The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

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”.

One Last Plan and a Final Report

I digitized the last trench plan for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project field season yesterday. In general, we digitize trench plans on the fly in the field directly into our GIS. This allowed us to produce publication quality illustrations (or close to it) while still excavating and allow us to make sure that we have the detail in the trench plans correct and identify problems while the trench is still fresh in everyone's mind. This year, however, we experienced some complicated trench plans that simply defied quick digitization. So the digitizing process was put off until now, when I was finally able to digitize the last trench plan. The plan below shows a trench at the southwest corner of an annex building of an Early Christian basilica. The majority of the annex room was excavated over 10 years ago by a team from the Department of Antiquities. We excavated a trench to the southwest of the main excavated area to both clarify some stratigraphic issues and to determine whether there was more architecture to the west of the annex room.

As you can tell, this plan represents a tremendously complex trench with multiple features and a wide array of material still embedded in the soil. From this confusion, however, the excavator, Sarah Lepinski, was able to discern multiple episodes of destruction and several obvious (if somewhat careless) attempts at repair. In addition to this final trench plan, we now have digitized plans of every stratigraphic unit removed from this trench and these will serve to illustrate many of the episodes in this buildings history.

This plan will be inserted into the final reports that we produce at the end of each field season for distribution to the various organizations that fund our project. Our ability to digitize on the fly directly into our GIS program means that our plans are accurate both to themselves and on the face of the earth (i.e. to other plans on the site). The technology and the cooperation of a great group of trench supervisors has allowed us to produce high quality digital images almost (almost!) instantaneously. The fact that the last trench was digitized in November (rather than years later as is not uncommon) is a testimony to our trench supervisor's diligence and the remarkable pace of technology.

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!

Teaching Thursday: Another View on the Cost of Cheap Education

Crossposted with Teaching Thursday.

It was really exciting to see the interaction between John Tagg and Anne Kelsch who are two of the most thoughtful commentators on higher education to grace this humble blog.  Their discussion revolved around a recent Washington Monthly article entitled "College for $99 a Month" which reviewed the education model offered by companies such as Straighterline.  My post today is less of a critique of their posts and more a complement to it.  I want to offer a slightly different perspective on the same article.

First, one aspect of the original article that was not noted by either Tagg or Kelsch was that introductory level classes have evolved over a particular trajectory in part to satisfy the changing needs of university faculty.  Introductory level classes play a key role in the university ecosystem, according to the Washington Monthly article, by providing income that supports upper level courses, research (particularly in the humanities where external funding opportunities are relatively scarce), and even the physical facilities and services which have become synonymous with university life.  So, the nature of these lower division courses and, in particular, their size has become an important feature in university fiscal ecology; changing one part of the ecosystem will necessitate changes across the ecosystem.  This is not say that this is a bad thing,  but we are all probably aware that the balance between teaching and research is one of the key issues at stake.  Introductory level courses are frequently taught by non-research faculty (often adjuncts).  Redesigning introductory level courses, making them smaller, or changing their relationship to the rest of the curriculum are expensive and potentially time consuming tasks that take time away from research, writing, and other faculty tasks.  The university ecosystem is a delicate thing!  The advantage that companies like Straighterline have is that they employ individuals who are charged only with teaching.  They can offer courses so cheaply because they don't have to manage the complex ecosystem of the modern university.

Next, if changes in the way that we teaching lower level classes will be this expensive and disruptive process within the university ecosystem, we have to consider quite seriously who will bear the costs.  The democratization of higher education represents one of the great myths of the American success story.  At the same time, higher education likes to cling to its elite roots.  Many of the expectations surrounding university life redound with ideals from the earliest days of the modern university.  As Tagg points out when he asks "what is college for?", there is not a single answer that describes the role of college in the development of all students.  Our calls for a university that develops students in accordance with the age old principles of humanism will not necessarily ring true with our entire student body.  In many ways, companies like Straighterline which offer bargain basement higher education packages cater to students who have radically different expectations of their college education.  Universities have long ago absorbed crucial aspects of vocational education which practices across the world have demonstrated can achieve some degree of success without placing emphasis on critical thinking or intellectual development and focusing on the mastery of a set of practices or body of content.  While we can argue that there are better and worse ways to communicate and teach content, the basic goals of these degrees and experiences are substantially different from the goals of fields like history, English, or math.  My point here is that universities have pulled together a wide range of disciplines under a single roof.  At some point in the past, this may have led to economies of scale where facilities and certain core resources could be shared among these divergent disciplines; today, we might argue that this forced marriage of vocational, practical, theoretical, and philosophical education works counter to the basic democratization of higher learning.  Maybe Straigherline can do as well, if not better, than tradition bound university practices which, and here's the catch, are expensive, rooted at least partially in lingering elitism, and perhaps maintained as much for their place within the university ecosystem as any genuine concern about producing a sustainable, well-educated society. 

