Friday Quick Hits and Varia

I've been slowly making my way along my blogroll and catching up with some of my favorite reads after a couple months away.  As one could predict, there was a bunch of interesting stuff going on over the summer months... Here are some of my favorites:

• Project Blogs
  • Brandon Olson, PKAP alumnus, dedicated blogger, and some of his graduate student colleagues, are blogging from the Mopsos Survey Project in Turkey. 
  • UCLA recently featured a series of posts from the field work of their undergraduate students.  It earned mention in Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog.
  • The Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project (for more about it read here) will begin its 2008 season presently and like the last couple of years will keep a blog.
  • My co-director Scott Moore has continued to post over at his Ancient History Ramblings Blog. 
• Shawn Graham, The Electric Archaeologist himself, has a great little video (now close to a month old) on his work on archaeology in Second Life and has a short contribution on the same topic to a special section of the European Journal of Archaeology (edited by Troels Myrup Kristensen of Iconoclasm), along with several other significant players in the digital archaeology movement.  The only bummer here is that you need a subscription to get access to the articles.  One thing that Shawn did not observe (although it has been observed elsewhere) is that Second Life, as a persistent world (that is to say a virtual world where the work of its participant can remain even after that individual leaves), allows for a kind of archaeological investigation of its own history.  Cruising around the old "mainland" (before the creation of islands) reveals, for example, how the original creators of SL saw most travel through their virtual world in cars on the ground rather than by flying or teleporting.  More interestingly, it is possible to explore numerous "abandoned parcels" created by ambitious designers who have, for whatever, reason left the parcel for new projects.  While traditional formation processes do not effect these neglected corners of Second Life, it is, nevertheless, archaeological to consider the original intentions and meanings of their creators and attempt to piece together a typology of parcels, features, and places.  Also be sure to check out the Shanks and Webmoor post on Second Life at Archaeolog.
• Archaeolog, probably the most intellectually robust and sophisticated archaeological weblogs (not to mention one of the few weblogs that actually make you feel more cool by reading it; it is superhip), celebrated its 100th post.

Comments

[Shawn]

Thanks Bill, for the mention! It was so brutal, trying to make that video, that I forgot in the recorded talk itself to mention just that very thing: the spooky virtual archaeology of the abandoned lands of SL. In my paper for the Brock Virtual Worlds conference last year, I did touch on that, and if you trawl through june-july 07 of my blog, you'll find an audio version of it... sorry I don't have the proper link; am on dialup, everything is painful! Meant to leave this note before my good internet access was cut off...