The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Elwyn Robinson Lecture Thoughts: Digital Archaeology

Just before the holidays, I was invited to give the library’s Elwyn Robinson Lecture.  The librarian suggested that I do something that highlights how my research will benefit from the newly established Working Group in Digital and New Media.  This would coincide well with Elwyn Robinson’s interest in the “new media” of his day, namely radio.  Robinson’s Heroes of Dakota radio broadcast brought the University of North Dakota, the department of history, and his research on the history of North Dakota to a broad audience far beyond the limits of scholarly publication.  His broadcasts were so popular that he circulated paper copies of his broadcasts to listeners across the state and his research for this broadcasts became the basis for his course on the history of region and the state and eventually his magnum opus, The History of North Dakota.  So in some sense, Robinson embraced what some scholars today would call a transmedia approach to scholarship. 

My approach to using the digital and new media in the service of historical and archaeological research shares two features at least with Robinson’s: it is both practical and, as yet, under-theorized.  I am contemplating using the Robinson lecture to try to assign some theoretical or at very least methodological aspect to my use of digital and new media approaches in my own research.  In particular, I am thinking about articulating the notion of digital workflow and its implications in my own archaeological research. 

By digital workflow, I mean the use of digital technologies across the entire range of archaeological procedures from pre-season planning, data collection in the field, and the dissemination of our results across multiple platforms for diverse audiences.  I like to imagine that our deep dependence on digital data and applications shaped not only how we approached historical and archaeological problems but also how we understood the results of our research and imagined the process of scholarly critique as well as pedagogical .  This is, in part, a response to the view of digital technology as merely a tool that scholars and teachers deploy in the ongoing search for truth rather than an “active” participant in the process of determining what truths are significant, knowable, and even imaginable within a particular academic discourse. 

This is a pretty ambitious goal for a 30 minute paper and would reach well beyond my intellectual comfort zone.  It would require me to link the mundane world of field procedures to the more ethereal world of epistemology.  The most obvious point of contact is through an emphasis on documenting archaeology as a performance.  If the performance of archaeological procedure and method is central to the production of authentic archaeological knowledge, then archaeological knowledge would certainly benefit from the growing set of tools capable of documenting efficiently the whole range of archaeological experiences (from the daily grind of excavation to evening banter with colleagues and the reflective moments at the end of a chaotic field season). 

Another, perhaps more practical, example would emphasize how the wide dissemination of applications designed to facilitate collaborative research from Wiki-pages to blogs and the yet unrecognized potential of applications like Google Wave open the door to more democratic approaches to field research as it became easier to distribute decision making and analysis across a more diverse team.  These applications allow almost real-time collaboration across the world blurring the century old division between academic periphery and the center.  While such de-centered projects have clear limitations – our project is often better at identifying problems than establishing a clear course of action – and rest on assumptions of how knowledge production is organized that precede the existence of particular digital applications, digital collaborative workspaces rest upon the assumption that so-called “collective intelligence” is superior to judgment of a single individual serving as director.   

A similar process of relying upon a digital, collaborative environment appears in the way in which the curation of archaeological data will change with the production, storage, and dissemination of archaeological data in digital media.  In past, the careful documentation of archaeological information was largely confined to analog storage devices.  This included film based photographs, paper notebooks (often archived on microfilm), and carefully archived paper illustrations and plans.   Today, most projects have some level of digitization involved in the recording of archaeological information.  Forward thinking project store this data on servers which typically include digital back-ups in their basic infrastructure.  Once on a server, this digital data, unlike its analog predecessors, is available to groups of researchers around the world.  As these scholars use this data, they can typically download some form of the various datasets onto their personal computers, servers, and backup systems, effectively multiplying the copies of the existing archaeological data.  As researchers use the data, they invariably move the information from one format to another for analysis or manipulation and, in some case, they produce alternate versions of the original data (hopefully with a full complement of metadata).  As a result, they participate in the process of preserving the data by ensuring the proliferation of copies and ensuring that it remains in a useable format.  Like the de-centered, collaborative model of decision making, the de-center, collaborative model of archaeological data curation relies upon the (relatively) easy movement of digital data from person to person and from format to format.

The audience of the Robinson lectures is a mix of academics and non-academics.  My talk would largely focus on the part of the audience who still struggle to understand why it is important to develop not only the physical aspects of the digital infrastructure (servers, computers, software), but also the theoretical and practical aspects of the digital infrastructure especially in the humanities (which have remained on many campuses bastions of unapologetically analog thinking).  At the same time, the paper will continue my own effort to articulate in more sophisticated terms the effect of the digital technologies on my own research.

Understanding Early Christian Baptisteries

Over the Christmas holiday, I’ve spent some time thinking and reading on Early Christian baptisteries.  This contributes to a relatively long-term collaborative project with Robin Jensen of Vanderbilt University and Dick Rutherford of the University of Portland, but also to a short-term project of writing an encyclopedia entry on Early Christian Baptisteries for a encyclopedia of world religious architecture published by Cambridge University Press.  So, I’ve spent the break reviewing some very basic works on Early Christian baptisteries and considering how to approach a 2000 word essay on their architecture.

In many ways, the study of baptisteries suffers from many of the same problems that the study of Early Christian architecture faces in general.  There are five major problems, as I see it:

1. Most Early Christian baptisteries, like churches from the same period, lack a clear date for their construction, use, and modification. Many of the best examples of architecture from the Early Christian period (roughly from the 3rd-7th century) were excavated before the middle years of the 20th century and were not subjected to stratigraphic excavations (or at least not published as such).  The absence of stratigraphic information and the archaeological material that allows scholars to assign dates to the relative chronologies produced through careful excavation has made it difficult to determine the degree to which diversity across the entire corpus of Early Christian architecture is the result of chronological changes or simply differences in style, taste, or the needs of a specific community.

2. In fact, it is clear that there was considerable diversity in the architectural forms of baptisteries across a region or even across the buildings in a specific city.  This diversity may reflect differences in taste or a desire to create a distinct space of initiation for admission into a particular group of Christians.  The diverse range of “orthodoxies” among Christian groups present in the Mediterranean basin ensured that any number of different Christian groups could live and build in a particular region.  The Arian and Orthodox baptisteries in Ravenna are clear evidence for this and propose a model that might explain the differences of architectural form in other urban centers like Corinth where several baptisteries of different forms existed at the same time. 

3. Recognizing that different groups may have desired different kinds of buildings is a far cry from understanding why these differences were required. The importance of ritual in the process of Christian initiation suggests that differences in the baptismal liturgy might account for some of the differences.  The known rituals across the Mediterranean reveal considerable variation even among grounds regarded broadly as Orthodox.  It would stand to reason that “non-orthodox” groups would have differed from their Orthodox brethren as well as from one another adding to the considerable variation in ritual structure of Christian initiation.  Unfortunately the lack of chronology for many of our buildings and our uneven coverage of known baptismal rituals mean that liturgical texts can only shed light on the function of Early Christian baptisteries in some areas.  For Greece, for example, we have no liturgical texts at all.

4. Further compounding the uneven distribution of liturgical texts is the diverse range of symbolic and exegetical readings of the baptismal ritual.  Even if a liturgical text provided a blue-print of sorts to the rites involved in Christian initiation, the meaning of these rites derived from the ongoing interpretative work of various communities, church leaders, and even, one must assume, the viewers.  Moreover, it seems likely to me that the rich symbolism and interpretive skill of Early Christians produced multiple simultaneous or even contested meanings for baptismal ritual.  It, therefore, becomes very difficult to assign a single symbolic text to an Early Christian baptistery and then relate this text to a particular Christian community or set of initiatory values.  This does not mean, of course, that it is impossible to interpret the symbolism present in Early Christian baptisteries.  Some symbols like water, the hart, paradise, the river Jordan, and the dove appear consistently enough to present a consistent array of baptismal imagery.  What I mean, rather, is that the diversity of images associated with baptism and baptisteries should discourage us from assigning a single, exclusive meaning to Early Christian space and ritual. 

5. The diversity of meanings in Early Christian architecture is made clear in the practice of literary ekphrasis.  Ekphrasis was a popular genre of Early Christian ritual focused on unpacking and exploring the symbolism present in architecture.  The authors of ekphrastic texts clearly took it upon themselves to produce wide ranging symbolic meaning from even relatively mundane objects in a religious building.  Such extensive architectural exegesis often departed from structural reality which these authors subordinated entirely to their own creativity.  Efforts by modern scholars to reconstruct actual spaces and buildings from ekphrastic texts regularly end in tears.  The goal of ekphrasis was the text itself as a literary artifact and not as an even loosely empirical reproduction of an actual building.  As a result, some of the most detailed descriptions of Early Christian space are, ironically, the least helpful in construction actual practice or architecture, and, instead, reveal Early Christian architecture as a suitable foundation for multiple symbolic regimes.

The challenges associated with our understanding of Early Christian baptisteries and architecture more broadly will likely discourage any scholar committed to understanding these spaces as a manifestation of a single unified ritual or symbolic regime.  (And, in all fairness, I am not sure that there are many scholars committed to this particular approach.)  Instead, the diversity of architectural forms, symbolic regimes, and the ambiguity of chronology begs for interpretations that embrace the multivocal nature of the evidence itself.  Taking the lead from the authors of ekphrasis, scholars might be well-served by exploring the space of Christian initiation as the space susceptible to multiple, overlapping, and perhaps in some cases contested, symbolic, architectural, and ritual significance.  In such a case, the study of Early Christian architecture becomes the study of Early Christian architectures in the same way that Early Christianity has given way to the study of Early Christianities.

Christmastime in Brisbane

Some happy Christmas photos of Brisbane City Hall (with its solar powered Christmas tree) and some architecture from the Fortitude Valley neighborhood of Brisbane.  Plus a photo of irrigation for fun.

Merry Christmas!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transmedia Teaching

The very first series of posts on our Teaching Thursday blog revolved around the idea of EduPunk which represented a combination of outside-the-box educational thinking, the widespread use of digital technologies, and the DIY attitude associated closely with punk rock (check them out here and here).  While EduPunk appears to have been a flash in the pan, the ideas at the core of the movement probably possess more staying power.  In particular, I have noticed a resonance between some of the ideas around EduPunk (whatever they precisely were!) and the notion of transmedia teaching.  

Transmedia teaching is a term that describes teaching and pedagogical techniques that work to create an immersive learning environment which extends beyond the limits of the classroom through the use of multiple, typically digital, media. The idea derives most specifically from the work of Henry Jenkins on fan culture, convergence culture, and transmedia experiences.  Jenkins has recently summarized his ideas on transmedia culture in a pair of blog posts (here and here).  In these posts, he identifies 7 key characteristics of transmedia, or convergence, culture which center on how new and user generated digital media has come to transform the relationship between the original content provider and groups who were once imagined to be consumers of content.  The emergence of a whole series of new media platforms and technologies (such as YouTube, blogging platforms, audio and video mash-ups, wikis and other collaborative environments of various descriptions, et c.) has encouraged both the “authorized” groups of content producers as well as groups of fans to create, manipulate, modify, and expand original content in ways that extended these franchises across a wide array of narratives and into different media environments.  For example, action movies often spawn a whole set of related, authorized video games, a range of sequels and “prequels”, books, music videos, toys as well as “unauthorized” fan-fiction, blogs, and even various forms of adaptation in user-generated environments like YouTube.  The proliferation of related content across platforms represents the core of the transmedia phenomenon as both an aspect of contemporary multimedia marketing strategies, but also as a far more de-centered phenomenon engaging a wide range of fans whose commitment and interest in a storyline, cast of characters, or imaginary world manifest itself in highly dynamic and creative ways.  The interaction between the “original” content producers and the committed fan community can be either sequential – that is fans responding to a creative franchise after it is imagined as, say, a major motion picture – or simultaneous – as is manifest in reality TV shows like American Idol where the “audience” co-authors the outcome of the narrative by voting or otherwise actively participating in the creation of the story.  You can read his original postings here.  

My goal in this short essay is to consider how Jenkins’ ideas could be applied to a notion of transmedia teaching.  Our goals as teachers are largely the same as those of content providers in any media franchise.  We hope that our students become committed to the ideas, stories, methods, and worlds that we create in the classroom.  We hope that the commitment on the part of our students manifest itself at least in being able to model certain behaviors and methods on their own (in, say, a laboratory assignment or as a paper or test) and ideally in our students willingness to internalize the lessons of the classroom (broadly construed) and commit to producing their own content.  We measure student success in generating content by how closely it relates to the rules that we identified as governing the thought worlds of our discipline or a particular method.  What a creative franchise might regard as the best examples of “fan fiction”, we as teachers regard as evidence for learning, a familiarity with content, and the ability to internalize certain methods   These goals, of course, are not exclusive to transmedia teaching, but they do suggest a certain similarity in the best-case scenario outcomes of a transmedia franchise in the sense that Henry Jenkins studies.  

