The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Artifact Level Analysis and Places of History

Over the last few weeks, I've been working with David Pettegrew to finish writing the analysis of the survey data from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP).  Followers of this blog know that this work is a long a term project and involves challenges both on the level of analysis but also organization and description.  In other words, we've been working to figure out both how to interpret our survey results, but also how do we organize and describe this data in way that is useful to scholars who are likely to ask different questions from the one's that our survey set out to consider.

The biggest challenge is moving from the highly granular, artifact level analysis of individual groups of pot sherds to the level of historical time and space.  After all, very few important things happened in the space of a pot sherd or in a time framed absolutely by the life-span or production cycle of an individual vessel.  It is essential to aggregate sherds, space, and time in order to produce historical arguments.  The chronological ranges for artifacts through time depend, in particular, on our understanding of ceramic typologies based on the fabric, shape, and in some cases decoration.  These the chronology assigned to these various typologies are not necessarily meaningful in a historical sense and can be quite individualize to particular objects.

In other words, artifact level analysis is separate from the process of interpreting artifacts across the survey area as chronologically and historically meaningful groups.  Part of the interpretive process involves grouping artifacts together into more or less contemporary groups of object.  This process involves judgement on our part and cannot be applied in the same way across the entire assemblage.

As an example, our analysis of material representing activity across our site from the Classical to Hellenistic (BC 475 to BC 100) periods involves artifacts dated to at least 8 different, overlapping chronological ranges: Archaic-Classical, Archaic-Hellenistic, Classical, Classical-Hellenistic, Classical-Roman, Hellenistic, Hellenistic-Early Roman, and Protogeometric-Hellenistic.  In contrast, our analysis of activities on our site from the Roman period involves artifacts dated to three chronological ranges: Roman, Early Roman, and Late Roman.  Our ceramicist established the date ranges for individual artifacts largely based upon dates established through stratigraphic excavation and completely independent from our interpretation of the site as a whole.  It is common for individual classes of artifacts to receive have different chronological ranges. A sherd from a cooking ware pot might represent a vessel-type produced over a 500 year periods (say, any time during the Classical-Hellenistic period), whereas a fragment of fine ware might derive from a vessel produced during a 4 or 5 decade span of time (say, the early 4th century).  Each of the objects receives a different date and chronological range when documented in the survey area. As a very general rule, utility wares tend to be produced over longer spans of time than fine and table wares, but this has no necessary impact on how and when they were used.

The process of interpreting the artifacts documented by our ceramicist involves us aggregating these objects into chronologically, functionally, and spatially meaningful groups.  Past human activities took place in particular spaces and made use of object produced at different times and for different functions. To produce a picture of what happened in the past at our site that has meaning within these human terms, it is necessary to group together material with different date ranges into assemblages that have meaning in human terms.

For example, here are various maps showing some of the periods aggregated to produce our analysis of the Classical to Hellenistic period at our site:

Archaic-Classical Period

Classical Period

Classical-Hellenistic Period

Classical-Roman Period

Hellenistic Period

Hellenistic-Early Roman Period

To understand trends at our site from Classical to Hellenistic period, the data contained in each of these maps must be analyzed together.  Occupants at our site may have used coarse ware datable only to the Classical-Roman period alongside table wares dated more narrowly to the Classical period.  The Classical period table ware may have represented a households investment in public display, the same household may have stored their agricultural wealth in a series of amphoras that have forms and fabrics used for over 500 years.  To establish the potential spatial relationship between these two activities in an archaeological setting, it is necessary to plot artifacts assigned to different chronological ranges across our site in order to produce assemblages that reflect historical activities.

This task is central to the analysis of artifact level survey data and is the key interpretive move in mediating between the results of archaeological work and historical events in the past.  Our goal as we work to prepare this kind of analysis for publication is to keep this interpretative move as transparent as possible.  Transparency, while sometimes tedious for the reader, opens our analysis for critique on both evidentiary and methodological grounds and reinforced the idea that archaeologists produce the landscape that they interpret.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A lovely fall day here in Grand Forks, so here are a little gaggle of quick hits and varia:

• This is a pretty nice little piece about advising graduate students.
• This is a great interactive video project on life in the Global Highrise.
• The 2010 National Survey of Student Engagement is out.
• A nice report on how students evaluate research information.
• The University of North Dakota and social media: A Soft Yes.
• More social media at the departmental level.
• Even more on social media.
• This is pretty depressing cricket (at least from an Australian standpoint).
• What I'm reading: Laura Salah Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Culture. Cambridge 2010 (via Dimitri Nakassis)
• What I'm listening to: Clinic, Bubblegum (via Kostis Kourelis)

Teaching Thursday: The (Teaching) Revolution will not be Blogged

X-posted to Teaching Thursday.

This blog post is an effort to understand the fairly lackadaisical interest in participating in the Teaching Thursday blog among my colleagues at the University of North Dakota.  It got me thinking about the nature of teaching conversations and whether they are suitable to a blog.

Anyone who follows the happenings on the internets is probably familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's recent article in the October 4 New Yorker: "Small Changer: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted".  In this article, he argued that the connections produced by such social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are "weak ties" which are unlikely to hold up to the kind of social pressures that real revolutionary action will both require and endure.  He begins his article with the students who participated in the revolutionary Greenboro sit-in of 1960 and noted that the four participants had deep social connections as roommates at North Carolina A & T or as friends from high-school. These social connections, characterized by regular physical proximity to one another and a significant body of shared experiences, enabled these four brave students to have the confidence to imagine radical ideas and to maintain their resolve in the face of adversity.

Other pundits, like Clay Shirky, have challenged the idea that such dedication is necessary to generate revolutionary change.  Shirky, particularly in his most recent book Cognitive Surplus, has argued that the internet and social media sites become conduits funneling myriad rivulets of surplus energies together making the great deluge of internet knowledge possible (manifest in sites like Wikipedia and The YouTubes).

These two positions intersect with the mission of this blog.  The idea for this blog was to capture the hundreds of short (and long!), thoughtful, creative, conversations about teaching that go on weekly across campus into a central place.  The hope was that the blog could become an alternative source for stimulation for busy colleagues who missed a great program offered by our Office of Instructional Development or were not in the hallway at the second two colleagues were unpacking a tricky issue or did not have a moment to read the newest book that presents a new solution to the latest problem. Over the last three months, I extended this effort to Twitter once again trying to funnel energy and ideas from across campus into a single conduit.

Follow us on Twitter at OIDatUND!

So far, the blog has had its moments, but they have been few and far between.  Over the last three months, I've been promised many, many blog posts, but always "in the spring semester" when, of course, the songbirds return, the snow melts, and other obligations drift away on the first warm, scented breeze.  I expect that some of these posts will come to enliven our blog, but even these contributions (which I know will be excellent), do not really represent even a fraction of the exciting conversations I have had about teaching.  Of course, we are all busy, all of the time, and finding time to write is a challenge.

Having read Gladwell's article, I began to wonder whether the experiences of teaching actually resist blogging as a medium for communication. Perhaps this is because so much teaching on campus represents spontaneous responses to spontaneous issues.  Could it be that our day-to-day teaching activities - a troubled student, a particularly bad classroom experience, or a brilliantly successful assignment - all exist within such a complex matrix of variables that communicating how something succeeded or failed in writing would be either a monumental task unsuited to the limited medium of blogging or somehow impossible to articulate in a useful, generalized way?

In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that understanding how to become a better teacher is impossible through public reflection -- obviously the research conducted by various academic departments in teaching and learning have both real practical value and a robust disciplinary tradition -- but to wonder whether many of us on campus do not think about teaching in a way that lends itself to even the modest structure of a blog post.  Teaching is an emotional experience full of frustration and excitement as we join the struggle to achieve goals that, in most case, are very difficult to articulate.  Of course, we can all enumerate formal learning objectives, classroom goals, content expectations, and the like, but I wonder whether these are the things that really motivate us as teachers.  For me, teaching is about realizing goals that extend far beyond the classroom.  These goals are resistant to clear quantitative or even qualitative evaluation and they often exist at the fringes of my ability of articulate them in a rational way at all.

In short, maybe this blogging experiment reveals the limitations of media dependent on the kinds of "weak ties" that Gladwell assigns to Facebook friends and Twitter colleagues.  Face-to-face meetings, intimate seminars, conversations over strong beverages, and hallway insights depend upon the strong ties of shared experience to have value.  Extracted from that context, everything seems mundane and hardly stuff that matters.  The teaching revolution will not be blogged.

Book Reviews and the Blog: A Case Study

About 10 months ago, I blogged about Ann Marie Yasin's new(ish) book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean.  I offered a quick review of it, mostly centered on a series of hastily composed observations.

Here's a link to that quick review.

This summer, I was asked to review the book for real, in a print journal, one that appears in paper, and goes to libraries.  This is the first time that I was asked to review for real something I had already reviewed in the old blog.

