Goals for this week
Our overarching goal starting up is to set up your digital archaeology workflow, and to map out some of the broad contours of ‘digital archaeology’.
Getting the workflow set up involves creating a place to lodge your materials (a data repository via Github), a place to make notes and explore code (we’re going to use a thing called JupyterLite), and a way of being social with your community of nascent digital archaeologists (a social annotation layer for the web called Hypothes.is).
You might already have a system you use for making notes and keeping track of things, which is good. But for this course, I want you to engage with my system because it intersects with broader issues around open access research, replicability, and knowledge-making in digital archaeology that I want you to learn.
Therefore, this week our goals are:
- understanding what the hang you’ve signed up for
- getting a sense of what digital archaeology is; also, the importance of a space where it is ‘safe to fail’
- getting your data repository set up on Github
- getting your collaborative reading environment with Hypothes.is set up
- exploring our JupyterLite digital notemaking and analytical environment
Listen
Right-click and save-as this link to download the audio file
Advice on how to listen to a podcast for a class. It’s not as straightforward as you might think.
Each week, this podcast interviews a different digital archaeologist. These interviews were conducted a while ago. One thing I want you to ask yourself therefore is ‘how might things have changed in the interim?’ Listen for key words and phrases. A good idea would be to use OpenAlex, Google Scholar, JSTOR, or our library to search these terms to find articles from the last five years that are germane.
DO
- Listen to the podcast
- Follow the instructions to get Github and Hypothes.is set up
- Annotate the syllabus part of this website while being logged into our private Hypothesis group; here’s the link if you haven’t already joined (indeed as with the readings mentioned above, and with all annotations for this class, always make the annotations as part of our group).
- Use the 3 w’s: what is ‘weird’ (eg, unfamiliar to your experience or expectations), ‘wonderful’ (eg, makes you see your studies in a new or exciting way), or ‘worrying’ (eg, something that seems problematic to you)
- I ask you to do this so that you get familiar with the hypothesis workflow. Notice that any annotation you make gets its own unique permanent link, so you can link to it in any notes or writing you do. Notice that you can also responde to anyone else’s annotation.
- Install our lab bench environment. It has a bundled getting started tutorial that explains what the lab bench does, and how it works. Complete that tutorial.
- Read the readings. Have Hypothes.is turn on so you can make similar annotations, or respond to others’ observations. Make notes on the readings in your lab-bench. How many? That’s up to you. Better note-making and linked thinking leads to better grades, ultimately.
- Log your reflection in your appropriate github repository
Readings to set the scene
- Morgan, Colleen. 2022. Current Digital Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 51:213-31. link
- Cook, Katherine. 2019. EmoboDIYing Disruption: Queer, Feminist & Inclusive Digital Archaeologies. European Journal of Archaeology 22 (Special Issue 3 Digital Archaeologies): 398-414. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2019.23 full text
- Cook, Katherine, and Beth Compton. 2018. Canadian Digital Archaeology: On Boundaries and Futures. Invited submission for special anniversary issue of Canadian Journal of Archaeology 42: 38-45.link
- Bollwerk, Elizabeth. 2015. Co-Creation’s Role in Digital Public Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice 3.3, 223-234 https://doi.org/10.7183/2326-3768.3.3.223 pdf
Record and Reflect
Your github repository is where you will deposit all of the artefacts you make for this course, including your reflections. Depositing everything you make gives me a vision of your process and learning, so I encourage you to be expansive.
Make sure to ‘invite user shawngraham’ to your repository so that I may view it.
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Being a digital archaeologist means keeping track of what you’ve done, as a gift to your future self (ie, so that when you come back to something, you can pick up where you left off). In our digital lab, make a new markdown document, and put into it any new terms you’ve encountered, commands you used, error messages you encountered, websites that helped, and so on: this document is a lab notebook, as it were. Bullet points and memos-to-self are fine. Put this markdown document into your week one repo on github, along with any other files or digital things you happen to make. Call it your ‘wk1-memos.md’.
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In a new md document, jot down some reflections - narrative, or bullet points, whatever works for you; both are fine. Call it ‘journal-wk-1.md’ This document also goes into your week one repo on github.
Begin the reflection by quoting (w/ citation) one sentence from the readings that resonates with you. You might select something that is personally meaningful, or leaves you confused, or makes you happy, or intrigues you to know more. Reflect on why that is.
In this document, you will detail any issues you had with getting started, any parts that caused you difficulty, anything you annotated that you really want me to address for you. If you got any error messages while trying to get set up, copy those into your reflection; google them. Do you find any websites that help you? What kind of ‘failures’ might you have encountered this week?
Going beyond the mere mechanical aspects of getting started, draw on your annotations of what you’ve read (and/or your notes from what you’ve listened to), discuss your idea of what ‘digital archaeology’ might be prior to starting this course, and think through whether any of the materials we’ve seen this week confirm or upset those notions. What kind of archaeology have you encountered so far at Carleton, if at all? Where do you want to go, with digital archaeology?
Log Your Work
Checklist:
- Github account set up; an initial private repository made called ‘week1’
- user ‘shawngraham’ invited to the repository
- hypothes.is account made
- initial annotations on the course website made
- podcast listened to
- notes on readings
- digital lab environment explored and initial wikilinked notes made there
- initial log on the week’s work deposited in your github repo
- Dr. Graham notified
I know this seems like a lot. But really, this is mostly just setting things up. By the time this week is done, you’ll have your own personal digital archaeology laboratory!
You can log the link to your repository in this form.