Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Storytime

Welcome to week 6, the halfway point of the course, and the last week before the fall reading week and Hallowe’en. I want to tell you about the library at the British School at Rome. Imagine a room two stories tall, lined with bookshelves. There’s a walkway around where the second floor would be; you can go up a spiral steel staircase and browse those shelves up there, looking down on the scholars at their desks below. Each scholar in residence at the School has their favourite desk. People get quite attached to ‘their’ space. The school faces to the west, and in the afternoons, the light slants in through the huge high windows, bathing everything in a sleepy yellow glow. But as night falls, the shadows get longer, the building starts to cool, and soon there are only small pools of light where the dedicated still labour at their desks. After supper, no one is in the library. But say you open the little wooden door and step into the vast shadowy darkness… if you go up onto the upper walkway around about that time, and you wander over to the one bit of wall without any shelving, try placing a book on that empty shelf. You might look away if you hear something. When you look back, the book will be on the floor. They say the ghost of Eugenia Strong, once the assistant director of the school during WWII, still likes to work in the library at night, and uses this now blocked in doorway as her own personal entrance. She only throws the books over the edge.

So they say.

Part I

I want to talk to you about libraries.

If knowledge equals power, and power equals energy, and energy equals matter, and matter equals mass, then libraries are very dangerous places indeed. Not because they cause explosions, but because the explosions they cause happen inside your own head.

If you’ve read any of the works of Terry Pratchett, you’ll recognize that I’m talking about what Pratchett calls ‘L-Space’, one of the great secrets of Librarianship. In essence, all books everywhere affect all other books - thus you can deduce the contents of books not yet written.

It’s all pretty silly, but this week, you’ll see that there’s a bit of truth in it. In fact, the main task for this week is to explore over 20 000 archaeological journal articles, written in English, from about 1935 to 2010 ish. You can’t possibly read all these articles. But you might be able to see macroscopic, large-scale trends in the things that these articles talk about. What I’ve done, in fact, is said to my computer: imagine there are 150 topics in these 20 000 articles. Please sort each article’s words into the most likely topics, and show me the results. So the computer looks at each word in each article, and its surrounding words, in each article, versus how that word is used in every other article. It imagines a world where writers pull words from different buckets in different proportions to write - and if you can imagine that, then you can get the computer to work backwards from the proportions to the original buckets.

I’ve already done the computational part, although I have tutorials that will show you how to do this, if you’re interested. For making sense of more material than you can hope to read, a topic model is a great way to get this macroscopic view.

I want you to pay attention to the visualizations that we can produce from the topic models; look for inflection points or other interesting blips. Dive into the data - the topic model browser will show you the individual articles, all of which are available through JSTOR. Can you identify the trends that lead to the emergence of ‘digital archaeology’ as we understand it in this class? What about ‘computational archaeology’ - is that something different from ‘digital archaeology’? If you need a framework to understand these inflection points, the Wikipedia article on ‘archaeological theory’ is not a bad place to start.

Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass. Ideas become real because they dictate how we see and understand patterns in the material culture, and what we pay attention to and make real and end up calling ‘archaeology’.

Part II

Today we’re joined by Dr. Erin Averett of Creighton University.

hello introduction to digital archaeology students! Your professor dr. Graham invited me to think about several key questions that I believe you will be addressing throughout the semester.

I thought I’d start by introducing myself. My name is Erin Averett and I’m a professor of archaeology at Creighton University in Omaha Nebraska. I have excavated in North America, Greece, and Cyprus, but for the last 20 years I’ve been working with the Athienou Archaeological Project in Cyprus which is the easternmost island in the Mediterranean and I really like working there because it’s such an interesting mix of cultures and influences and it’s always changing so it’s always an exciting place to study. My current project is the publication of over a thousand fragments of terracotta figurines that were dedicated as votive offering at the large rural sanctuary that we’ve been excavating for the past 15 years. As our project has increasingly incorporated new 3D data into our recording processes we have begun to rethink that “gold standard” of the archaeological final report with catalogue and publication format. Despite innovations in relational databases, imaging, and online resources with linked open data, there is [not] as yet an agreed-upon replacement for the venerated and large printed final publication that represents the final interpretation of an archaeological site. And so as I work on publishing all of these figurines I’m considering new ways to publish our 3D models alongside illustrations and photographs as well as a database that can be continually updated and so in other words to challenge this idea of a final printed monograph that is the end, the goal of archaeological publication.

Dr. Graham ask me to speak about how I got started in digital archaeology. And to be honest one thing you should probably know about me is that I do not consider myself a digital archaeologist! I received a very traditional training in graduate school. When I was in graduate school there weren’t really any classes at all on digital archaeology or digital tools in my program - and I think that this is relatively common for most graduate programs in the 90s and 2000 across American institutions - so whatever we learned we had to pick up in the field. And obviously archaeologists have been using computers and databases and digital tools for quite a long time but it just wasn’t considered something worthy of study and a graduate classroom right, you kinda learned that on hand. So I’ve had to learn the digital tools that I need as I go, which has been very challenging. I’m continually impressed at how much training students at all levels can now get with digital technology and digital archaeology, and so this is a big change from just I think graduate training a decade ago.

Our excavation on Cypress first started experimenting with new digital technologies as we followed the innovations of the Pompeii Porta Stabia project and others as they transitioned from traditional paper notebooks to digital notebooks on iPads. As the Athienou Archaeological Project tested and then adopted the digital notebook, which replaced our paper notebooks and used born-digital data, it forced me to really think about how the tools we use inform how we record process and even analyze and interpret the archaeological data. But the vast array of new digital tools now at our fingertips as they become cheaper and easier to use, this is only increasing and so I think archaeologists are now faced with many challenges as they struggle to adopt these tools in an effective, meaningful, and ethical way.

Since our first experiments with digital notebooks we have started creating 3D models of some of our artifacts using structured light scanning and photogrammetry to record the trenches as they are being excavated and to create a 3D map of the sanctuary. So I guess you could say my start in digital archaeology was slow, informal and clumsy.

The next question that Dr. Graham posed is, what is the biggest challenge facing digital archaeology at the moment? That’s a very big question! You’re probably going to get a lot of different answers but from my point of view I see two major challenges. And the first one is that as we see the academic job market become more and more dire there is a widening divergence between what students are being trained to do to be good archaeologists in graduate school and what skills will get them the elusive tenure track jobs. What makes you a good archaeologist - things like specializing, knowing digital tools, being aware and knowing how to incorporate scientific advances in archaeology, GIS Etc - does not usually correspond in classical archaeology in the US at least to what search committees want: which is traditional training in Greek and Latin languages and the ability to teach the languages and standard culture courses. And so this is a disconnect right what makes you a good archaeologist doesn’t necessarily make you a good job candidate and that’s a big problem.

The second challenge is that after the rapid adoption of digital tools and this is pretty standard right, it’s not unique to archaeology but when you have new technology people just experiment and try them out in different ways but archaeologists are only just now stepping back and considering larger issues of ethics and the epistemological implications of these new tools on our discipline. The good news is that there’s some really great scholarship that is considering these things now and I expect to see more and more scholars address these broader implications in the near future.

The fourth question was, what drives you up the wall about how digital archaeology is currently received or perceived in the profession? I think there is still a perception from scholars who don’t do it or who don’t read about it that digital archaeology is about knowing tech and that there’s very little intellectual value, interpretation or analysis in other words they don’t see the difference between IT and digital scholarship and research. Of course this is bonkers! but I think the number of people with this narrow and incorrect view is dwindling as some basic knowledge of how digital tools enhance research is now necessary and it’s becoming more commonplace.

I’m going to skip Professor Graham’s optional question about glorious failures. I’ll just say of course I’ve had them right? They’re great learning experiences but it would push me over my a minute allotment here so I’m going to end with addressing Dr. Graham’s last question and that is, what fills you with hope? And I think today younger scholars especially are forcing us all to really delve into the ethical issues in archaeology more generally but also in digital archaeology specifically. Studies on the ethnography of field work, ethics of data collection, access and publication, and digital appropriation and more, are forcing us all to think a lot more deeply about the impact of what we do and that’s a really important thing.

And so thank you to Doctor Graham for the invitation to give these questions some more thought and to your students I hope that you enjoy the rest of your semester; thank you!