Varia and Quick Hits

Some quick hits and varia for the weekend:

• The blogging archaeology article that I worked on in the fall and serialized here and over at the Ancient World Bloggers Group page has appeared on Archaeology Magazine's online features page (here's a link to the article).  Thanks to everyone who helped with the revisions and Mark Rose at the Archaeological Institute of America who provided some nice editorial touches and his web-design who helped its slick appearance.  I hope to be able to provide an update to the article in 9 or 12 months time and continue to track some of the developments in the blogosphere. 
• Brandon Olson, a PKAP and UND alumnus, has made a foray into the blogosphere with his Historical Archaeology in the Ancient Mediterranean blog. He not only discusses his own research but also his experiences and classes as a Ph.D. student at the Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Program at Penn State.  So far, it provides a nice perspective on advanced graduate.  With all this new blogging activity, I will have to expand my PKAP blog aggregator.
• Erstwhile, PKAP co-director Scott Moore has begun to blog on his Digital History course at Indiana University of Pennsylvania at his Ancient History Ramblings blog (part -2, part -1, part 0, part 1, part 2).  In an earlier post, I mentioned Sam Fee's mini course on Web 2.0 at Arranged Delirium.  I am thinking about offering a Digital History course at UND next year and will have to consider the experiences of these two colleagues (in addition to the iconic and sophisticated course offered by William J. Turkel at the University of Western Ontario).
• David Gill who already provides us with the excellent Looting Matters, now adds another "research blog", History of the British School at Athens.

[It will be interesting to track the way in which certain genres coalesce in the blogosphere over the next several years.  On the one hand, there are clearly certain relatively well-defined and recognizable types of blogs: research blogs, teaching blogs, news blogs, graduate student blogs et c.).  On the other hand, there does seem to be a willingness to experiment with hybrid blogs that bring together teaching and research and present themselves in a conversational style.]

• I meet with Scott Moore and David Pettegrew tonight in Second Life.  It will be the first time that PKAP attempts to use their presence in Second Life as an actual productive tool -- albeit not in a very creative or unique way (we are not using it as anything more complex than a conference call!)
• Finally... I have managed to settle back in from my holiday travels.  I then survived a week of unmitigated bustle with teaching responsibilities and several thought provoking talks that centered on a recognizable theme. Ben Millis gave a "Tea Talk" (an informal lecture on a work in progress) on the ethnic and linguistic identity of the refounders of Corinth entitled "“The Social and Ethnic Origins of the Colonists of Early Roman Corinth".  He argued that the population of refounded colony of Corinth was a hybrid population who were comfortable in both the eastern "Greek" world and the western Roman world, and therefore well suited for a position astride a major east-west trade route in the Mediterranean.  Maria Georgopoulou, the director of the Gennadius Library, conducted a Gennadius Seminar entitled "Studying Mediterranean Cities at the Gennadius Library" which examined the nature of Cretan/Venetian interaction at the sites of Heraklion and Venice in 400 year period of Venetian control over Crete.  Much of the material derived from her excellent book, Venice's Mediterranean Colonies: architecture and urbanism, but she provided a very thoughtful theoretical introduction which considered the influence of more recent theoretical developments on the models she employed to understand Venetian/Greek interaction.  Finally, Nanako Sawayanagi, a graduate student at NYU, offered some of her research at a Gennadius Library "Work-in-Progress" seminar with a paper entitled, "The Team of the Japanese and the Greek Politics in 1906 - 1908".  Like Georgopoulou and Millis, Nawayanagi considered cultural interaction (whether literally or figuratively) to be a suitable topic for historical study.  While she argued clearly that there was no evidence of real Japanese involvement in Greek politics (the name Team of the Japanese refers to a small but influential party in the Greek Parliament in the early 20th c.), the name itself reflects the influence of a growing global awareness and a willingness to negotiate (a political) identity in transcultural terms.

Comments

[Jimmy Cummins]

I started a blog long time ago under biological anthropology which attracted a host of professors and students
Made a few friends but mostly shared information with students writing topics
I did however find a woman who helps me with internet research, a valuable commodity and she invited me to join an invitation only group on msn spaces
It involves just scriptures and Native American philosophy
I'm a native American descendent and A Presbyterian
Good luck with your blog and fieldwork
My blog started out with tracking information on east coast hurricanes and I used wandering but not lost which works well in my concentration of archaeology
Happy digging
Jimmy aka iceman

[Maddy Bray]

Nice feature in Archaeology! :)