The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Friday Awesomeness

Some quick Friday awesomeness for the weekend.

First, if you're in Toronto, check out Dimitri Nakassis's talk at the Royal Ontario Museum. Dimitri is a valued member of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project and helps us connect the Aegean Bronze Age with the evidence for the same period on Cyprus.

A second burst of awesomeness comes from this photo of a poster at Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Stapleton Library. Scott Moore, PKAP co-director and my co-editor of the volume, Archaeology and History in Roman, Medieval, and Post-Medieval Greece, was a bit miffed that the book had dropped below the 3,000,000 sales rank on Amazon (3,082,125 to be exact), so he fired up the ole Scott-Moore-IUP-PR machine. Ashgate should be braced for the influx of new orders. I just ordered two more myself.

Go read Teaching Thursday, UND's Graduate School blog, and (pre)texts.

Finally, it's Ohio State - Michigan weekend and Richmond - William and Mary weekend. Two great rivalry games and three schools playing good football right now (sorry, Michigan). This story about Mirror Lake on OSU's campus is just gross. Go Spiders and Buckeyes!

Have a great weekend!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some links on a cloudy Friday morning.

• A long time ago, I wrote an online article on Blogging Archaeology. Now I wonder whether I should write an article on archaeology and the new(er) media. It's exciting that projects are beginning to use Twitter to keep stakeholders and the general public interested in their work. Check out the Gabii Project's Twitter feed followed me the other day, and I'm glad they did! They continue a tradition a practice we used during the PKAP season and the Ostia Antica excavations used to chronicle their fieldwork. I love my tweets from Research News in Late Antiquity and Chuck Jones' ISAW Tweets. Anyone have any idea who was the first project to Tweet from the field?
• It would be fantastic to produce an index of good archaeological video on YouTube.
• The effort to save Michigan State's Classic's Department has moved to petition stage. Over 800 signatures so far. I wish I understood the situation there better.
• This is a cool blog design.
• Really busy day on Teaching Thursday yesterday. Check it out.
• Firefox is 5 years old. The Wordpress folk noted Firefox has crept up on Internet Explore consistently over the last few years. Now it accounts for 45.7% of visitors to their blog. This is up from 32.8% in 2008 and 30.7% in 2008 and 2007 respectively. (via Scott Moore)
• This is how you teach (via Chuck Reynolds)
• It's so cool that Arranged Delirium is back.

Have a good Friday and weekend.

Varia and Quick Hits

A few random quick hits on a sunny and warm fall midmorning:

• A real nice excavation website by the Norwegian team working at Tegea in Arcadia. Word is that they will be working around the Thyrsos basilica this next summer.
• This week the "Big Digs" Go Digital Symposium happened in Athens. It's a symposium co-sponsored by the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens:

" to explore shared opportunities and challenges for large-scale German and American excavations in the Mediterranean in the digital age. The project is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA). Initially, this website will act as a forum as private collaboration but, as the project progresses, it will also become a tool for publicly disseminating the results in the hope that lessons learned will benefit other institutions investigating collaborative ways to support digital scholarship."

It's a cool program and initiative, but I wish they would make the proceedings of their symposium more public. Those of us struggling with the process of digitizing "little digs" and surveys would love to see and understand more clearly how the big boys do it.

• Anne Kelsch's piece on Teaching Thursday was linked to from an article in the New York Times. Teaching Thursday is now global and world wide.
• The Australia v. India one-day international yesterday was pretty exciting.

Now back to preparing the data for the Ohio Boeotia Expedition.

Have a great weekend.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Some quick hits on a cold and blustery Friday morning:

• Hawth's Tools and Doc Savage's ReprojectMe! are becoming more and more important tools in my GIS tool kit. Both are great boons to any archaeological GIS work.
• Teaching Thursday this week garnered an almost record number of hits. Check it out. And if you're at the University of North Dakota and have something to say... drop me a line!
• I am beginning work again on digitizing the results of the Ohio Boeotia Project (1979-1982) around the town of Thisbe in Boeotia (oddly enough). I am writing this blog to avoid commencing with data entry.
• This is a week late, but Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009, came out. Academic bloggers feature almost not at all. So much for being important.
• PKAP Alumna makes good. This is a nice article about Sara Fortnam's continued involvement in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.
• This is either super strange or transcendently wonderful: Cry for Byzantium. You can follow the 5th century A.D. via a Twitter feed. As of now, it has 172 followers, which is pretty good!
• This is a follow up. You can now own a piece of history: a motorized La-Z-Boy used by a Minnesota drunk driver.
• Be sure to cheer on the Phillies tomorrow night.

That's all for today because I have to get onto data entry!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

A sunny, but cold Friday and just a little assortment of odds and ends:

• Everyone should follow the North Dakota Museum of Art on Twitter.
• I Tweeted this article yesterday, but it deserves to be blogged: "Minnesotan admits to drinking, then driving motorized La-Z-boy". It's stories like this that cause my wife to ask "where have you taken me to live?" (but there is nevertheless something vaguely Australian about this story).
• A new blog, by an old friend. Check out Grace Cheow's blog on design and Chicago.
• Check out the inside workings of the UND Graduate School.
• This is gross and super strange.
• The population of Rome from the perspective of a tech-dude. "Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20k employees)."
• A very quick note about Omeka. There is no batch delete. So don't upload 900 photos and then decide that you need them to not be there.

Stay tuned for podcasts from our panel at the Modern Greek Studies Association meeting, an effort at describing the future work of the Working Group in Digital and New Media, and some more GISing next week.

And Go Phils!

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Some quick hits on a sunny and cold Friday morning:

• The famous smiley water tower in Grand Forks met its end this week. The local water tower painted with a smile and wink in 1977 was dismantled despite the controversy surrounding its importance to the local community.
• I've begun to experiment with Omeka and hope to have some kind of exhibit of material from the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project available by early next year.
• I've also started blogging with ecto. So far, so good.
• Finally, Ryan Stander and I received an invitation from Kickstarter and hope to have something up and ready to go by the end of the month.
• If you haven't read Teaching Thursday, you should.
• Via, Objects-Buildings-Situations, the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens has opened its reinstalled Post-Byzantine collection.
• It's fantastic to see the new home of the Digital and New Media Working Group coming together. Photos soon.

More soon, but in the meantime, have a good weekend!

Friday Quick Hit and Varia

A gray and cold Friday for some quick hits:

• Some really good posts from Tenure Radical lately.
• 70,000 hits at Electric Archaeologist... congrats!  And it's nice to see that Archaeology of the Mediterranean World did its part.
• New York graffiti artist and University of North Dakota alumnus Richard Patterson (of the famed O'Kelly Graffiti Wall) will be on campus October 5th to do some new work and talk about it in the Anna Mae Hughes Room in the Hughes Fine Arts Building.
• Congrats to the NL East Winning Phillies.
• Be sure to check out Teaching Thursday and the schedule for the Reflecting on Teaching Colloquium on October 16-17 at the Memorial Union on campus.  We are looking for someone to live blog parts of the conference.  If you're interested drop me a line!
• Check out kottke.org's user stats and follow the links to similar stats from other blogs.  I'll put together some for my blog on a Metadata Monday.

So, it felt like a slow week in blog world... and maybe it was.

Have a good weekend!

Some Friday Quick Hits and Varia

It's been a busy week!

But too many fun web discoveries to pass up on a quick hits and varia.

• The Staffordshire Hoard.  Pretty amazing stuff and with all the recent interest in Late Antique/Early Medieval trade, this hoard is certain to contribute in some way to broader conversations about the earliest European economy.
• Making Map: DIY Cartography.  Kostis Kourelis turned me onto this blog with it's slight edge of punk-ness via the DIY ethos.
• The Sound of Phillippe Starck as a 24 hour stream. 
• The Graduate School Blog here at UND has been particular productive lately.  They have embraced blogging better than any other division on campus.
• The photographs coming from the Australian dust storm are amazing.  As is this satellite image.
• Be sure to check out Teaching Thursday.
• Things are coming together for the exhibition of Ryan Stander photographs.  Keep your eyes on this spot.

Have a good weekend!

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

First, thanks to all the folks who showed up yesterday at Michael Fronda's lecture.  We had a great crowd (>70 people!), a great talk, and a nice reception afterwards.  Special thanks go to the Department of History, and the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and the University of North Dakota Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta who helped with the preparations.  I hope to have a podcast of the talk posted soon.

Now a handful of quick hits on a beautiful Friday morning:

• This is a cool post at the Electric Archaeologist on teaching online.
• The blog revolution continues at the University of North Dakota.  I just discovered that the College of Arts and Science has a blog.
• This is a pretty neat installation.
• Dinner tonight.
• This may be the best post on this blog.
• Arranged Delirium is back.
• Phyllis Graham passed onto me two nice links related Pikionis and his work around the Acropolis in Athens.  One was a short note on an effort to reopen a cafe on the Philopappou hill designed by Pikionis in the 1950s; the other is a brief autobiographical excerpt from his work A Sentimental Topography.

Have a great weekend!

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Some quick hits on a rainy Friday morning:

• If there was any doubt that R. Scott Moore is the Gigapanda, then this spectacular photo should dismiss them forever.  Check out his gigapan of the Larnaka Salt Lake.
• I rushed out and purchased a Pogoplug for all my internet based storage and distribution needs.  Cute package, seemingly easy set-up, but it might not run on my university's internet.  This is a bummer.
• Both Archaeology of the Mediterranean World and Punk Archaeology got shout-outs from Middle Savagery which was nice.
• The blog at The Graduate School at UND and from the President's Office still seem to be alive.  That's a good sign.  It's disappointing, however, to see that few folks have taken advantage of the comments section on either blog.
• Mashable has a short post on "10 Must-have Firefox Extensions for Students". 
• You can follow me on Twitter or on Tumblr.
• Make plans, like now, to attend the inaugural Cyprus Research Fund lecture co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Department of Political Science and Public Administration.  It's next Thursday at 4 pm in the East Asia Room of the Chester Fritz Library.  It will be delivered by Michael Frond and entitled "Anarchy, Rivalry, and the beginnings of the Roman Empire".  Who doesn't like anarchy.  Here's the flier: