan 1, 1992
Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities might appear a recent phenomenon. Yet almost seventy years have gone by since ... more Digital Humanities might appear a recent phenomenon. Yet almost seventy years have gone by since Father Roberto Busa initiated his Digital Humanities project: the computer-assisted lemmatization of the complete Thomistic corpus (http://www.corpusthomisti-cum.org/). Although Busa first conceived of this project in 1946, it took him nearly four decades to realize it; leveraging the power of the digital computer as an ordering machine capable of processing and listing potentially infinite amounts of textual data. The development of the first computational analysis of archaeological materials, a numerical classification of Eurasian Bronze axes conducted by Jean-Claude Gardin and Peter Ihm in the late 1950s (Cowgill 1967; Huggett 2013) introduced a different aspect of computer-based research: one that brought to the fore the possibilities afforded by digital methods for dimension reduction, discovery and visualization of latent structures of complex data. Fast-forwarding to the present day, two surprisingly distinct communities have already emerged in digital arts and humanities research. On the one hand, Digital Humanities, at least until very recently, appeared preoccupied with transforming the traditions of text-based humanities computing, drawn directly from library collections and scholarly practice. Digital Heritage, on the other hand, has drawn more from theories and practices in digital archaeology and the digital representation of material culture but has often gained attention for its adoption of cutting-edge visualization and virtual reality technology. While driven by the traditions of custodian institutions such as museums, galleries, libraries, and archives and special collections, Digital Heritage leverages the capabilities of contemporary technologies in visualizing and representing cultural objects beyond text, and occasionally borrows ideas from the entertainment industry...
…there are two kinds of scientists -physicists … and stamp collectors.
Archives and Museum Informatics, 1997
Internet Archaeology, the new peer-reviewed electronic journal published by a consortium of Unite... more Internet Archaeology, the new peer-reviewed electronic journal published by a consortium of United Kingdom-based academic departments and organisations 1 attempts to break free of the limitations of print by providing its "readers" with an enhanced way of exploring archaeological data and argument. In doing so, it offers an intriguing glimpse of the potential of electronic media for scholarly publication, while at the same time raising a number of important questions about their role and modus operandi.
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Publications by Costis (Konstantinos) Dallas
the context of digital infrastructures for knowledge and communication in the cultural heritage disciplines, as shown from current research digital heritage projects.
the context of digital infrastructures for knowledge and communication in the cultural heritage disciplines, as shown from current research digital heritage projects.
Winckelmann, Worsaae and Thomsen – an objectual epistemic practice not an act of display. Viewed as information objects, archaeological visualizations gather elements from different layers of the interpetation ladder, from captured traits of sense data to middle-range theories, and act as boundary objects between compilations and explanations, J.-C. Gardin’s two kinds of archaeological constructs.
The emergence of pervasive digital curation practice in archaeology is manifested in the increasing colonization of archaeological work by ubiquitous mobile devices, global networked infrastructures, and an expanded digital sensorium for capturing the archaeological record. Its advent brings about new forms of archaeological visualization and marginalizes others. But, given the interactive potential of digital objects, and the rising overlap between data collection and interpretation in digital archaeological work, it also calls for a turn from conceiving archaeological visualizations and associated (meta- , para-)data as ‘actuarial records’ of what the sensor saw to understanding them as ‘epistemic contracts’ for scholarly knowledge and cultural meaning-making. I will outline this theorization of archaeological visualization and assess its implications on the construction of archaeological data models and metadata schemas, as well as on their affordances for research, scholarly communication and public interpretation.
The DCI is calling for applications for a one-year funded Fellowship in the broader area of sustainability and curation. Applications are due by March 31, 2020. We are seeking a curious individual who pursues creative friction and synergies across disciplinary boundaries, especially those between the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering, design, computing and technology.
Submission instructions to the Special Issue are available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=ycah20. For any queries contact the Special Issue editors, costis.dallas@utoronto.ca or ingrid.kelps@gmail.com.
-EU, CARARE, LoCloud, Europeana Cloud and ARIADNE projects, I argue that requirements for digital curatorship call for a radical rethinking on how knowledge objects are represented, curated and managed in cultural information systems such as scholarly e-repositories, museum digital collections and cultural heritage metadata aggregators, on the basis of onto-epistemological considerations that heed their culturally contingent, agency oriented, and dynamic nature. In this context, I present aspects of recent curation-aware cultural information systems, and I examine critically some emerging issues for future work.
The session is organised by the COST Action “Archaeological practices and knowledge work in the digital environment” (http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA15201).
To propose a presentation, submit an abstract of max. 300 words using the conference system at https://www.klinkhamergroup.com/eaa2017/sessions/contribution no later than March 15, 2017.
More information on the session in the link.
The symposium brought together leading international theorists from Canada, the United States and Europe, in order to probe the nature and significance of fundamental changes in the human sensorium which shape and are shaped by technological mediation in a globalised world. Taking stock of the seminal insights of McLuhan, Ong and Carpenter, it sought to establish fruitful multidisciplinary dialogues with intellectual traditions as diverse as semiotics, memory studies, the phenomenology of perception, the new epistemologies of affect, the anthropology of material culture, and the philosophy of information and media, in order to account for the intriguing range of emerging socio-cultural practices based on technology-enhanced extensions of human experience, situated on embodiment, multisensoriality and affect.
Abstracts, links to video recordings of the session, and further information is available at the symposium website."