Part of my evidence for this (and it's a bit circular) is the growing Luddism of many university faculty.  (This critique does not apply, obviously, to Anne's and John's posts; they both demand that we reformulate the very nature of college education which would, in part, undermine the position of companies like Straighterline.)  When I use the term Luddism, I don't mean it to describe an irrational response to technological change, but rather in terms of E.P. Thompson's reading of Luddite radicalism in 18th century England.  He argued (bear in mind I'm an Ancient Historian) that the Luddites were less concerned with the industrial revolution and the mechanization of the cloth production, per se, and more concerned with the incredibly deleterious effects of these changes on the social fabric of their communities.  The violent and superficially futile protests were socially calculated acts meant to highlight the plight of communities which were suffering grievously as a result of industrialization.  Today, I often wonder whether our protests against changes within academia represent a kind of Luddite response to an increasingly dynamic educational environment.  The coming of the $99 university degree may not be inevitable, but university much face the changes brought about by technology, the increasingly challenging global economy, and a dynamic workforce which struggles to relate to the elitist rhetoric that has come to dominate the discourse of higher education.  What I am suggesting is that the response to challenges from places like Straighterline tend to be geared more toward shoring up the existing university ecosystem rather than understanding how such challenges (which are basically symptomatic of larger changes in how education and information is understood in the global economy) will inevitably produce a radical restructuring of university life.

To return to my first observation: that companies like Straigherline do not simply offer a new model for teaching university level classes, but threaten to disrupt the institutional fabric of university life by separating teaching from research, undermining long held faculty privileges (office space, access to libraries, relatively generous pay, support for humanities research, et c.), and repositioning higher education to serve students who view the college degree as a kind of vocational or practical training.  These seismic changes are equal parts terrifying (hence the Luddism) and exciting (hence the quality of Anne's and John's response), but above all demand wide ranging discussions of the kind that our Teaching Thursday blog seeks to encourage and support.  So, if you have an opinion, idea, or comment, post it here or drop me or Anne Kelsch a line and we'll make sure that your post appears on Teaching Thursday. 

Three Little Birds: Pyla-Koutsopetria, Photos, and Ubuntu

The second week of classes is upon us and the excitement of the first week has given way to the somewhat uninspiring bustle of the semester's routine.  But sometimes there are moments, challenges, and successes that seem to propel the week forward and cut through some of the routine.  Here are three such "Little Bird" moments (after the Bob Marley song):

Rise up this mornin,
Smiled with the risin sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singin sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Sayin, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:)

Singin: dont worry bout a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singin: dont worry (dont worry) bout a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right!

1. We had our first meeting to plan the 2010 Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeology Project season yesterday.  Every year, it starts a week or two earlier.  I fully expect our 2011 planning meeting to take place in Cyprus or perhaps even before the 2010 season.  David Pettegrew, Scott Moore, and I convened by conference call and in an efficient hour meeting charted a course of action (subject to change, of course, or at least redirection).  It was such an efficient and focused meeting that it made me glad to work with such capable folks.  In a nutshell here is where we stand.  We decided that we would run a hybrid study season/field school/study tour this year drawing undergraduates from Messiah College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and graduate students from UND and elsewhere.  We also set some deadlines for our work to compile a complete inventory of our paper and digital data for the projects.  We started this considerable undertaking last spring, but it was interrupted (at least on my end).  Now is the time to finish this work.  Our data inventory will be the foundation for writing the monograph.  To that end, we even set deadlines for monograph sections.  We want to have the basic text of our catalog of survey finds, methodological discuss, and our analysis of distributional data from the survey complete by January 15th next year. 

