Futures of Digital Archaeology
Goals for this week
- Try your hand at building an image classifier
- Simulate the Roman economy
- Raise the ghost of Rudolpho Lanciani
- Situate this work in an understanding of the potential futures for digital archaeology, but also in the context of current work in archaeology.
Listen
Feed for the podcast here. | Transcript for the podcast here
Read
- Huggett, Jeremy. 2017 The Apparatus of Digital Archaeology, Internet Archaeology 44. link
- Dawson, Ian, and Reilly, Paul. 2019. “Messy Assemblages, Residuality and Recursion within a Phygital Nexus” Epoiesen link AND RESPONSE by Rachel Opitz link
- Morgan, Colleen. 2019. Avatars, Monsters, and Machines: A Cyborg Archaeology. European Journal of Archaeology 22.3, 324-337 link
- Kersel, Morag. 2016. ‘Living a Semi-digital Kinda Life’ in Erin Walcek Averett, Jody Michael Gordon, and Derek B. Counts (eds) Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology. Grand Forks: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. pp. 475-492. 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
I do not necessarily expect you to complete all of these, because you are all coming to this class with different levels of digital ability. These are listed in order of difficulty. Push yourself until you get stumped.
- Raising the Dead I: Agent Based Models
- Raising the Dead II: Language Models and Artificial Intelligence
- The Automated Archaeologist: Build an Archaeological Pottery Recognition App with Computer Vision
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 7.
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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 potential for these ‘future archaeologies’ to be unethical, alienating, or, conversely, liberating or powerful new lenses for understanding humanity. 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.