INTERVIEWER: What have your “journeys to PIT” been? How have you thought about and promoted the public interest within your work?
ANTHONY TUCK: The wider subject of archaeology is very frequently one which ignites the popular imagination, and people want to know more about what that work looks like. In our case, in particular, we're working in Tuscany, which is a wonderful space. There are a lot of different attractions to Tuscany, and local cultural promotion boards and museums are very interested in showcasing archaeological material as a way to get people's attention. An archaeological excavation is a data engine. It produces enormous amounts of information. But that's information that then needs to be meaningfully synthesized and presented in ways that aren't just relevant or interpretable or legible to a very narrow academic community; they also need to be more widely available. And so responsible archaeological projects are ones that don't just generate significant amounts of data, but also transform that data into meaningful, interpretable narratives.
Going back to the 1990s, as I was finishing my dissertation and working on different dimensions of this project, I was very interested in the possibilities that the then early database development environment allowed for. I realized we could use that as a springboard into this incremental process of translating what was then a physical paper archive of archaeological data into something that could be a digitally manipulated environment. We’re now in early stages of figuring out how to translate this enormous body of archaeological data into visualized descriptions of meaningfully interpreted narratives. This archive includes transcriptions of daily logs, of people's reflections as they're working in the field, and when I first conceived of the idea of taking a body of legacy data and orienting it in a way that could meaningfully absorb and collect and incorporate new data, there was, I'd say, a gasp of horror among a pretty wide population within my discipline at the idea that someone's musings as a graduate student would be publicly visible, twenty years on. But for me what’s always so interesting to think about: I as an archeologist am trying to think about ancient lived experiences, and what meanings and ideologies are implied by what we can see within the traces of their actions, but there's this other data set which is not the archaeological data, but rather the data created via the archaeological excavation, and those data are also interrogatable. And that's where things begin to get really really interesting, but also a little awkward for people. As archaeologists, our data and how we mobilize our data can kind of push and create certain kinds of cultural interpretations, and are responsive to existing ideologies that are circulating in the era that we are collecting data. I genuinely don't know what visible ideologies of an American project operating in post-war Italy looks like, but it all of a sudden becomes a really interesting question to begin thinking about.
So I've always been of the opinion that I don't own any of this material, I don't own this information—I'm just the custodian of it. So long as it exists in a physical form, it is incumbent on me to make sure that scholars that want access to it are able to work with it and walk away with the information they need. And so when it comes to public interest technology, in a certain sense, the only kind of new dimension of that with respect to how I think about my work is the technology piece of this. For me, there wasn't ever kind of a moment where it felt as though I was kind of conceiving of a new way of doing things. It just sort of seemed like the logical extension of what seemed like a charitable approach to material that didn't ever really belong to me. We're still very much in the early stages of figuring out how to translate this enormous body of archaeological data into visualized descriptions of meaningfully interpreted narratives.
MICHELLE TRIM: I'm a first generation college student. I don't do things the way you're supposed to. I don't perform the way you're supposed to. So I've often found myself in weird sort of social situations because of that. And I've always been attracted to technology. My dad was a hand radio operator, which meant I could sort resistors by their color codes. When I was 5, I was his helper. He built a TV and I helped him do that. So I've always been around technology, and I've always understood it as a thing that had the potential to create access to other things, like activities and jobs. And I think I've also always understood what it means to lack access, as someone growing up working class and who put themself 100% through college, and had to work almost full time the whole time. I think I’ve always had it in my face how my situation is different. And so I think I was sort of always sensitized to care about how knowledge, and particularly technological knowledge and awareness of technology, separates and constrains access, whether it's to resources or advancement or just, you know, survival. So the connection between my background and interest in this work is really clear.
I've been interested in the public impacts of technology for forever. Even during my comprehensive exams in graduate school, I wrote about “technology and human agency,” and I have been actively engaging in scholarship at that intersection ever since. I've been teaching related courses since the early 2000s. I joined UMass to teach about the social impacts of computing and I felt like they really lucked out when I came here, because I felt like: who could be as uniquely qualified as me with this weird combination of nerd stuff on one side and then my graduate training in rhetoric and technical composition on the other? And it has turned out to be very successful. Our undergraduate major has since quintupled, perhaps more than that. And so now, 11 years later, we run 28 sessions a year of CICS 305: Social Issues in Computing. I direct that class, and have since also successfully proposed and taught for the last several years the graduate version, which is Ethical Considerations in Computing.
So though we didn’t have the name for PIT when I was a grad student, for me it's a narrative that's just become more nuanced and filled in over time, but was always there. For me it is about public responsibility, about human agency. It's about the impact that technology has on people's lives. It’s about how we are facilitating the agency of the public, of our students, of our stakeholders, and particularly of those folks whose relationship to power is less. My own personal interest has to do with the way in which technology can become implicated in and reinforces particular structures in society that perpetuate certain kinds of oppression and social harms. I care very deeply about democratizing access to education and democratizing access to information. For me, PIT is where the rubber fully meets the road.
INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us about the PIT project you're working on? How did your collaboration come together?
MICHELLE TRIM: I first met Tony 4 or 5 years ago. I had this really wonderful TA named Cole Riley, who I think double majored in computer science and classics as an undergrad student, and had been working with Tony for a while in his excavation. When he was a master’s student he was my TA for our Intro to Informatics class and he was like, “You gotta meet this guy!” So Tony and I met, and I was instantly so impressed by his work. I thought, “Oh, this is so amazing, this kind of work needs to be celebrated. Our students need to be exposed to it.” Meanwhile, my spouse happens to also be trained in archeology, so I was kind of already sensitized to some of these issues Tony thinks about. Obviously I'm not an expert, but I was already familiar with some of the heritage concerns, and the connections between preservation, and careful collection and responsible description, and data collection throughout that process so that people can still make use of what they learn, and things aren't destroyed.
Our initial conversation was mostly “Come to Italy!” And then it turned into “How can we get students to come to Italy? What opportunities might exist?” Because at that time I was the associate program director of the Informatics program (now I'm the program director) so I wondered, “Can we get informatics students to come to Italy? And can we get Classics students to take informatics classes? What kind of partnership could we build?” I'm very committed to continuing to foster in students a sense of responsibility and awareness of the need to do data analysis work on public data that has meaning to a municipality or public body beyond the technologist working on it. I think that's something our students don't get in computer science as often as they need it. And so the idea was: we find a small cadre of students to go and be there in the summer, and they would get this specific kind of training and how to do data science. Then this great opportunity came up, and we just put it together. It facilitated international travel for primarily Pell Grant-eligible students because we made the bulk of the funding focused on providing scholarships.
The students funded by the New America PIT-UN Challenge Grant have produced a really cool range of stuff. And what is neat about it is that it really approaches data from a broad definition, so everything from thinking of visualizations as sort of infographics, to pictures with descriptions to help illustrate complex ideas about a place or a history, to different kinds of reconstructions. One thing we talked about was what would it be like to walk through a three dimensional digital representation of a piece of the archaeological site so that you could look around and draw inferences for yourself about how things were.
ANTHONY TUCK: That's where some really interesting, problematized experiences begin to emerge, because the archaeological data is inevitably incomplete, and a significant dimension of that reconstructed environment has to be interpreted. It's possible to be very, very literal and very explicit with respect to what you can clearly, evidentially demonstrate. But once you step away from that, you begin to enter into this interesting kind of space, like what, ethically, does the data support in terms of an interpreted articulation of archaeological space? Because these reconstructions are incredibly potent arguments. People will look at a nice 3D rendering of an ancient building, and think, “Well, it looked like that.” So it's a really interesting problem to figure out how to pull the viewer back from the surety of a reconstruction and provide them an insight into the real evidentiary basis that justifies the reconstruction as you see it. And that's a pathway that I've been working with and thinking about for a very long time. We're often kind of building inferential worlds out of pretty limited bodies of data. And so it's an interesting point of connection to this question of responsible use of data, and also responsible use of the technologies that can sometimes be used to obscure the quality of data that informs your construction.
