Goals for this week
- Find a local historic graveyard (see the alternative if necessary)
- Begin recording some gravestones
- Create a rough map of the site
Listen
Right-click and save-as this link to download the audio file
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
Readings to set the scene
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Dennis, L. 2021. Getting It Right and Getting It Wrong in Digital Archaeological Ethics. In: Champion, E (ed.), Virtual Heritage. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bck.j
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Cook, Katherine. 2018 Open Data as Public Archaeology: The Monumental Archive Project. AP: Online Journal of Public Archaeology 3: 177-194. link
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Klehm C. The Use and Challenges of Spatial Data in Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice. 2023;11(1):104-110. doi:10.1017/aap.2022.38 via our library
As you read, remember to annotate. 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. Make notes in your lab-bench. Link those notes as appropriate.
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 ‘wk2-memos.md’.
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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 might select something that is personally meaningful, or leaves you confused, or makes you happy, or intrigues you to know more… and explain why that is, etc. Point to evidence in your log that underpins your reflection. Put your journal entry in your repo.
Log Your Work
You can log the link to your repository in this form.
Neha Gupta on Fair & Care Data Governance
Bonus - Building an anti-colonial digital archaeology through FAIR and CARE data governance principles with Dr. Neha Gupta, UBC Okanagan: