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19 / Crafting Cosmos, Telling Sister Stories, and Exploring Archaeological Knowledge Graphically in Hypertext Environments Jeanne Lopiparo and Rosemary A. Joyce In 1994, Rosemary Joyce began a long-term collaboration with two nonarchaeologists on a hypermedia project based on ethnohistoric materials about sixteenth-century Aztec society. Joyce’s collaboration on Sister Stories ( Joyce et al. 2000) has led her to view hypertext presentation as a potentially powerful medium for the representation of not only archaeological interpretations but of the archaeologist’s process of arriving at an understanding of a past society ( Joyce 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002). Over the same period, we have worked as part of UC Berkeley’s Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Archaeology (MACTiA, http:// www.mactia.berkeley.edu), teaching undergraduates and graduate students how to use multimedia authoring tools in representing archaeological practice and interpretation. As part of her association with MACTiA, Jeanne Lopiparo developed a prototype hypermedia project, Crafting Cosmos, which pursues our goal of using this new technology to make the process of archaeology more accessible to nonspecialists and specialists alike. In this chapter we interweave accounts of our goals and strategies in these two works. Both of these works use the possibilities of art to try to convey to those who immerse themselves in these new media a better sense of how as archaeologists we construct tentative, contingent, and multiple interpretations of the past. The works thus both represent something about a possible past and simultaneously enact the creation in the present of representations of possible pasts. We have developed some opinions about the merits of hypermedia for archaeology , and the effects it is capable of achieving, from the years we have spent in the development of these works, in a community in which the values represented by such works have been actively debated. Because our two projects have had different development histories and exist at present in two quite different forms—one a web publication, the other a work to be distributed on CD-ROM—we also have a practical basis from which to assess the relative merits of different technologies. And the fact that the two projects—while sharing much in philosophy, development history, and goals—are nonetheless strikingly different means that the comparison between them serves to illuminate the creative range that digital media enable. Although we are wary of speaking for an entire medium, we take the opportunity here to re®ect from our own exchanges on the medium and its effects and to comment on some of the broader issues implicit for archaeology in computerized hypermedia. GOALS, PROCESSES, AND RESULTS: SOME GENERAL COMMENTS Our primary shared rationale for creating computerized hypertexts is that this medium allows the creation of more effective multivocal representations of the past. We argue that multivocal electronic narratives should not seek to resolve contending views. Instead, they have the potential to expose the ways people with different views differentially use material remains. The messiness introduced should be seen as a strength, and a microscale representation of the macroscale of healthy archaeological dialogue already extending between different texts. . . . It would be dif¤cult to create a single linear text that accomplished this. While the dangers of the medium— particularly anonymity of voices and the ®attening of all information to the same degree of authority—cannot be evaded, they are actually not unique to electronic media. (Joyce 2002) We realize our attempts at multivocality in Sister Stories and Crafting Cosmos differently, but in both cases the multilinear linking capacity of hypertext allows us to provide multiple entry points that balance the relative dominance of the different voices. Exploiting the generative effects of hypermedia, we engage the reader as a collaborator in the construction of archaeological interpretations . As the reader chooses to follow particular links, he or she creates a unique juxtaposition of primary data and secondary analyses that shape an experience that, while constrained by the sources, is irreducibly unique. The 194 / Jeanne Lopiparo and Rosemary A. Joyce reader enacts the process of archaeological interpretation that we would like to model in these works. Like others using computerized hypermedia, we acknowledge both that these are not the only media in which to make such attempts and that they are not unproblematic means to accomplish these goals. In fact, our experiences in developing our projects have made us intensely aware of both the current limitations in realizing the promise of hypertext and the actual impossibility of completely vacating the position of authority implicit in authoring such works in...

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