What I’d like to suggest here is that Jenkins’ study of transmedia phenomenon can provide teachers with another way of thinking about how we present and articulate content to our students.  It is worth noting that when I am referring to content here, I mean both formal content (for a historian like myself this would be names, dates, events, places, et c.) as well as methods which are just as often the goal of a classroom environment.  We often teach methods in such a way that makes them a kind of content which is particularly susceptible to transmedia expression.  Media, in this analysis, refers to both the context and the physical (or technical) environment in which students deploy various the various skill sets.  I regularly repeat that the core aspects of the historical method, for example, represent transferable skills; I far less frequently articulate either where I imagine students transferring these skills or, perhaps more significantly, how these skills are to be transferred (much less modeling the process!).  Transmedia teaching foregrounds the idea that skills are transferable by encouraging from the very start the transfer of skills from one media to the next.  Digital media are particularly useful in this regard in that they are ubiquitous in our 21st century world and increasingly geared toward the production and dissemination of “user generated content”.  In other words, digital media provide an almost perfect environment for the easy transfer of skills (or more traditional content) from one medium to the next.  There are clear analogies between taking the critical analysis skills central to historical interpretation from the realm of “historic” texts to realm of critically reading a piece of popular journalism or the creation of a compelling corporate memo and the creation of a plausible argument using the historical method in the context of a blog, YouTube video, podcast, or Wikipedia entry.  Transferring a historical argument across differing media requires an understanding of the basic historical method as well as the commitment to the notion of the historical method (or even well established historical coordinates) as an immersive environment replete with a kind of internal coherence and continuity that makes the creation of multiple storylines, perspectives, and even performative expression not just possible, but desirable (most of these terms derive from Jenkins).  

The work of transmedia teaching, however, is more than just the use of digital space to encourage students to produce their own interpretation of, say, a historical narrative or method, but rather a method of teaching that prioritizes convincing students to internalize an immersive world with particular rules, tropes, characters, relationships, and even events.  By taking a transmedia approach to the pedagogical process from the start, we foreground the transferable nature of the content presented within the classroom environment by modeling its spreadability across different platforms, genres, and media readily available to students in their everyday, increasingly digital lives.  We can also note the attendant benefit of this method is encouraging students to become familiar with the basic digital tools and techniques necessary to manipulate digital media and to imagine these media as sharing common boundaries and limitations of particular worlds of content or method.  

At the same time (and perhaps more importantly!), transmedia teaching would realize that differing media will react differently to different content (whether this content is specific bits of data, content, or methods).   Thus, we would explicitly reject any perspective that regarded media as merely vessels or tools for the dissemination of specific content or the execution of methods presented in laboratory environments, but as active participants in the transference of one skill set or body of knowledge to another context.  In other words, the notion of user generated content at the core of transmedia phenomena requires a knowledge of both the content and the processes whereby the user actually generates content.  In the end, we encourage our students to see digital technologies (and creative places) less as inert tools and more as active participants who produce knowledge, narrative, and methodology.  This move toward viewing media as central to the creation of knowledge is long established and coincides well with the methods that scholars in the humanities employ every day.  We would never read an inscription on an ancient stone block the same way that we would read an ancient text or piece of architecture.  The same process is, of course, true for disseminating knowledge in a transmedia world: the world created in the classroom takes on different manifestations across different media.  By foregrounding this process, we’re emphasizing the transferable nature of skills.

This is all relatively abstract, I realize; so a case-study is perhaps in order.  Over the past several years, I have worked with a wide range of collaborators to present my archaeological research in Cyprus as a kind of transmedia experiment.  Our project has employed a wide range of media and techniques to communicate our discoveries, methods, and experiences to a wider audience.  Our goal has consistently been to create an immersive environment for a wide range of end-users (from students, interested onlookers, fellow scholars, donors et c.) by extending our work across a number of platforms and media.  Over the past 5 years we have produced documentaries in digital video, released series of podcasts interviews with students and staff, created interactive maps, supported the work of a landscape photographer, “tweeted” our day-to-day life across social media applications, reflected on our work and life together across student and staff generated blogs, written reflective essays, documented the site through a series of regular forms and procedures in the field, and published a constant stream of formal reports and articles in academic journals.  The result has been a deepening understanding of the performative aspects of site (that is specific geographical and chronological content) and archaeology (that is as a method and set of regular procedures).  Describing the site to a small digital recorder for a broad “non-expert audience” is different from recording stratigraphic layers in an official field notebook.  Reflecting on the experience of working at the site on a blog is different from preparing a final budget of expenses. Taking systematic photographs of an object or archaeological context is different from taking photographs of the site in such a way to communicate the sense of place to a broader audience.  The different techniques and modes of expression required of these significant shifts in how we present our site and method force us to consider how various different media function within a larger cultural context.  In short, even this rather simple example of the transmedia representation of an archaeological project encouraged participants to model archaeological knowledge as a transferable skill.

Some Random Thoughts on a Travel Tuesday

I am blogging from LAX today and there’s nothing like travel to give me time to entertain random thoughts.  So here are three random, end of the semester, travel inspired thoughts:

1. LAX replicates the city of LA.  The terminals and facilities are dispersed and more or less without a clear center.  Minneapolis Airport in contrast is centered around a gaudy food court and shopping mall with a nice observation deck that lets you look out and watch jets come and go.  LAX (at least the various terminals that I drifted through over this 8 hour layover) makes it pretty hard to watch the plains come and go and almost always involves a trip outside of a particular terminal to find important information like departure times, gate numbers, or even places to eat and chill out on a long layover. 

2. Students. I’ve been pretty lucky this semester.  I had a number of students take the time to send along little notes thanking me for the semester. These are so gratifying!  This semester I taught two completely revamped classes and a graduate seminar that threatened to devolve into a kind of pedagogical trench warfare.  Despite the challenging semester, it was energizing to know that students enjoyed their class and learned something!

3. What I read when traveling: Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker.  I’ve traveled enough this past year to have read almost every issue of the two monthlies.  I’ll also read William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007)). When I asked my Teaching Thursday readers what they planned to read over the holidays, I got one response.  This either means that we faculty need to do a better job of modeling our behavior or that the readers of our blog are unlikely (for whatever reason) to read books over break.

Dipping my Toe in the Public History Pool

Public history is all the rage these days in history programs.  To my eye, the interest in public history is an effort within the discipline of history to connect our work with a recognized group of jobs as archivists, public historians, and at museums.  On the one hand, this is good in that it recognizes that many of our students want to stay in the field of history, but do not aspire to academic positions.  On the other hand, this is part of a larger vocational trend in the humanities that we probably need to monitor.  While there is no reason not to embrace programs which hold forth the prospect of employment for our students, history as a discipline would be weaker if preparing future public historians became the dominant goal of history departments. 

In any event, since our department is looking to get more serious about its offerings in public history, I thought I'd make an effort to see how my work in Greece and Cyprus could contribute.  So in 2010, I am going to offer a small internship program in public history.  Below is a very, very rough fact-sheet on this graduate level internship.  As you can see, many of the details are to-be-determined, but I think it captures the core of what I'd like my internship to do. 

Public History Internship
SP2010

The goal of this internship program is to provide an opportunity to gain experience with a wide range of digital and new media applications that are becoming increasingly central to public history, museum management and outreach, archival work and archaeological curation.

This work will focus on a number of ongoing and completed archaeological and historical projects and tools.

1. Topos/Chora: The Photographs of Ryan Stander. This is a series of photographs and related essays from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The photographs will appear at the Empire Theater for the month of January and then in an online gallery. They will be accompanied by a series of reflective essays written by the archaeologists who participated in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The goal here is to have something up on the web by January 15th and the gallery available for viewing by January 30th.

2. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: A Digital Museum. Since 2003, a team under the direction of Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and me has been working at a site called Pyla-Koutsopetria on the south coast of Cyprus. This project has produced a vast amount of digital data ranging from video to podcast, photographs, text, descriptive data, maps, plans, illustration, quantitative data, et c. The goal of the Digital Museum is to present some subset of this data in a coherent way for the educated public. We have Omeka, online museum software, installed on a university server. This software can provide the base for our online museum.

3. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Data Curation. One of the most important aspects of any archaeological or museum work is the responsible curation of all forms of data. PKAP has recorded a substantial amount of both digital and paper data over the past 7 years. This data needs to be curated. The paper data must be prepare to be deposited in the university archives and parts of the digital data, to be uploaded to Open Context for digital publication. In many ways this curation project is the flipside of the project 2.

4. Lakka Skoutara: An Early Modern Site in the Eastern Corinthia. Since 2000, David Pettegrew and I have recorded descriptive and photographic data from the early modern site of Lakka Skoutara that documented the changes at this site as a result of a whole range of abandonment practices. These photographs need to be put together with textual descriptions in a way that is useful to scholars. This archive will become the online companion piece to a published article.

5. Ohio Boeotia Project at Thisvi, Boeotia. Over the past two years, I have slowly been digitizing the results of an intensive pedestrian survey project conducted between 1979-1982 around the village of Thisvi in southeastern Boeotia. It would be excellent to report the results of this project in a transparent way or to develop an online environment where this work can be highlighted and made accessible.

Goals and Priorities: To some extent, I will let you imagine a set of priorities for this list of tasks, and I certainly don’t imagine that you’ll get all these done. On the other hand, I expect that early on, we as a team develop some sense of priorities in how we plan to attack these various projects. It is important to emphasize that public history projects are almost always collaborative. That is to say that people work together to accomplish a particular task. We are going to work together as a team to accomplish the goals listed below.

Assignments and Responsibilities: Since this is an internship, I will not have a major writing or reading assignment. You should plan to dedicate 10 hours a week to working this internship. I will insist on weekly 1 hour meetings. These will include status updates and are not optional. In addition, you will be expected to maintain a public blog detailing weekly how the various projects are progressing. The goal of the blog will be both to keep you honest (as a team) and to make the progress of the various projects underway transparent to the various stakeholders both at the university and elsewhere. I will expect each participant in the internship to contribute a single blog post a week. It might be best to blog on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. The first assignment will be to select a blogging service.

Resources:

1. Digital and New Media Laboratory. At present we have a single PC, a Linux powered laptop, and a gaggles of very powerful Macintosh computers. Time in the laboratory should be negotiated with the various other users.

2. Published and unpublished reports from Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Ohio Boeotia Project, and Lakka Skoutara (which was a part of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS)).

3. People. Consider me, my various colleagues, and folks on campus potential resources. When in doubt, ask questions. Part of a successful public history project is knowing how to get the information that you need.

Some websites:

http://omeka.org/

http://www.pkap.org/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/

http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/between-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-the-upland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikastorion_archaeological_project/

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It's cold here! So a frigid Friday Varia:

• This is Sebastian Heath's account of the CPAC (Cultural Property Advisory Committee) meeting in Washington, D.C.
• This is an interesting concept: TwHistory.  Check it out. (via R. Scott Moore)
• This is a cool post on the graves of archaeologists.
• The First Cyprus Research Fund lecturer, Michael Fronda, has a book cover!
• This can't be good news for Greece.
• This is strange news.  Tassos Papadopoulos grave was robbed and his body stolen. 
• But this is undoubtedly good new for Bismark and the rest of us who appreciate Aaron Barth's quirky ruminations.
• This is good news: The Kent-Berlin Ostia Excavations got the funding it needed to continue, after almost having to pack it in. 
• Go to Teaching Thursday and tell us what you're reading this holiday break.  There is no excuse not to and we know that you are going to be reading something.  So, please.
• Big news about the 2010 Wilkins Lecture in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota... so stay tuned.
• I've been invited to give the Elwyn B. Robinson at the Chester Fritz Library at UND.  Readers of this blog know my interest in Elwyn B. Robinson so this a particular honor.  More on my subject soon.

Ok, I  better get back to this stack of grading, but I'll check back and update this quick hits and varia over the course of the day.  I am sure there are things that I meant to include, but they just slipped my mind at this hectic time of the semester.

Some Fun Web Data and Some Light Duty Analysis

Some quick notes on Google data for the University of North Dakota Website.  I did this mostly for fun, but the results are sort of interesting...

Google Trends

The goal of this short report is to summarize my very superficial analysis of our site data via the Google Trends interface. I suspect that this report will raise more questions than answers, but some of the patterns in the data are interesting (and perhaps vaguely alarming). As with all things Google, they are relatively opaque concerning what variable go into their analysis, but I suspect that they are more or less stable and the analysis is systematic.

Analysis of und.edu

This first graph shows the number of visitors who visit the website over a 1 day period. This chart compares und.edu (in blue) with ndsu.edu (on red), and as a control grandforksherald.com (in gold). The most curious thing about these graphs is the huge drop in traffic over summer of 2008. This could be a simple matter of the data that Google for analysis, but if it is associated with a particular change in the way that the site was organized, the we should make note that visitors stopped visiting our main domain (i.e. und.edu) rather abruptly and most never returned.

Moreover, the general trend, according to page rank, is that our site (as well as ndsu’s site) has become less popular through time. It is interesting to note, however, that the downward trend appears to be the case will any number of university home pages. This chart adds sdstate.edu (gold) and wichita.edu (green) to the chart. The similar slide over the summer months of 2008 suggest that the pronounced slide in und.edu has at least something to do with how Google collected data.

To compare the decline in the number of visits to main domains, here is a chart comparing four major big ten universities: osu.edu (blue), psu.edu (red), umich.edu (gold or, better, maize), and umn.edu:

They all show similar declines with a slide during the summer months of 2008 (although this slide is far less pronounced at osu.edu).

