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Material Culture Studies in the Age of Big Data: Digital Excavation of Homemade Face-Mask Production during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2022

Matthew Magnani Open the ORCID record for Matthew Magnani [Opens in a new window] ,
Jon Clindaniel Open the ORCID record for Jon Clindaniel [Opens in a new window]  and
Natalia Magnani Open the ORCID record for Natalia Magnani [Opens in a new window]
Matthew Magnani*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA
Jon Clindaniel
Affiliation:
Computational Social Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Natalia Magnani
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA; Department of Social Sciences, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
*
(matthew.magnani@maine.edu, corresponding author)
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Abstract

This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using digital data. Scholars interested in the materiality of past and contemporary societies have been limited to information derived from assemblages of excavated, collected, or physically observed materials; they have yet to take full advantage of large or complex digital datasets afforded by the internet. To demonstrate the power of this approach and its potential to disrupt our understanding of the material world, we present a study of an ongoing global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on face-mask production during the pandemic across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Scraping information on homemade face-mask characteristics at multimonth intervals—including location and materials—we analyze the production of masks and their change over time. We demonstrate that this new methodology, coupled with a sociopolitical examination of mask use according to state policies and politicization, provides an unprecedented avenue to understand the changing distributions and social significances of material culture. Our study of mask making elucidates a clear linkage between partisan politics and decreasing disease mitigation effectiveness. We further reveal how time-averaged asssemblages drown out the political meanings of artifacts otherwise visible with finer temporal resolution.

Este manuscrito presenta un enfoque novedoso para el estudio de la cultura material contemporánea utilizando datos digitales. Los académicos interesados en la materialidad de las sociedades pasadas y contemporáneas se han limitado a la información derivada de conjuntos de materiales excavados, recolectados u observados físicamente; todavía tienen que aprovechar al máximo los conjuntos de datos digitales grandes o complejos que ofrece Internet. Para demostrar el poder de este enfoque y su potencial para interrumpir nuestra comprensión del mundo material, incluido su cambio en el tiempo y su distribución en el espacio, aplicamos nuestro enfoque al estudio de la pandemia de COVID-19. En particular, enfocamos en la producción de mascarillas durante la pandemia en los Estados Unidos en 2020 y 2021. Obteniendo información sobre las características de las mascarillas caseras en intervalos de varios meses, incluida la ubicación y los materiales, analizamos la producción de mascarillas y su cambio de material en el tiempo. Demostramos que esta nueva metodología, junto con un análisis sociopolítico del uso de mascarillas de acuerdo con las políticas estatales y la politización, brinda una vía sin precedentes para comprender las distribuciones cambiantes y los significados sociales de la cultura material a lo largo del tiempo. Nuestro enfoque aclara un vínculo entre la política partidista y los impactos negativos en la mitigación de enfermedades a través de la producción de mascarillas caseras.

Keywords

contemporary archaeologyCOVID-19material culturespatial analysisbig dataarqueología contemporáneaCOVID-19cultura materialanálisis espacialgrandes datos
Type
Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 87 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 683 - 703
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Archaeology

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