The New America Funding in the context of the public interest technology program gave us the ability to begin thinking about ways to translate dimensions of this, both the data side of things and the narrative side of things, in ways that could be animated through and enlivened by, in the case of our particular program, undergraduate engagement with both the archaeological field school that we run and with the wider kind of academic environment within which we operate. We have students that are coming into the field for the first time, and who more often than not are coming from major spaces that typically are within the humanities, sometimes in social sciences, but very, very infrequently we have people who are coming from natural science or from computer science. And when they do show up, just kind of by accident, I get my hooks in them immediately, because somebody who has aptitude in geology, somebody who's interested in zoology—these are people that just have an interest and a skill set that catalyzes our ability to see information and data that we've collected in different lights. And so one member of our staff is a phenomenal archaeozoologist, and so she looks at animal remains at the site with incredible degrees of facility and clarity. And so students who are interested in, let's say, veterinary science all of a sudden discover that there's an opportunity for them to think about their immediate interest through the lens of these ancient experiences.
And so I'm always anxious to open the door wider, and demonstrate this as a new path. We have to maintain and service our traditional curriculum in the Classics department, but whenever the opportunity arises to pivot a portion of that curriculum in a different kind of way we embrace it. We’ve been working for quite a while now to create courses in Classics that point towards informatics and data science. We just got approval for a new course that focuses on ancient legal studies. And so another kind of pathway, another population that wouldn't normally think of classes within the School of Humanities and Fine Arts realm becomes relevant. I'm not suggesting that every pre-law person has to take this class, but if it's available, it starts a bigger conversation and creates a broader opportunity for that kind of cross-pollination that meaningfully advances professional opportunities across the board.
INTERVIEWER: What are the challenges to this kind of interdisciplinary work?
MICHELLE TRIM: As someone whose PhD is not in STEM, I have not only survived in this department for 11 years—I have four large grants, I'm a program director, I received the college teaching award. And yet I still struggle to feel like I belong. It's difficult talking interdisciplinarily, because epistemologies are different. We've talked about this an awful lot in our different conversations. Actually I had an epiphany after our summer, and we were trying to think about “Where do we go next? Do we grow and expand on campus, do we make it smaller? What do we do next?” And I had an epiphany that, without really realizing it, we weren't on the same page in terms of systems of reward and recognition within our different domains. So it was a real pivot point for me, and a little humbling; I felt a little embarrassed that I didn't figure this out sooner. That for you, Tony, feeding the publication machine was really important, and that excavation activity needs to be happening in order to help with all the constellation of efforts that enable the site’s persistence and the support of all the people attached to it. But, on the other hand, I'm in an environment where that's not how resources flow. In fact, there's virtually no reward or recognition for scholarship in STEM, right? At least not in computer science. Like, you could get a best paper at a conference, or get a paper in a conference that has, you know, 10% acceptance, right? Whoohoo! Big deal! Good for you. But if you don't have three or four significant products a year with most of those being grants that are sustaining graduate students in producing research that drives rankings and citation indexes, the scholarship by itself is not really valued. And in the humanities it’s different, too, right? Because there scholarship is also about building a reputation, and demonstrating acumen, pushing towards more and different ways of understanding a particular long standing text or idea or history. But scholarship is also about raising awareness and drawing attention to a topic, social practice, group of people, or text that might otherwise be overlooked, both in the academy and by society. When I realized this difference, I thought, “Why didn't I figure that out before we started?!”
I think it would be a shame if we weren't able to continue, because I kind of feel like in a weird way, after all this effort and all this work and all this talking, and all of these experiments, I feel like we're finally very close to being on the same page. The truth is interdisciplinary work is very, very hard. But we’re lucky here in that our Deans in HFA and CICS have been very supportive of this work and that support makes a tremendous difference.
INTERVIEWER: If a student is interested in doing this kind of work, what would you recommend?
ANTHONY TUCK: Ideally undergraduate students will not think of themselves as targeting a very specific place, but rather see a range of options, and that somebody who's interested in the relationship between cultural identity, cultural material, and political utility can see an opportunity here. Somebody that's super interested in coding and building VR environments, you could see an opportunity here, too. On the surface it doesn't feel immediately as those things necessarily connect. But getting them together in the same office, getting them set in the same classrooms, getting together in the same field environments, allows for these remarkable synergistic, catalyzing conversations to happen that have results that, honestly, l can’t anticipate or predict. I never necessarily know what will come out of the conversation, and that is one of the most exciting dimensions of a project like this for me.
MICHELLE TRIM: Students should not be afraid to explore. There's too much siloing of students into their majors, and not enough leveraging of things like GenEds and other graduation credits they need to fulfill to explore an area they know nothing about. So I would say, students who want to work in interdisciplinary spaces should explore, and UMass is a particularly good place for that.