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A New Digital Dark Age? Collaborative Web Tools, Social Media and Long Term Preservation

This single authored article was written, at the invitation of the editor, for a special themed edition of World Archaeology. World Archaeology is a peer reviewed journal published by Routledge in the United States (Taylor & Francis Group), listed in the Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index and ranked 9th for archaeology in the world in the SJR with a score of 0.849 and an H index of 25 (2011). Due to extensive research experience in archaeological informatics and in the use and abuse of social media in the humanities generally, I was invited to contribute to a themed issue on ‘Open Archaeology’ of this highly prestigious journal. The substantial article of c10,000 words draws on original research and practice in the fields of social media in the humanities and informatics. In content the article is a direct response to the explosion of social media use and user generated content in archaeology and the relationship this has with long-term preservation, particularly as digital preservation of traditional media remains problematic within the discipline. I expect this article to have considerable impact and become widely cited. Such has been the impact to the journal’s special edition already that the keynote talk at the 2013 Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (CAA UK 2013) was a response by the editor, Mark Lake, to the debate its publication has created, including in relation to my article, in the wider archaeological community, much of it taking place via social media.