2. One small crisis is our PKAP photograph collection.  We have thousands of field and artifact photos that need to be checked, (re)labeled, and available for study to the directors of the project and their senior collaborators.  We have not developed an image database, but, instead, use the photo's filename to identify the object. It's not a particularly powerful identifier, but for artifacts our unique numbering system locates it spatially and keys it to a proper description in our finds database.  In most cases, the artifact number (and the file name) are visible physically in the photograph.  We feel that the system is pretty ironclad and stable.  The only issue is that because the photo itself contains the artifact number (i.e. the file name) we have allowed ourselves to fall behind in labeling the actual files.  This isn't the mini-crisis, however.  The crisis comes when we have the photos all labeled and checked.  How do we make them available to the team?  We need to be able to download them individually or in batches (e.g. for a trench or a particular area in the survey).  We need our solution to be inexpensive.  And if it is server side software, we need to be able to run it on fairly simple and limited equipment.  In other words, our server folks while helpful and generous, do not want to have to radically restructure their hardware and software infrastructure to accommodate our needs.  Any thoughts on this would be great.

3. Ubuntu.  This is just one of life's small triumphs.  I am now running a Ubuntu powered Dell XPS. Ubuntu has breathed new life into a 4 year old laptop. After I figured out that the ailing optical drive would not function as a port for booting and installing the new OS, I figured out that with a minimum of effort I could boot from a USB drive.  10 minutes later (and one false start, hang, crash, beeping issue), I had Ubuntu running.  It boots in less than 25 seconds.  Seems stable.  Runs Open Office 3.0, Gimp, and Firefox (and soon my new favorite toy Opera 10) without a hiccup. When something that everyone tells you actually works and works just like people tell you that it will... well, it's just a nice thing.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A little klatch of quick hits on an overcast Friday morning:

• Beloit College's Mindset list for the Class of 2013 is a great read.  And it makes you think carefully about any common ground that you imagine will exist between students and and faculty.
• The Personas Project at MIT is pretty cool.  From what I can tell, Bill is much more interesting than William. Here are my results:

• If you haven't checked out my other new media experiment, you could by clicking here.  You should probably follow me on Twitter.
• This is something to think about, I mean, if you are into that kind of thing:

 

• Fortunately, our University president has a blog, at just about the time when other university presidents have twitter feeds (Gordon Gee (OSU), Kirk H. Schulz (K-State), John Maeda (RISD)). Someone might want to point out: if you're in most of the photographs posted on your blog, it sorta undermines the illusion that you are generating the content.  Just sayin'.
• Go read Teaching Thursday and join the conversation
• And some love for the only PR Machine at the University more powerful than the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project: The Institute for Philosophy in the Public Life.  They're showing Casablanca at the Empire Theater on Wednesday.
• Word is that I'll be in my new office sometime next week.  That's the first week of classes. Yikes.
• Rain at the Oval just as the Australian side got their feet under them.  My new opinion is, if you live in a country where it rains all the time, you should not be allowed to host a Test series.

Teaching Thursday: The Rise of a New Luddism

I'll admit to being a bit slow on this, but a couple of weeks ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a short piece in their technology session on taking computers out of the classroom.  The provocative title of the article is "When computers leave the classroom, so does boredom," and it was centered around an interview with José A. Bowen the Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU.  In his argument, he weds the age old argument against lecture-based classroom experience with an attack on Powerpoint (or, as we call it here, The PowerPointer) and urges faculty to use classroom time for discussion rather than Powerpoint based lectures. 

There is nothing revolutionary, of course, about asking faculty to create a more dynamic environment in the classroom and abandoning the nap-inducing nature of the PowerPointer seems hardly a suggestion worth covering in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Moreover, PowerPointer (and other similar ways to organize and project images from the computer onto the big screen) has nearly revolutionized how we teach image based courses like art and architectural history.  In fact, projecting images from a wide range of sources to a class is not at all incompatible with a discussion based classroom experience.  Slides, of course, work, but the simplicity of the PowerPointer works better.  So there must be something else to this.

It seems to me that this article represents a growing stream of Luddism in faculty approaches to technology.  While university faculty will always have as many early adopters of technology as obdurate dissenters, I wonder if there is an economic (sub?)text to some of the more adamant critiques of technology in the classroom.  This is not to suggest that Bowen's critique is particularly adamant, nor that he recommends that we storm classrooms and destroy computers and delete Powerpointer software.  What I wonder is whether the recent increase in critiques of technology in the classroom are less critiques of the effectiveness of technology (as Bowen notes, Powerpointer is an improvement (in some ways) to the old chalkboard or overhead projectors), and more a critique of the way that technology in the classroom is changing the economic and social structure of university life.  Bowen notes, of course, that many of the best research universities are already making lectures from their top professors freely available online (and Berkeley is developing software to make this even easier to do!).  There are established models for online course development that require faculty to abandon control of their courses making it possible for non-faculty employees or adjuncts to "teach" the course (at lower pay rates!).  Of course, some of this conversation has already been played out over "the Wikipedia".  There is a certain vested interest among both content creators (faculty, teachers, et c.) and content providers (i.e. textbook and reference book companies) to undermine the credibility of Wikipedia.  And even if some of their arguments are accurate and compelling, it does not remove the underlying economic motivation. 

The emergence of an educational open market where technology makes all aspects of faculty material more freely available could well be terrifying to old guard university types whose place in the academy depends on their local monopoly on expertise.  Like the followers of Ned Ludd some of them have come awake to the real and potential problems with technology in the classroom and are using these problems to reinforce their own positions.  I don't mean necessarily to tar Bowen's with this brush (although he admits some economic motivations for his arguments), but I do think that his article acknowledges one aspect of a Luddite response.  Just as Luddites were not opposed to technology per se but the changes to their society brought about by changes in the modes and means of production, university faculty who oppose technology often do so in ways that defends their own economic and social positions. 

The scary thing is, of course, that the Luddites failed.

More on Blogging

I try to read the odd book that deals with Web 2.0 stuff or blogging with an eye toward including a couple in a yet-to-be taught digital history class.  I am particularly interested in books that look at the history of some digital phenomena.  The time span for such a history is amazingly small; even the most optimistic readers of the blogging phenomenon don't trace the development of the medium earlier than the mid-1990s.  While interviews, articles in the popular press, and simple human memory go far to provide a foundation for writing "web history", other kinds of primary sources can be amazingly ephemeral and controlled by the vagaries of the roving-robots of the Internet Archive and cached browsers pages.

With this brief word of introduction, I'll offer a few modest observations of Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: how blogging began, what it's become, and why it matters. (New York 2009).  It was a quick read by an accomplished journalist who provided a sound history of blogging from the first autobiographical pages of Jonathan Hall to the recent explosion of political bloggers.  The book focuses almost explicitly on the bloggers themselves with particular attention to folks who facilitated the development of the tools that most bloggers depend upon to engage their craft (folks like David Winer (of XML, RSS, et c. fame) and Evan Williams (of Blogger and now Twitter renown)).  Rosenberg manages to capture the personalities of these individuals in rather vivid style, which is fun even if some of the characters end up reading a bit like generic tech-hipsters and less like read folks. 

What was really odd about the book (and what perhaps separates it from the best kind of history of blogging) is that it deals almost not at all with the folks who actually read the blogs.  These are the people who ultimately made blogging a global phenomenon rather than a hobby for late 20th century ham-radio types.  Of course, blog readers, as a group, are somewhat less interesting.  They range from the bored housewife to the insomniac historian to the unemployed denizen of the public library to the technology consultant, and for whatever reason they found that a blogger out there had similar (or diametrically opposed) interests.  Moreover, these folk had access to the technology to keep up with a blog and perhaps even comment on it through the proliferation of personal computers in the public and private zone.  And these kinds of folks found in blogging a medium capable of producing a compelling message.  The slick Blogger, Moveable Type, or Wordpress, driven presentation, the reliability of the prose (both grammatically and in terms of its adherence to specific language of expertise), the links to other trusted websites or blogs (i.e. a relationship to a trusted community), or even the the relationship of the blogger to certain known and trusted non-internet based entities whether these be universities, corporations, print publications, or even the government.  The authority and influence accessible to bloggers was not simply a development of their own idiosyncratic genius nor was it it simply their ability to tap into or leverage a kind of "surplus authority" floating around the web.  The most interesting thing, to my mind, was that bloggers were able to establish a position of authority in this new media and challenge the longstanding and time tested authority of both general and specialized print publications.  And this wasn't accomplished simply because blogs were "better" or offered "better", quicker, more up-to-date news, it was because the web provided a medium where new relationships formed between authors and readers and from these new relationships new sources and forms of authority developed.

Thus, as romantic an image as Evan Williams cut in Scott Rosenberg's prose, he was only really one side of the equation.  The other side of the equations is a readership who were willing to embrace and trust blogging as a medium for conveying information (in some of the same ways that we (or, ahem, our students) are willing to trust Wikipedia as a medium) or  engage in a public debate with a certain faith their voices will not only be heard, but in an abstract, intangible way matter.  So as much as the authors of the blogs had to feel that they were doing more than shouting into the wind, the readers had to feel the same way.

Unpacking the change in American culture that made this possible requires more than just producing romantic character sketches of cyber pioneers, but exploring the complex intersection of technology, social organization, authority, and the very acts of readership and authorship in the late 20th century.  Blogging didn't just come about because people were willing to "say everything" but because people were willing to read everything.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some fun little notes today:

• First, I experienced the power of social media applications and blogging first hand this week.  On Wednesday, I posted a photo of a curious Egyptian drawing found on the back of a bookshelf in a colleagues office.  I posted a photo of it on my blog and asked if anyone recognized it.  At the same time, I tweeted a link to the blog post.  Within 20 minutes, I had a response, from Chuck Jones, who not only identified the sketch but also confirmed my suspicion that it was done by the late UND History Professor Charles Carter.  By the end of the day I had over 200 hits on the page (up from my summertime average of 70 or 80).  How cool is that?
• If you rock and iPhone or an iPod Touch and have to deal with ancient Greek, you should get Lexiphanes which provides access to the Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon (1924) and the G. Autenrieth, Homeric Dictionary of 1889. Wow. (Thanks to David Meadows at Rogue Classicism)
• Breaking News: Paul Ferderer and I were interviewed by our local ABC affiliate (WDAZ) yesterday about our work this past summer in Cyprus.  The story is set to appear on the 10 pm broadcast tonight. 
• More Breaking News: If you're in Southwest Florida, you owe it to yourself to go and check out the Surf and Song Festival, produced by the famous Fritz Caraher.  And it's for a good cause.  So check out Famous Fritz in the Ft. Myers' News Press here or, if you're  a more visual person, on the Morning Blend on Fox 4.
• Even More Breaking News: I just heard that my new Mac Mini has shipped.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Digital Workflow in an Analog World

One my responsibilities is managing the digital workflow on the project.  This includes migrating information collected in the field from an analog format (mostly text written) to digital formats.  With the beginning of excavation, I digitized the first trench plan yesterday.  Each plan is digitized as it is prepared by the excavator so the following days trench plans can include features excavated the previous day (if these features remain in the trench -- like a wall or a particularly immobile stone).  The digitized plans provide the excavator with a tidy model of their previous days sketch. The worry, however, (and there is always a catch) is that they will freeze with the sketch the interpretative process.  This is not a huge worry for something like a single stone which is rather less susceptible to changes in interpretation than, say, the top of a complex wall.  Once the wall appears on a trench plan as illustrated it can, of course, be changed by the excavator (and we encourage them to change their illustrations as often as needed!), but I wonder how the crossing of the digital/analog divide will influence a trench supervisors understanding of the interpretative processes.

As another example, Scott Moore and I celebrated (with a bag of chips and a fruit juice) the reading of the last unit of survey pottery from the intensive survey the we conducted from 2004-2007.  Scott dutifully recorded pertinent data on over 8000 batches of artifacts (close to 20,000 artifacts total).  He recorded all the information on a prepared form and these were keyed into the project database.  The process of digitization transforms the objects from physical, three dimensional artifacts to bits of data organized into tables.  These data can then be searched and organized according to the analytical needs of the project.  Like digitized trench plans the transition from analog (or even "real") artifacts to digital artifacts ossifies or freezes certain analytical functions.  Like the authority vested in the written word, digital data resists the kind of reinterpretation that more traditional analog forms of data encourages in an archaeological context.  An object or a notebook entry seems inherently more susceptible to recatagorization and change.

The trick with digital data and central to the documenting the digital workflow is to annotate somehow the changes to digital datasets that occur as they move from an analog state to a digital state (and any changes that almost inevitably occur within a digital state).  In a notebook or on a handwritten form it is easy to strike out an earlier interpretation or statement and replace it with a newer one.  The paper copy, then, preserves a record of the changing interpretations, mistakes, and to some extent the archaeological thought process.  An important secondary issue is how to preserve this process in digital form -- especially in a way that embeds the process of change in the visible representation of the data (not in hidden metadata, the name of which implies a secondary aspect to the data itself).

More scanning and digitization today... and I hope that an answer reveals itself as I continue to modify and refine the workflow from the analog to the digital.

Crossposted to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Season Staff Blog.  If you haven't already, check out the PKAP Blog Aggregator.