Each Graffito Deserves Its Polygon

It Is About Time

Abstract

Time has remained one of the hardest-to-grasp properties of nature despite humans talking about time… all the time. However, even academic fields that are indifferent to the exact physical or philosophical characteristics of time must find ways to engage with the temporal dimension of their data. This applies to all of the Digital Humanities and maybe most to archaeology, a discipline focused on examining space- and time-bound anthropogenic activities. Like archaeological sites and landscapes, graffiti-scapes are spatially and temporally stratified. That is why the academic graffiti project INDIGO uses an archaeological lens to document, disseminate and investigate an urban graffiti-scape in space and time. However, since archaeologists still lack effective practical approaches to manage and visualise the temporal data dimension (besides a handful of data modelling standards and tools, both mainly created by geographers), INDIGO is currently developing graffiti-specific approaches to manage, visualise and analyse the uncertain spatio-temporal boundaries characterising these contemporary artefacts. After a general introduction to time and its relevance for archaeology and the study of graffiti, this paper explains why and how INDIGO uses polygons as digital representations for each real-world graffito. These polygons, stored in a human- and machine-readable file format and annotated with detailed temporal data, aim to provide a nuanced documentation of a graffiti-scape’s spatio-temporal dimensions.