Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Part I

Hi everyone!

Welcome to introduction to digital history.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t stomach any more zoom meetings. There’s something horrible about having to stare off-centre at your camera so that it appears like you’re looking out of your little window box at everyone else; but everyone else is staring off camera too, and frankly the whole thing feels like horrible small talk at an awkward faculty social event.

So we’re not going to be doing that.

Instead, I would like you to listen to these short podcast episodes, wherever it is comfortable for you to do that. These are not lectures, by the way. A good lecturer takes their cues from audience reaction and interest. Obviously, I can’t do that.

No, these podcasts will follow the same basic structure – I’ll remind you of what you ought to be doing, suggest things to keep in mind, and maybe riff a bit on some of the key ideas for the week, how they link to previous weeks, and how they foreshadow the upcoming work. I have also persuaded a number of digital archaeologists to join me throughout the course to offer up their thoughts on what it means to do digital archaeology.

Part II

This week is the ‘getting started’ week, so I need to take a bit more time to lay some groundwork. As I wrote on the course website:

I’ve taught online for a variety of institutions, using a variety of formats and approaches. I like teaching asnchronously because I believe it is a kinder approach to complex topics, especially when there is a second layer of difficulty - basic digital literacy, in this case - which intersects with the content, my learning goals for you, your own personal situations - in ways I cannot always anticipate or know.

Since I cannot know these things, I do not believe that I should bludgeon you with content; I do not think that ‘rigour’ is demonstrated by forcing you to join me at set times; I do not believe that face-to-face work is somehow more ‘scholarly’ than other kinds of work. Right now, with the world the way it is, I want to build a structure that opens possibility space for you to engage with this topic, and with ‘digital archaeology’ when you encounter it beyond this course, in ways that will push you forward as a scholar and citizen.

For this to work well, it requires you to be on the same page as me. There is a lot of flexibility built into this course, but it does require you to try to push yourself out of your comfort zone. The key thing is always to tie what you’re doing with what you’re reading and what you’re thinking. That ‘second layer of difficulty’ will come with practice. But how it intersects with everything else: that’s where the learning happens.

You will get to do some self-directed digital field work – I want you, if you are able, to go out to a local historic graveyard and do some data recording (there is an alternative assignment if that isn’t feasible for you). As a class, we will end up generating quite a lot of data that we will then be able to explore from various viewpoints and other digital archaeological approaches.

It might seem a bit macabre or ‘off’ somehow to build some of our work around the ways the dead are memorialized in Canadian graveyards, in this time of pandemic. I wrestled with this. But I settled on doing this for a variety of reasons. One, the simple reason that getting you outside and doing one variety of archaeological work and thinking through how tech intersects with field work and the realities of space is a valuable exercise; two it gives us data that we can work on later as the weather grows colder; and more importantly - three - we don’t often talk about death in modern Western culture. Memorialization and its practices can reveal much about past human groups, but in the gaps with our present day, can teach us much about ourselves.

…and that is why this course is the way it is. No doubt, things will break, and some things will work better/be more effective than others. We will roll with it.
Now – go get a drink, because I want to talk to you about failure and technology and what ‘rolling with it’ can mean. In fact, I’m going to tell you about some of the ways I’ve really screwed up.

Part III

The next 15 or so minutes is drawn from Failing Gloriously

The End

This week, it’s all about getting yourself set up with what amounts to your own ‘digital archaeology’ laboratory. On the course website, each week has a page of instructions, and then supporting tutorials or walk throughs to help you do the tasks I want you to complete. In week 1, you will set up a Github account and make your first private repository. Don’t forget to add me as a collaborator on your account. Each week you’ll make a new repository for that week’s work. You will set up a Hypothesis account; hypothesis enables an overlay on anything you read on the way, where you can make annotations of the text. We have a private group for this; make sure you join it and that every time you make an annotation, you make it in our group. Otherwise, it’ll be visible to the world. Finally, make sure to join our Discord server. I will do my office hours there. More importantly, it’s a social space where everyone else is going through the same thing. When things don’t work, or you’re confused, ask for help! DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY IS A TEAM SPORT. You do not get extra points for being a heroic lone scholar. But you might get them if you’re collaborative, helpful, and willing to ask for help when you need it.
Each week, I want you to record two documents – a ‘notes’ document that is like a lab notebook. Into this goes the commands that you typed, error messages that you received, all those memos-to-self that help you remember how to do the digital tasks. The other document is a ‘journal’, where you do the joined-up thinking, explicitly tying what you did – successes and hiccups both – to the stuff you read. Each week you will log the location of these in a google form so that I can take a look and help you out. At the end of each module, you’ll use these to produce a consolidation document that will get submitted for grades.
Well, that’s about enough out of me for now. Read the Syllabus pages carefully, Read the Week 1 materials carefully, and when things are unclear, ask me or your peers for clarification.
I can’t emphasize it enough: DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY is a TEAM SPORT. I want you to succeed; I’m not trying to catch you out. Life’s too short for that kind of crap.