Goals for this week
- uncover the ways in which ‘counting’ hides or highlights the past
- encounter CSVs, SQL, and R and how to do some basic statistics on archaeological information
Listen
Right-click and save-as this link to download the audio file
Read
- D’Ignazio, Catherine and Klein, L. 2020. ‘What gets counted, counts’. From Data Feminism 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)
- 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
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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Explore the ‘archaeo-stats-in-R.ipynb’ computational notebook in the week 5 folder in the lab workbench, 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
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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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. Who are you missing? Why? If you were able to get our class data into a notebook and you were able to begin examining it, what patterns emerge and what do they suggest (given what you’ve read this week)? What aspects of doing this small graveyard project are not, cannot be, captured with the tools you’ve used so far? What does this suggest about the differences between ’the past’ and ‘history’ or ‘archaeology’? 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… 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