Animated GIFs as Expressive Visual Narratives and Expository Devices in Archaeology

1. Centre for Digital Heritage, Department of Archaeology, The University of York, YO1 7EP, UK. Email: colleen.morgan@york.ac.uk

2. Department of Archaeology, The University of York, YO1 7EP, UK. Email: nmas501@york.ac.uk

Cite this as: Morgan, C. and Scholma-Mason, N. 2017 Animated GIFs as Expressive Visual Narratives and Expository Devices in Archaeology, Internet Archaeology 44. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.44.11

Summary

Animated GIFs are uncommonly well suited for representing archaeology. A shudder-start, temporally ambiguous fragment of sequential media, the animated GIF (just GIFs, hereafter) occupies the margins of formal discourse, visually annotating everyday life on the Internet. The creation of a GIF – compiling frames of action into a sequence – draws an easy parallel with the mode of atomizing that characterises excavation, treating archaeological deposits as discrete entities and their subsequent reassembly into a stratigraphic sequence (Morgan 2012; Morgan and Wright in press).

Complex cultural expression is distilled into a brief gesture, the digital equivalent of an archaeological trace. Yet GIFs are fleetingly rare in archaeological representations, with only a handful of examples since the introduction of the media format in 1989. In this GIF essay (modelled on a photo essay), we briefly review the history of the animated GIF with particular attention to archaeological GIFs, discuss their utility in representing archaeological remains and narratives, and argue for a more creative integration of visual media into archaeological practice.

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Features

• Keywords: Archaeology, IT, animation, publication, storytelling, digital artefacts, reconstruction, art, GIFs, animated GIFs, archaeological illustration, visual media, digital archaeology.