The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quick hits for a cool and raining and busy Fall Friday:

• The most exciting thing this week is Steven Ellis' Pompeii project being featured on the Apple website for its creative use of iPads.  I had a chance to work with many of these people at Isthmia and I can attest that their use of the iPad at Pompeii was more than just a gadget exercise.  The technologies actually made excavation more efficient and appears to have made it easier to document their trenches more thoroughly.
• A new and really useful Teaching Thursday this week featuring 25  some starter tips for online course design and teaching.
• I'm beginning to like covers of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" better than the original.  Check this out. (inspired by Chuck Jones who posted a link to this)
• Big announcements from Zotero.  My Zotero use had declined since I started using Chrome more often.  The recent announcement that Zotero was going to be cross platform and even create a free-standing version is great to hear.  And this post from ProfHacker sets out some of the most exciting aspects of these developments.
• These videos of Peregrine Falcon and Goshawk with cameras on them are crazy.  I wonder how the cameras effect the birds aerodynamics?
• The Atlantic put together a canon of major works on technology.  There are some omissions but over all, it's pretty good.
• I need to finish up my paper for the Corinth in Contrast conference next week.
• I received a vote for tenure from my department this week.  Thank for all the encouragement and support!
• What I'm listening to: Crocodiles, Sleep Forever and this free EP from the fantastic Fat Possum.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It's a beautiful but chilly fall morning, ideal for a little gaggle of quick hits:

• There is an interesting article in Vanity Fair that looks at the role of Athonite monks in Greek financial crisis.  The economic power of monastic communities in both Greece and Cyprus evokes the role of monasteries in Byzantium.
• An Ian Morris interview offers a few gems: "The past sucked" and "The ancient distinctions between East and West will be irrelevant to robots". (via Dimitri Nakassis)
• Twitter as narrative and as mind-streaming.
• A new Teaching Thursday yesterday reminds me of some of the challenges from teaching my first class as a grad student years ago. (And if you don't, follow us at OIDatUND on Twitter)
• It's great to see Kostis Kourelis blogging again and his post on the Masons of the Morea is great piece of mini-scholarship (also inspired by Dimitri Nakassis).
• What I'm reading: R. Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture: unity, diversity and empire. Routledge 2005.
• What I'm listening to: Saccharine Trust, We Became Snakes; Busta Rhymes, When Disaster Strikes; The Walkmen, Lisbon.

Have a great fall weekend!

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

It's a rainy and dreary Friday.  So just a modest list of quick hits:

• I put in my tenure application yesterday.  This is the first page of it to give you an idea of the number forms, and forms about forms, and forms summarizing the work summarized on other forms. I found it too difficult to include my blog in the official paperwork for tenure, but I think it will lurk in the background to some extent.
• The future of reading.
• This is a pretty fantastic site that considers computers as historical objects.
• A little press for my Fall of the Roman Empire class.
• There will be some announcement regarding this post in the next few weeks.
• There are two people who I follow on Facebook whose posts are so amazing to me that I want to collect them and create a Tumblr of them.  They're models of what not to say as an academic in a new job or searching for a job.  But they're also a kind of poetry of frustration and professional unawareness that make them somehow more wholesome and honest.
• This is a great weekend for sports: Formula One, NASCAR at Richmond, great college football, first weekend of the NFL, and some great baseball pennant races.
• What I'm reading: L. Revell, Roman Imperialisms and Local Identities. (Cambridge 2009)
• What I'm listening to: The Urinals, Negative Capability... Check it Out!, The Minutemen, Acoustic Blowout.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Lots of little things on a sunny but windy Friday before a holiday weekend.

• An interesting, if a bit peculiar article, on the Landscape of Digital Humanities (via Sebastian Heath who offers some technical notes)
• An interesting and FREE book about the design aspects of Obama's Presidential campaign in 2008.
• This is a supercool customizing video based on a good Arcade Fire song.  The power of the intertubes!
• Have you checked out this week's Teaching Thursday (an advertisement for myself!)?  You absolutely MUST follow us on Twitter.  Do it!
• My wife's awesome new content-driven marketing site "Grad Stories" is now up.
• The tech blog Techcrunch claims that 31% of its traffic yesterday was from people using Google's Chrome browser.  For the past month at this blog, Chrome only represents 10% of my traffic.  Firefox produces 37%, IE runs 35% of my visitors, and Safari runs about 12%, Chrome comes in at 4th, with Opera holding strong at just under 4%.  I might need to do a meta data Monday to contextualize these result.
• The blog for the Kent-Berlin Ostia Excavations is one of my favorites.  Their recent post on using remote controlled helicopters to photograph the site from the air should have Scott Moore reaching for the nearest tech grant application especially in light of our less than successful Kite-o-blimp experiment this summer.
• This Esquire article from 1971 on the "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" is really great (via kottke.org).  The language of using blue boxes to hack the phone system reminds me of William Gibson's descriptions of the "jacking in" to his imagined internet.
• If you're a reader in South Florida, you should be excited for the 3rd Annual Surf and Song Festival in Fort Myers.  You can even follow them on Twitter.
• I'm totally bummed that Mohammed Amir, the great young Pakistani bowler, has been caught up in the recent spot fixing scandal and now struck from the ICC awards list.  This is a cat from Taliban controlled areas of Pakistan who was a thing of beauty to watch bowl (even as he was dismantling Australia and being cocky about it!).  I hope that his career and reputation survive.
• What I'm reading: Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming out Colleges and Universities (Knopf 2010).
• What I'm listening to: Dinosaur Jr., You're Living All Over Me and Dinosaur.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

Some quick hits on a windy, but sunny Friday morning:

• Some really cool imaginings of what a new American currency could look like here.
• Tim Caromody is both really smart and increasingly ubiquitous.  Here are his thoughts on reading revolutions and here are his thoughts on the so-called Philadelphia blogging tax.
• This is a perfect page to look at while listening to the punk rock.  Great photos.
• Some thoughtful and careful research on why academics blog.
• 4Chan is pretty wild.
• Go and check out Teaching Thursday this week to find what OID will be to next year.  And while you're at it follow us on Twitter.
• What I am listening to: X, Los Angeles.
• What I am reading: Michael Azarrad, Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground.

A Few Quick Hits at the End of a Busy Week

Not much in the way of time to explore the interwebs lately, but a few heres and theres:

• I've been thinking about Sprawl especially as I listen to Arcade Fire's new album.  I re-read William Gibson's Count Zero this past summer (on the flight to Cyprus, in fact) and it is among Gibson's "Sprawl Trilogy" along with Neuromancer and Mona-Lisa Overdrive.  These books inspired Sonic Youth's track Sprawl (from Daydream Nation) and this track may or may not have come to inspire the penultimate song on Arcade Fire's album the recent album Suburbs (for what appears to be a reference to this, check out this otherwise ordinary review in Spin). 
• Tim Carmody one of my favorite New Media Academic Hipsters is blogging this week at kottke.org. If you don't already check out his usual blog, Snarkmarket, on a regular basis, you should.  He edited one of the more clever (and probably fleeting) little collections of reflections on the New Media entitled the New Liberal Arts.  UND almuni and New Media Design Hipster, Rex Sorgatz, contributed.
• World Archaeology has a nice collection of assorted article on 'archaeology and contemporary society'.  It has a cool introduction by John Schofield, who I think is pretty bright.  I haven't read much of it yet, but did notice that there were no articles on archaeology and music (via Dimitri Nakassis).  Punk Archaeology remains untapped.
• And more teaching news, