Field work and ethical data collection
Goals for this week
- Find a local historic graveyard (current graveyard is OK)
- Begin recording some gravestones
- Create a rough map of the site
Listen
Feed for the podcast here. Transcript here.
Read
- Cook, Katherine. 2018 Open Data as Public Archaeology: The Monumental Archive Project. AP: Online Journal of Public Archaeology 3: 177-194. link
- Lacy, Robyn S. 2018. Public Engagement through Burial Landscapes: Cupids and Ferryland, Newfoundland. AP: Online Journal of Public Archaeology, Special Volume 3: Death in the Contemporary World: Perspectives from Public Archaeology. Pp. 55-78. link
- Dennis, L.Meghan., 2020. Digital Archaeological Ethics: Successes and Failures in Disciplinary Attention. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 3(1), pp.210–218. link
Richardson, Lorna-Jane., 2018. Ethical Challenges in Digital Public Archaeology. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 1.1, pp.64–73. link - Gergatsoulis, Manolis; Georgios Papaioannou; Eleftherios Kalogeros; Robert Carter. 2018. Representing Archeological Excavations Using the CIDOC CRM Based Conceptual Models Metadata and Semantic Research Springer. pp355-366. link (You should be able to access this via Carleton, if you run into issues. Let me know).
Each reading is ‘seeded’ with annotations by me; some of my annotations contain video from me directing you to pay attention to particular issues or ideas. Annotate anything interesting you find with Hypothes.is while logged into our reading group, keeping in mind what you’ve already heard/read.
A good annotation draws connections between what you’ve read and other things you’ve read/heard/experienced. I explicitly encourage you to connect what you read in this class with what you’re reading/doing in other classes. (Also you might want to add anything you read or anything interesting you find to your Zotero library.)
Do
This week and next you will head out into your local community to map a historical graveyard, and record some gravestones, using a digital recording tool called ‘Kobo Toolbox’.
- Make sure you understand the rationale for why we’re doing this
- Follow these instructions on working safely
- Make a sketch map of the graveyard following these suggestions; you’ll turn this into a digital map next week
- Begin recording using the kobotoolbox forms
- There is an alternative project if it is not feasible to go out into your community
Talk to each other. For instance, you might want to share photos of what you’re doing in the Discord server to ask others what they think of a particular grave monument, how they might code it in our system. I am not trying to catch-you-out, so it is ok to admit that you’re not entirely sure about something: archaeology is social. We’re all on the same team.
Record and Reflect
You may make your repository private or public.
If you make it private, make sure to ‘invite user shawngraham’ to your repository so that I may view it. (See the Github instructions for a reminder.)
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As you did for week one, make another notes.md entry and put it in your github repository for week 2.
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In your reflective journal (journal-week-2.md), drawing on your annotations of what you’ve read, your notes from what you’ve listened to, and the work you’ve done (both the successes and the not-quite-successes) discuss the ethical issues that this week’s work presents to you as you go out into your community. Are there ethical or physical dangers for you? What are the challenges for doing digital archaeology in your own particular context? How does the work I am asking you to do present ethical or moral challenges for your community? Begin the reflection by quoting (w/ citation) one sentence from the readings that resonates with you: you don’t have to explain why, but you might select something that is personally meaningful, or leaves you confused, or makes you happy, or intrigues you to know more… etc. Put your journal entry in your repo.
Log Your Work
You can log the link to your repository on this form.