The Mound of Bits
In the physical world, a Tell is formed when a city is built, destroyed, and rebuilt on the same site for millennia. In the digital world, we find the same pattern. A platform like AOL is a Tell: the modern interface sits atop layers of older software, legacy protocols, and millions of abandoned usernames. To "dig" into an AOL Tell is to move through the layers of the 1990s, the early 2000s, and the modern web.
Stratigraphy of the Social
The Tell is the primary unit of site reconnaissance. When we identify a Tell, we are looking for the Stratigraphy: the order in which the information was deposited. The bottom layer might be hand-coded HTML; the middle layer, a proprietary CMS; the top layer, a modern, reactive framework. Each layer tells us about the technical and social constraints of its time.
Field Notes
Identifying a Tell is the first step of any major excavation. We don't just look for "files"; we look for the mounds where the most activity has happened. The larger the Tell, the more complex the context.