Here's that review:

Yasin Review Oct2010

For people who struggle to wrap their minds around the difference between a blog and a formal print publication, perhaps these two reviews will shine some light on the issue.  I think that there are subtle changes in style, content, and tone.  As I was writing my blog post, I considered my audience to be someone who might read the book one day.  When I wrote the print review, my audience became someone who was unlikely to read the book ever.

A Comparison Between a Survey Assemblage and an Excavation Assemblage

For the past few months, David Pettegrew and I have been "publishing" the preliminary results of some experimental analysis conducted over the past year at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project on Cyprus.  As part of the experimental component to our project we were interested in documenting the relationship between the surface assemblage and the assemblage of material produced by excxavation

The archaeological fieldwork conducted on the elevated height of Vigla provided us with an opportunity to compare assemblages produced by intensive pedestrian survey and the excavation of a trench in the survey area.

Longstanding critiques of survey have suggested that the relationship between the surface assemblage and the subsurface material is too problematic for survey to be a technique used to produce a comprehensive view of the landscape. While it is true that there are more variables in the formation processes that impact the creation of a surface assemblage, we should be aware of the potential for a false dichotomy. Excavated assemblages are every bit as much a product of formation processes as those on the surface and as a result, we always have to temper our interpretation of past events with the understanding of the archaeological record as the product of a whole range of physical and cultural transformations. The goal of this comparison then is not to test the surface assemblage against the subsurface material, but rather to suggest that their correspondence indicates that the area may have endured similar archaeological processes.

As with all of our experimental units, the comparison is influenced by significant differences in the spatial comparison between the two sample areas. The surface area of our trench EU 8 represented only 6 sq meters; The two survey units 500 and 500.1 combined to covere over 6000 sq m. Any comparison of area, however, is problematic; the trench had volume and the relatively two-dimensional surface of the survey area did not.

  

The excavation unit produced significantly more ceramic material. The excavation unit produced over 4000 artifacts. By comparison, we counted anywhere from 366 to close to 1000 artifacts from our survey of various areas on the top of Vigla (depending on surface conditions and the number of walkers available), and these samples allowed us to estimate an overall artifact density of between 15,000 – 11,000 artifacts per ha. These are astronomical densities by any reckoning.

While we counted every artifact visible in our 20% sample of the surface, we collected artifacts using the chronotype sampling strategy which required us only to collect each unique type of sherd from each swath.  Using this technique in two campaigns of field walking on Vigla, we collected 963 artifacts with a weight of 27.6 kg.  In contrast, we collected and analyzed every artifact from the excavation area and this resulted in over 4000 artifacts, but this assemblage weighed less than 10 kgs more (37.0 kg) than the assemblage collected from survey.

The nature of the chronotype sampling method used in the survey makes it difficult to find a metric to compare the quantity of material collected from the survey against the quantity of material collected from excavated contexts. The key point for evaluating the correspondence between the two assemblages is not necessarily the quantities of material but rather the presence or absence of material indicating particular activity, periods, or material types present in the area.

Comparing the period date between the two collection strategies reveals that the survey collection produced more chronotype period categories (16 compared to 14) and nine of the periods represented in the survey assemblage were also represented in the excavation assemblage. In general, the survey material represented a longer chronological range with material from later periods present on the surface including material from the Late Roman, Medieval-Modern, and Modern periods. The excavated area, in contrast, produced more material from narrower periods and at least one object from a period earlier than those represented in the survey, a sherd potentially dating to the Bronze Age (for more on broad and narrow periods, see here). This artifact appears to pre-date the earliest phases of architecture present in our trenches and may not represent a past activity on the site. In general, the material from both the survey and the excavation overlap, but the excavation material offered slightly more chronological resolution than the material from the survey.

The diversity of chronological periods in the survey material would appear to extend to the chronotypes represented in each unit. The excavation produced 54 chronotypes, while the survey unit produced 57. There are 30 overlapping chronotypes between the two collection methods. While the different sampling techniques make it difficult to compare the assemblages in a meaningful way, the quantity of material from each area nevertheless provides a very basic matrix for comparing the relative quantity of various types of material from each unit. The survey and excavation both produce a significant number of artifacts from the three rather general chronotypes: 'Coarse ware, ancient historic', 'medium coarse ware ancient historic', 'kitchen ware ancient historic'.  The excavation also produced a significant proportion of material from two additional chronotype that were poorly represented in the surface assemblage: 'animal bone' and 'fineware, Hellenistic-Roman, Early' which made up 6.6% and 5.5% of the excavated material respectively, but less than 1% of the material from the survey. The absence of animal bone on the surface of the ground could be an issue with visibility (white and tan bones do not stand out as well against the buff colored soil) and certainly preservation. 

It is notably harder to compare the potential range of activities present in the area. The chronotype method of collection privileges larger, better preserved sherds (walkers will often discard small or poorly preserved sherds if they find larger examples of the same chronotype). It also tends to under represent very common chronotypes in proportion to the total assemblage. In other words, there are fewer examples of chronotypes such as “medium coarse body sherd, ancient historic” in the survey sample in part because field walkers were instructed not collect multiple examples of this very common type of artifact. In the excavation, excavators collected every example of a “medium coarse body sherd ancient-historic” causing sherds of this type to make up a larger proportion of the total assemblage.

This tendency can be seen in the relative size of artifacts collected from the survey and excavation. From the survey, the collected artifacts were much larger and this probably reflects both our field walkers’ tendency to select larger sherds more frequently than smaller sherds for collection and the difficulty seeing the smallest sherds on the ground from a standing posture. These two tendencies combined to produce an average survey artifact weight almost 30 g as compared to the average size of an excavation sherd that was under 9 g.

The fabric groups present show some significant differences in the assemblage that we can largely trace to different sampling strategies. The survey unit preserved more coarse ware (47%) whereas the majority of material from the excavated unit was medium coarse ware. The weight of the two fabric groups as a percent of the total assemblage sheds more light on the situation. Medium Coarse wares from the excavation represented 53% by volume, but only 22% of the assemblage by weight. In fact, the average weight of a medium coarse ware sherd is less than 4 grams. In other words, many of the medium coarse fragments of pottery from the excavation are quite small, and these sherds are the most likely to be overlooked during survey. Cooking/kitchen ware, coarse ware, and amphora represented the other significant parts of the excavation assemblage. As the chart below indicates the percentage of weight is significantly different from the proportions determined by counts. In weight amphora and coarse wares combine to make up the majority of material.

The material from survey shows different proportion, but these proportions are significantly biased by our sampling technique that suppressed the collection of redundant artifacts.

Coarse ware is the most common fabric group by quantity and makes up the majority of material by weight. Amphora sherds, which tended to be handles or very large body sherds, represent a massive quantity by weight, but significantly lower percentage by quantity. The opposite is true of medium coarse ware and kitchen/cooking ware.

Similar tendencies are visible from rim-base-handle-sherd analysis (for more on R-B-H-S Analysis, see here). 

The results of this comparison suggest that for the height of Vigla the most major differences between the assemblage produced by survey and that produced by excavation are tied to the different sampling strategies used in these different contexts. At the same time, the basic patterns present in the survey assemblage were also present in the assemblage from the excavation.  The presence of material from the Classical and Hellenistic period, the presence of fine ware, kitchen/cooking ware, and utility wares, and the almost complete absence of earlier material allows us to argue that the site was first occupied in the Archaic to Classical period, saw domestic activities, and then was used less intensively in later periods.  This close correlation of survey and excavation assemblages reflects, in part, the stability of the soils on Vigla and the relative lack of erosion, on the one hand, and the lack of intensive activity during later periods, on the other.  In other words, the surface assemblage and excavation assemblage enjoyed similar sets of formation processes which produced similar assemblages. 

Brief Review of CLIR and Tufts: Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classics

This weekend, I finally made it through the most recent report on cyberinfrastructure and digital Classics.  As the title of this post indicates, it was produced by the Council on Library and Information Resources and Tufts University, a longtime leader in the field of digital Classics.  The report is massive, running to over 250 pages, and gives a feeling of exhaustiveness.  The bulk of the report consists of a series of case-studies organized into the various allied- and sub-disiplines of Classics (Philology, Archaeology, Papyrology, Epigraphy, Prosopography, et c.).  For most case-studies there is abundant technical detail as well as some information on the guiding principals of the project, intended end-users, funding sources, and institutional affiliation. There is a pronounced emphasis on the core area of Classics and the analysis of texts of various kinds (inscribed, on papyrus, in edition, et c.), and with this emphasis on texts comes a corresponding emphasis on mark-up technology, collaborative editing, and various image-to-text initiatives like Greek and Latin OCR.  The report's scope, detail, organization and bibliography make it a must read for anyone interested in the work of digital humanities, digital Classics, or the future of the discipline Classics.  It is the type of report that any graduate student going on the job market should at least skim to become familiar with the basic terms, programs, and projects in the field of digital Classics.

While I am hardly qualified to comment on the content of the report, a few things struck me as worth pointing out:

1. New models of collaboration for new kinds of texts.  The most exciting thing about this report are the new perspectives on scholarly collaboration. At the center of these new perspectives are a set of new tools and collaborative environments which are designed to produce new kinds of texts.  In general, these texts are dynamic, multilayered, and designed to take into account both the work of numerous contributors. The next generation of scholarly editions, for example, will be increasingly transparent allow the end user to understand the processes that produced certain editorial decisions and, if necessary, filter the various editorial decisions to produce new versions of a text in keeping with new analytical, interpretative, or methodological positions. The same collaborative environment extends to epigraphy, papyrology, and even archaeology (in some way) where scholars have developed ways to work together to pool resources from around the world and to create new groups of texts. These new collections of texts are born digital, making specialized bodies of material (like epigraphical and papyrological corpora) more widely available, and more susceptible to re-analysis and re-interpretation.  The scalability of digital technology allows multiple scholars, a wide-range range of end-users, and diverse digital objects (texts, images, and interpretative methods) to all exist in the same place at the same time. These are new, transparent, and productive scholarly environments.

2. Human infrastructure.  There is no doubt that the projects described in this report are exciting, but I felt that the report took the notion of cyber-infrastructure a bit too literally at times.  In places the projects described by the CRIL and Tufts teams stood strangely disembodied from larger social, institutional, and professional pressures and incentives. While the report made an obligatory mention of studies of scholarly collaboration, professional pressures, and potential end-users, I was not as easily able to grasp the creative environments from which these innovative programs sprung.  In particular, I struggled to identify the research questions or, more broadly, the scholarly discourse that inspired these new approaches to age old problems.  I recognize, of course, that large-scale digital initiatives often take into account a wide range of initiatives, research questions, and stake holders, but at the same time, scholarly collaborative while sometimes altruistic, rarely exists without some common research objectives. Moreover, these research objectives must exist in an environment where administrators, technical staff, and colleagues have the interests and the resources to promote and encourage innovation. The human infrastructure necessary to support cyber-infrastructure projects, to my mind, is far more crucial to their long-term health than the relatively ephemeral character of technical detail.  And this human infrastructure extends to how we teach students and the nature of academic and scholarly expectations. With more dynamic and robust tool available, it is curious that the willingness to avail oneself to these tools remains, to some extent, optional within the academic discourse. In other words, the eventual success of a digital infrastructure project will depend on the willingness of an editor, a peer reviewer, or a conference panel to expect a scholar to use a particular corpus of material.  The human infrastructure, then, represents a dense and complex web of knowledge, traditional practices, and support infrastructure that, to my mind, is far more important than the tools and vision at the root of a cyberinfrastructure project.

3. The Social and New Media.  Another slight oversight in this comprehensive report is the absence of any real discussion of the role of the public backchannel in Classics cyberinfrastructure.  By digital backchannel I mean both blogs and the growing role of social media in stimulating discussion among scholars of the ancient world on topics both digital and traditional.  I am not one of those people who think that blogs are the new academic journals or who even press for new media spaces to carry substantial weight in tenure, promotion, or professional development decisions. On the other hand, I have argued that blogs occupy a novel and useful place in the expanding digital information ecosystem of Classics.  And bloggers and their blogs, like many other larger, more integrative digital infrastructure projects, have not come to terms with the tricky task of curating and preserving the huge quantity of analysis, discussion, and even knowledge produced through these new media.  With the growth of Twitter, Facebook, and other even more ephemeral social media portals the issue of curation has become even more tricky. If we imagine social and new media applications as playing a role in our digital future as scholars, then these outlets have to become part of the conversation of the digital future of the discipline.

4. Mobile Futures.  Finally, I was surprised that mobil computing did not occupy a more significant place in this report.  If I understand the global trends in computing, the future is in mobile devices and applications. In fact, I read the report on my iPad. I do realize, of course, that some of the mobile computing "revolution" will involve us just doing on a mobile device what we've always done on a laptop or a desktop, but there is also a trend toward re-imagining how we work and how we disseminate data over mobile devices.  As we look ahead, it seems clear to me that mobile devices, the cloud, and even greater degrees of integration and communication will produce new challenges for curation and new opportunities of realtime collaboration.

As I said at the top, this report is a roadmap for anyone interested in the state-of-the-art in digital Classics and presents a brilliant case study for the impact of humanities computing in one field.  Any gaps or oversights, are incidental and tied more to the goals of the project than any shortcomings of the authors.

 

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It finally feels like fall here.  Cold.  So some various varia and quick hits for a cool and cloudy Friday:

• A cool GigaPan of the Cave Art of Niaux.  While you're GigaPaning, be sure to check out Scott "The GigaPanda" Moore's GigaPans from the Pyla-Koutsopetria.
• The good folks at the Center for History and the New Media rolled out the beta test of Omeka.net yesterday.  Here's the page.  Sebastian Heath already has a page.  We await his review!
• From the November 2010 issue of the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History: How is New Media Reshaping the Work of Historians?.  And more on a similar theme with the list of Digital History panels at the AHA Meeting in 2012.
• Some pretty clever posts on a brand new blog called The Aporetic: Googling Peer Review and Peer Review and the Public Sphere.
• The Geohistorian is a really cool place based history project.  Their really straight forward presentation "Using QR codes and mobile phones for learning" is the best of its kind that I've seen (here's a link to their powerpointer (.ppt))
• This little video has gone viral (in certain circles).  It's not my favorite thing ever, but its a pretty clever take on the challenges facing anyone interested in getting a PhD in the humanities (although the people who seem to find it funniest, mostly have jobs).
• This is a pretty cool little article-like thing on early telecommunications in Australia.
• Jay-Z in the Wall Street Journal: the very fine line between "blowing up" and selling out.
• The Awl in the New York Times.  See previous bullet point.
• More and more on student's use of eBooks and Apps.
• This is pretty cool: Arne G. Breke Bygdebok Collection (if you don't know what that means, it's not for you!)
• The American School of Classical Studies is (1) videocasting their lecture series this year and (2) inviting cartoonists to speak.  When I recorded a couple of presentations at the School for podcasting, there was interest, but some skepticism.  Now they have embraced the technology.  Imagine how much better a world we'll live in if scholars can't just give the same lecture over and over again, because they'll know it will be recorded and available for the public.
• What I'm listening to: The Clinic, Internal Wrangler and, in memory of Ari Up, The Slits, Cut. (both via my music consultant, Kostis Kourelis)
• What I'm reading: David Forgacs ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader. (New York 2000).

A Defense of Asynchronous Teaching

x-posted to Teaching Thursday.

Recently, I've been talking a good deal with one of my favorite interlocutors on teaching matters, Bret Weber.  He and I approach online teaching in different ways.  While I hesitate to speak for him, it seems to me that his online teaching emphasizes more cohort building, realtime interaction, and incremental assignments with set due dates.  This approach has suited his students, his teaching goals, and his program (Social Work) well.

My approach to online teaching is almost the complete opposite.  When I first developed my idea for online teaching I wanted it be as experientially different from the classroom as possible.  I was probably overly strident in my efforts to establish this difference and romanced by change for the sake of change. Whatever the cause, I developed a radically asynchronous model for teaching my History 101: Western Civilization class.

The class has 2 deadlines, and one of those deadlines is optional.  All work must be done by a date toward the end of the class so that I have some some time left to grade the inevitable onslaught of papers and assignments.  All the course material is available from the start of the class.  The only optional deadline is an optional midterm paper that, if the student decides to write it, is due at the mid point of the semester.  If a student opts out of this midterm paper, he or she must write a final exam paper that brings together all the content of the class.

The lessons in the class are organized into 15 folders numbered for each week.  So students are guided to engage a body of material and assignments each week.  Each weekly folder includes readings, a quiz, a discussion board post, and, in many cases, one or two potential paper topics.  Along with the cumulative paper, students must write two other 3-5 page papers analyzing historical documents from the class. All the work from the all the weeks is due at the end of the semester.  In general, I grade two or three weeks at a time as assignments come in.  Assignments that come much later than two or three weeks behind the weekly folder inevitably get less attention, but the students know that I grade on schedule and give greater attention to work submitted in a regular and consistent way.  I use a Twitter feed and announcements to remind the students to keep up with the course and to let them know where I am in terms of grading material.

This system has certain risks.  For example, I regularly write off the last two weeks of the semester to grade the papers from all the students who leave the work in the class to the last minute. These assignments tend to be, generally, of a lower quality, but the average grades for all assignments are not significantly lower than in my classroom classes where I tend to have more regimented deadlines.  It appears to be the case that this system probably leads some students to do more poorly on their papers which they leave to the last minute. On the other hand, it also appears that some some students do better than they would in a traditional synchronous course, and the students with better outcomes tend of offset the students who perform less consistently.

Aside from the assessed results of the class, his system does offers some additional benefits as well:

1. Flexibility for Students.  Teachers have always bemoaned the absence of face-to-face contact with students in an online environment.  My online classes have attracted students from around the world and across the country.  Face-to-face time would be impossible with these students even leveraging all the technology available to maximize realtime communication in an online environment.  Moreover, many of my online students have lives that make regular schedules difficult.  Online teaching gives a student who works on oil pipelines and needs to be far from civilization for weeks on end, a way to begin a university education. To me this is a good thing, and an asynchronous course, particularly at the introductory level cultivates diversity in our classes and expands the democratizing aspects so close to the heart of higher-education.

2. Flexible Engagement. One of the most challenging parts of creating a class schedule is attempting to address how different students will engage course material over the course of the semester.  For every assignment that some students master easily, other students, particularly in an introductory level course, will find challenging.  An asynchronous course allows students to engage material at their own pace and, moreover, allows different paces to exist in the class at the same time. It is interesting to see the natural divisions among students as small cohorts of students form and engage course materials at similar paces over the course of the semester. In a course of 70, about 10 students stay precisely on the weekly schedule, another 10 or so may fall the occasional week behind, and a third cohort of 10-15 students are never more than 2 weeks behind over the course of the semester.

2. Flexible Assessment. One of the best things from a faculty standpoint of asynchronous teaching is that it restricts the bulk grading experience to one occasion at the end of the semester.  During the semester there is a constant trickle of two or three assignments a day.  I tend to assess assignments on a weekly basis and contribute to the online discussion board slightly more often. I find that grading the slow trickle of assignments over the course of the semester gives me far more time to make substantial comments on student work.  Moreover, it gives an advantage to students who can make reasonably consistent progress through the course.  I've found that even students with the most complex schedules rarely fall more than a couple weeks behind if they attend to the course in a serious way.  The half of the class that maintains a good schedule of engagement over the course of the semester tends to get the kind of substantial comments that allow their work to improve over the course of the semester.  Students who turn in all their work at the end of the semester do not get the same benefits as students who approach the course in a regular way.  They not only tend to get less sustained comments on their work, but also have less time to develop skills and improve on the skills introduced over the course of class.

Asynchronous teaching is not a perfect system for all classes.  I might suggest that that it works best in larger, introductory level courses. It does little to accommodate  unmotivated or undisciplined student who can easily leave their work to the end of the semester or to set deadlines. My experiences has been, however, that these students tend to struggle in any learning environment and  the asynchronous system only exacerbates these issues.

Working Group in Digital and New Media Annual Report and Open House

On Thursday, the Working Group in Digital and New Media at the University of North Dakota will host its first open house and release to its various stake holders its first Annual Report.  The open house will run from 12-1 pm in the Working Group Lab 203 O'Kelly Hall. The open house and report seek to highlight the activities of the Working Group over their first year.  There is still a bunch of work to maximize the potential of this group, but there is momentum and opportunities for collaboration abound!

Since readers of this blog participated in some way in the development of the Working Group (loyal readers probably remember these posts: Potential for Digital Humanities at UND, A Digital Humanities White Paper, and Selling the Working Group in Digital and New Media), I thought it was fair to leak a version of our Annual Report on my blog.  The various members of the Working Group contributed to the Annual Report, I edited it, and Joel Jonientz designed it.

Here's the executive summary from the Annual Report:

The Working Group in Digital and New Media emerged as the result of funding awarded from the President’s call for collaborative and transdisciplinary white papers in his New Initiative funding program. The Working Group is dedicated to the support and development of digital and new media projects across the disciplines on campus. Beginning in the spring of 2009, the Working Group has created a laboratory space uniquely suited to collaborative digital and new projects developed across campus. To date these projects have brought together contributors from the departments of Art and Design, Music, History, English, and Computer Science, as well as the Chester Fritz Library and the ITSS High Performance Computing Cluster. Faculty and students have produced a dynamic and diverse group of projects ranging from video shorts, musical compositions, to online and gallery museum exhibitions and collections, and blogs. Statistically, the Working Group projects accounted for over 2500 person/hours of work, over 15 faculty and student collaborators, and close to 20 major creative and research projects. The Working Group created the intellectual and technological infrastructure necessary for over $35,000 of internal and external grants in its first year alone. In the hyper-competitive realm of non-STEM funding, the collaborative infrastructure Working Group in Digital and New Media gives faculty in the arts and humanities a significant edge. The transdisciplinary research, creative activities, and teaching of the Working Group’s members will continue to leverage the common space of the Working Group Laboratory to expand collaborative research and creative activities on campus.

And here is the Annual Report:

WGDNM Annual Report

Hesperia, Offprints, and the American School

Yesterday I had one of those little thought-provoking coincidences that make you wonder about how things could be done better.

At 11:44 am I got an email from the American School of Classical Studies publication office concerning our soon-to-be-published article on fortification around Ano Vayia.  Our article will appear in the next issue of the American School's journal, Hesperia. The email asked us where we would like our 50 complimentary offprints sent and whether we wanted to purchase 50 more for $150. Hesperia offprints are really lovely things. They are stapled, on high quality paper, impeccably edited, stylish in design, and include a nice, glossy cover.  In short, the $150 price for 50 does not seem unreasonable.

At 1:45 pm that same day I received a form-email from Jack Davis, the Director of the American School of Classical Studies. It was their annual fund-raising email.  The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is one of my favorite things in the world.  The institution played a key role in anything that is good about my professional development and no matter how long I am away, still has the feeling of a home-away-from-home. I have benefited three times over from their generous fellowships and these fellowships have led to my dissertation and numerous publications. I have come to appreciation the American School for its awkward and paradoxical blend of things traditional and things contemporary and "modern". By not shying away from some of the most traditional aspects of a classical education (e.g. the flavor of the Grand Tour that pervades the Regular Program), the School encourages students to reflect on the practices and institutions that have created the disciplines of Classics, Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, et c.  Because of these things, I am in the habit of giving money to the American School.  I can't give much as an Assistant Professor at a state school in North Dakota, but I give my proverbial widow's mite.

Back to the coincidence: In the same day, within hours, the same institution that was asking for money also offered me that very day something for free.  This got me to think: what if we as contributors to Hesperia just turned down our offprints?  Now, I recognize that the circulation of offprints continues to play a small role in the "academic gift economy".  But, as I began to try to make a mental list of people to whom I'd like to send offprints, I was counting far fewer than 50 individuals.  Moreover, many of the people on that list would probably just as soon have a digital offprint (a handsomely formatted .pdf file) suitably disgraced with some personal note of thanks. The digital offprints of Hesperia are every bit as high quality as the print offprints with good resolution on photographs and searchable text.  Moreover, of the handful of people to whom I'd send offprints, almost all of them have access to Hesperia.  Less than a month ago I had a conversation with a resolutely "olde skool" American School type and offered to send him an offprint of my forthcoming article. He smiled, thanked me, and said, that he subscribes to Hesperia. (I knew this, of course, but apparently even among the "olde skool" the ritual component of offprint exchange had fallen into disuse.)

All the same, I can anticipate some people saying that some individuals still keep paper offprint files and some of our European colleagues take the circulation of paper offprints quite seriously and some offprints serve as valuable contributions to small, highly specialized and underfunded libraries (say at the local office of the archaeological service).  The high quality of a Hesperia offprint makes them almost something of intrinsic value.

On the other hand, I am pretty sure (although I won't admit to doing this) that we can still print out a copy of a Hesperia article, scrawl some heartfelt note of thanks of the first page, and present it to a colleague as a token of thanks.  Maybe this violates copyright?  I'm really not sure, but I can hardly imagine this to be the kind of practice that the International Copyright Police would enforce, and it would guess that it would be possible for Hesperia to give authors permission to reproduce a certain number of copies of their own articles. (Although it would be awesome to be approached by a neatly dressed Nigerian man outside the Agora in Athens with a stack of slightly blurry photocopied Hesperia offprints...).

One more thing, Hesperia offers to let us purchase another 50 offprints for $150. Since Hesperia articles tend toward the long side, I assume that this price represents the average cost of printing 50 offprints, perhaps with some small compensation of watering down the copyright (in other words, perhaps they factor in that some people will receive an offprint and will decide not to purchase the journal, but I can't imagine that this represents a very large group).  Last year, Hesperia published 17 articles and if $150 is the average cost of a run of offprints, then they spent about $2550 on offprints.

If every contributor over a year just said, politely, no thank you to offprints from Hesperia, we could, in effect, give the American School Publication Office a gift of $2500. I suspect that each of us would have to turn down all of our offprints because printing enjoys really significant economies of scale, and it seems fair to assume that these economies are realized at 50 copies of each article. I know some contributors will still want to "kick it olde skool" and will want to have their shinny Hesperia offprints, but I also suspect that, if given the option explicitly, a percentage of hipper, new skool contributors would turn ours down.  And I'd like to think that Hesperia and the American School would appreciate this little gift.