After this week, the various pieces of digital work that we do pivot from ‘computational archaeology’ (ie, manipulation of data using computers) to ‘digital humanities’ (where we also think about what the act of computation does to how we know the past.)
Goals for this week
- follow the process from observation to data to story with the example of the Gabii Project and some stratigraphy
- explore some of the literature of archaeology using a macroscopic point of view to understand how academic writing ‘storifies’ the past
- understand something of the social context of archaeological practice
- identify the antecedents to digital archaeology in the broader literature
Listen
Right-click and save-as this link to download the audio file
(Incidentally, if you want to see what the BSR looks like, check out their video. When they mention ‘beautiful library’… that balcony is where the ghost turns up!)
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, S., Simandiraki-Grimshaw, A., Morgan, C., Taylor, J. S., Fadioui, A., Foket, L., … Clough, A. (2025). ‘Towards New Futures for Archaeological Data Production: Challenging Archaeonormativity through Storytelling’ Journal of Field Archaeology, 1–20. https://doi-org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1080/00934690.2025.2504235.
- 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
Do
“Since 2009 the Gabii Project, an international archaeological initiative led by Nicola Terrenato and the University of Michigan, has been investigating the ancient Latin town of Gabii, which was both a neighbor of, and a rival to, Rome in the first millennium BC. The trajectory of Gabii, from an Iron Age settlement to a flourishing mid-Republican town to an Imperial agglomeration widely thought to be in decline, provides a new perspective on the dynamics of settlement in central Italy. This archive is based on the Gabii Project’s first digital publication, which focuses on the construction, inhabitation, and repurposing of a private home at Gabii, built in the mid-Republican period.” via Open Context
First, you’re going to explore one of the Gabii project’s data repositories and consider how we move from observations to a story about the site, using materials designed by Paulina Przystupa and Meghan Daniels, scholars with the Alexandria Archive Institute.
These exercise do not require our digital workbench.
- Work through ‘Notes to Data’ link
- Try your hand at making a Harris Matrix and tell me the story it reveals
- Work through ‘Data to Narrative’ link
The next bit.
A few years ago I created a topic model (see this quick video for ‘what is a topic model’) on the full texts of 20 000 archaeological articles from 1935 to 2010-ish. I want you to explore it here. I want you to explore this because this gives us a macroscopic perspective of how stories about archaeological materials are told once we get to the level of the academic article: we’re a long way away from concerns about notes to data to lenses, and traditionally, archaeology hasn’t worried too much about this.
When you visit my site with my topic model explorer, you’ll see a lot of ‘bubbles’. 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.
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.
- As you did for week one, make another notes.md entry and put it in your github repository for week 6.
- 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. 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