The rather steady decline of the und.edu domain also appears in the data prepared for Google Ad Planner. Of course, in this context Google is trying to sell us on advertisements, so they have every interest in showing declining visitors, but it is nevertheless interesting:

To this can be added some basic demographic data collected by Google. I take this cum grano salis, but it is interesting to contemplate and there might be so real motive for Google to be accurate here. They make money (actually, almost all their money) from per-click advertisements. So the more people who click on your advertisement, the better they do. Consequently it is in their best interest to provide the user with good data to maximize the visibility and profitability of their advertisements.

Gender

Age

Education

While the data from these charts is probably inconclusive, it seems to suggest that visitors to the main domain of university pages are on the decline. This may well reflect the proliferation of servers on campus (and multiple domains), but I suspect that it also reflects changes in how the web is surfed, with visitors less frequently jumping from main page to main page and more frequently entering into domains through numerous other entry points.

Google Insights for Search (beta) Data

This service provides data on “the number of searches for a particular term relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time” normalized on a scale of 0-100. To begin, I compared the search terms “University of North Dakota” (light blue) to “North Dakota State University” (red). Since these are specific search terms, it is probably worth noting that NDSU is probably better known was “North Dakota State” than “North Dakota State University”, I included searches for “North Dakota State” (gold). I would guess that the higher “North Dakota State” numbers are bolstered by people searching for things other than the NDSU, like state offices or even general information on the state itself.

This graph shows the relationship between the overall number of searches in the specific category of colleges (dark blue) and universities to searches for “University of North Dakota” (light blue), “North Dakota State” (gold) and “North Dakota State University” (red); the dark blue line represents the relative growth of the number of specific searches against searches for colleges and universities in general. Apparently “University of North Dakota” performs better as a “global brand” than in the subset of university and college searches. Note the huge spike in searches for North Dakota State and North Dakota State University precipitated by the flooding last spring!

It is important to note that the downward sloping line does not necessarily mean that the number of searches for “University of North Dakota” is declining, but that the number of searches for this term in relation to the number of searches through Google overall is declining. The line however does decline at a significantly steeper slope than the lines for either “North Dakota State” or “North Dakota State University”. This suggests that the number of searches for our university name have declined more significantly in relation to all searches than searches for our friendly rival to the south.

As a check on this, I also compared Google searches for UND versus those for NDSU, recognizing, of course, that und is a very common word where I don’t thing ndsu means anything (it may be a kind of Asian fungus, but even then a rather rare one). To compensate for this I limited our comparison to the U.S. where people use the word und somewhat less frequently than, say, in Germany. I also did a comparison for North Dakota and Minnesota. UND is light blue and NDSU is red.

In the US:

In North Dakota (with forecasted data):

In Minnesota (with forecasted data):

The results here were surprising. Despite the fact that “UND” is a word, it is still being searched for less than “NDSU” in North Dakota and they are very close in Minnesota.

As another point of comparison for the analysis of various searches, I produced a chart based on searches for “Penn State” (blue), “Ohio State” (red), “University of Michigan” (maize) and “University of Minnesota” (green). The very dark blue line shows the overall searches for the Colleges and University Category.

It clear that the searches for the name of the university reflect the rhythm of academic life (and presumably recruitment), with peaks in September and October. To see whether I could isolate other, non-academic influences, I plotted searches for WCHA (red), “Fighting Sioux” (gold) and “University of North Dakota” (blue). To be safe, I checked the WCHA against searches for “Frozen Four” and found them almost completely parallel. I also checked “Fighting Sioux” against “Sioux Hockey” and found that they carved a similar pattern. In any event, it is interesting to note how little the Fighting Sioux’s end of the season battles has on searches for the term “University of North Dakota”.

Like the charts based on visits to various specific pages and domains, these charts (which show specific searches) also show a decline of searches for broad forms of classification. This chart reflects the decline in specific searches for the name of the university (i.e. University of North Dakota) and it more or less coincides with the decline in site visits to und.edu as a specific domain. The best analysis of this correlation is that visitors to our site (which according to our in-house Google Analytics data have remained relatively stable) are entering through venues other than the main und.edu page and they are not searching for the university through general search terms like “University of North Dakota”.

Thesis Defense: The Representation of Salvation in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Paul Ferderer defends his M.A. Thesis today at 1 pm in O'Kelly 221.  He will be my first student to write in my area of research (the previous group includes theses on Frankish Cyprus, Roman military equipment, and Caesar's Gallic Wars).  So this alone is reason to celebrate.  More importantly, Paul is a great guy.  He worked with us last year in Cyprus and has continued to help manage data this fall.  He is a regular visitor to my office and an expert on the NFL, professional wrestling, and public service announcements.  He also is a thoughtful commentator on the state of evangelical Christianity and longstanding member of our Latin Friday Morning group.  It will be sad to see Paul move on, but wherever he lands will get a first class mind and an all around good guy.

Here's the abstract for his thesis:

This thesis examines four prominent works of monastic literature composed during the third through the sixth centuries and contrasts the representations of salvation within them.  The Lives of Constantine and Antony, The Lausiac History and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers discussed conceptions of salvation in some of the earliest forms of monastic literature.  The contention of this thesis is that in relation to the major works of monastic literature composed during the same period, The Sayings, articulated an existential dimension of salvation experienced as deliverance from sin and manifested in restored communion between God and the believer.  Using genre as its primary unit of analysis, this study reveals the unique theology of salvation found in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

While this study focuses on the early monastic community, it has much broader implications in the study of historical theology and Late Antique religion.  This study’s theological focus contributes to the existing discussions on the holy man of Late Antiquity.  At present, such scholarship remains focused on the sociological implications of ancient religion.  This thesis provides a point of departure for studies of theological texts as works that describe the intellectual history of Late Antiquity. 

The present discourse on the history of Christianity places much of its emphasis on Western Christendom.  Saint Augustine and Aquinas remain the exemplars of Christian thought, and the reformation the pinnacle of the church’s impact on the course of history.  This thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship which probes Eastern foundations of Christian spirituality through the monastic movement and its rich intellectual history.   

He wants his defense to be open to the public.  So if you know Paul or this topic interests you, stop in to see the show!

Small Town Archaeology III pt.2

As promised yesterday, here is the second part of our salvaging expedition to Crookston, Minnesota.  Our goal was a beautiful, 1898, yellow-brick house which was to be demolished in the levy building projected on the banks of the Red Lake River.  The buff bricks immediately tie the house to the building traditions of the Red River Valley.  Numerous brick buildings in the region sport these buff colored bricks produced at either the Crookston or Grand Forks brickworks.  The house preserved some nice architectural detail.

But also some unmistakable signs of age.  The back wall of the house showed significant distress.

It was interesting to see that the builders had arranged a single course of bricks perpendicular to the courses used in the rest of the house (I am sure there is an architectural term for this and I suspect that I knew it once, but now I can't remember it!).  It served as an informal cornice immediately above ground level.

We were not the first salvagers in the house.  Early arrivals had removed much of the kitchen cabinets and counters, but had left behind the two working flour bins with hardware.

They had also removed the carpets from the first floor and exposed in the process the hardwood floors on the lower level.

They had, somewhat aggressively, removed the wooden railing from the interior stair case.

Despite the efforts at salvaging, the house itself retained features common to its age including nicely executed wood frames around the doors, wooden doors with attractive hardware, some well-maintained three-pane windows, and early 20th century duct covers.  We scoped out the situation quickly and decided to attempt the most serious salvaging projects first.  This involved the turn of the century picture window with stained glass insert. The window was held in place by a relatively narrow trim piece that once removed, allowed us to remove the window and pane without any damage. I'd like to think that the stained glass was original to the house.

We then turned out attention to doors (my co-conspirator Bret Weber was in search of 30 inch wooden doors for his roughly contemporary house in Grand Forks) and the duct covers.  My house has forced air hear that comes up through the floor.  We keep saying that we'd like to have in wall ducts and these early 20th century duct covers would complement our 1900 American four-square's architecture.  It was interesting to see that some of the duct covers had lost their ornate little regulators.  Bret pointed out how these small hoops (visible in the top picture below) turned a braided piece of metal (not a screw!) that pushed or pulled a metal flap that opened or closed the duct.  A very elegant solution!

Examining the doors revealed some nice early 20th century hardware.  We expected to see glass door knobs, but the intricate work on the mortise locks, in particular, attracted our attention.  I think that I could see some art deco influences on the design, so my feeling is that these date to the second quarter of the 20th century, but then again, they were consistent throughout the house and it is hard to imagine a systematic effort to replace all the door hardware 40 years after the house was completed.  It is possible that these are original.  The mortise lock and hardware was relatively easy to salvage.

From an archaeological perspective, it was interesting (although unsurprising) to see that all the meters were removed from the outside of the house.  The house was quite literally "off the grid" in that some of the tools which embedded the house within the community fabric were stripped away.

On the other hand, there were all sorts of reminders that the house had recently been lived in.  The reminders of everyday life were haunting.  Christmas lights, an outlet, a marble.