What Gets Counted, Counts
Goals for this week
- recognize the strengths and weaknesses of our graveyard coding scheme
- uncover the ways in which ‘counting’ hides or highlights the past
- encounter CSVs, SQL, and R and how to do some basic statistics
Listen
Feed for the podcast here. Transcript here.
Read
- ‘What gets counted, counts’. Chapter from Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein link
- Labrador, Angela. 2012. Ontologies of the Future and Interfaces for All: Archaeological Databases for the Twenty-First Century. Archaeologies 8,236–249 link (Hypothesis should be able to read the pdf if you open it in your browser).
- Cook, Katherine, et al. 2018. Teaching Open Science: Published Data and Digital Literacy in Archaeology Classrooms. Advances in Archaeological Practice, 6.2,144-156 link|(pdf version)
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 add anything you read or anything interesting you find to your Zotero library.
Do
Take your time with these. These are listed in order of difficulty. Push yourself until you get stumped. Honestly. It is far better to go through one exercise in depth, connecting with it, tying it to the readings, the podcast, experience in other courses, and other research you may have done, than racing through all of them for the sake of being ‘done’. If on the other hand the exercise is not challenging, push yourself to do the next one. Get stuck. Ask for help. Share. Reflect on why you’re stuck/how you’re stuck/what being stuck implies…
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modify the existing scheme or suggest a new category that would address one of the shortcomings you identified in last week’s Consolidation doc. Embed the link to your new form in a .md file you’ll upload to your repository, with whatever explanatory info you need (ie what changes, and why).
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Explore basic statistics in R on archaeological data and work through it.
These exercises are important, so you can continue them next week if necessary. You still need to log your work for this week though.
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 5.
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In your reflective journal, 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 space between the action of counting, and the reality of the things that have been counted. In what ways does the coding scheme from debs.ac.uk miss, elide, or highlight memorialization practice in Canadian graveyards? If you were able to get our data into a notebook and begin examining it, what patterns emerge and what do they suggest (given what you’ve read this week)? 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 You Work
You can log the link to your repository on this form.