The Contexts of Digital and Other Archaeologies

Goals for this week

• Explore some of the literature of archaeology using a macroscopic point of view
• Understand the social context of archaeological practice
• Identify the antecedents to digital archaeology in the broader literature

Listen

Feed for the podcast here.

Read

• White, William and Catherine Draycott. 2020 Why the Whiteness of Archaeology Is a Problem. SAPIENS link

• Overholtzer, Lisa, & Catherine Jalbert. 2021. A “Leaky” Pipeline and Chilly Climate in Archaeology in Canada. American Antiquity, 1-23. doi:10.1017/aaq.2020.107 link

• Perry, Sara and James Taylor. 2018. Theorising the Digital: A Call to Action for the Archaeological Community. In Oceans of Data: Proceedings of the 44th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Mieko Matsumoto & Espen Uleberg, eds. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 11-22. link (download the full publication at that page or look up the article on Google scholar.)

• Gupta, Neha. 2013. What Do Spatial Approaches to the History of Archaeology Tell Us? Insights from Post-Colonial India Complutum 24.2, 189-201 link

• Wilkins, Brendan. Designing a Collaborative Peer-to-peer System for Archaeology: The DigVentures Platform. JCAA 2020. Designing a Collaborative Peer-to-peer System for Archaeology: The DigVentures Platform. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 3.1, 33–50. link

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

• A few years ago I created a topic model of 20 000 archaeological articles from 1935 to 2010-ish. I want you to explore it here. Each of the bubbles is a ‘topic’; if you click on ‘years’ you’ll see a ‘stream graph’, or the proportion each topic accounts for that year’s total archaeological writing output (in English speaking journals). Notice the inflection points? What was going on in the world at those points? (Remember there’s a lag between work being done, and work being published). What other patterns do you notice? Are there topics that perhaps relate to the themes of this course? In what journals? By what authors? A bit of clarification: We’re used to ‘close reading’ in history, parsing individual words and sentences to understand what’s going on, reading between the lines and so on. By contrast, a topic model takes a large scale, macroscopic view: what patterns are visible when we soar up to 20 000 feet, as it were: what are large scale patterns in archaeology? So this is a way of getting a sense of archaeology’s historiographic evolution. By ‘explore’ then, I want you to use the different facets of the visualization tool to spot patterns, and then dive back down to the ‘micro’ view presented by our readings/course materials. Cycle between close and distant; identify ideas at the micro, then see what correlates at the macro (search for words, ideas, etc, in the tool)
• World Archaeology tries to be a much more …global… journal. It’s not included in the 20 000 topic model. Here’s another topic model just for this particular journal. Explore, and contrast this with the previous.
• You can continue to try the exercises from last week as well.

A quick video introducing the idea of a topic model:

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.)

1. As you did for week one, make another notes.md entry and put it in your github repository for week 6.

2. 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 what you have observed from the topic models (and what you did last week) in the context of what you have read this week. Can you identify issues or trends that make you hopeful for the discipline? How do our course materials stack up - is there something that needs changing? Maybe it’s something that I can change right now, and if that’s the case, then I need to know. 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.