The 290 series earned back a bit of respect this week with the lecture on Monday by Julian Richards, who is a specialist on digital archaeology (the subject of his talk) at Archaeology Data Service (ADS). ADS is a service in the UK that makes available, in various forms and via various portals, archaeological data on the Web. OK, it might sound boring, but the guy struck me as exceptionally knowledgeable, and he's thoughtfully engaged in one aspect of what I would call the institutionalization of digital knowledge production. A specific intellectual. So I asked him if he thought these new digitial resources and capabilities were doing more than making life easier for archaeological researchers: Were they also allowing them to ask different questions? He gave me his "short answer": Yes, because graduate students would save so much time being able to reuse previous data, and wouldn't have to spend so much time laboriously amassing new data, they would be freed up to take on different questions. Now, Richards didn't give me the long answer, but this much made me reflect back on fieldwork in socio-cultural. If we could reuse earlier researchers fieldnotes, where would that get us? If our time were freed up--whether the time we'd spend getting access or learning a language, what would that free us to do? Could we even imagine anthropologists sharing fieldnotes? Digital technology invites collaborations but, again, does contemporary knowledge production invite collaboration?

FYI: ADS "supports research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology.... it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies."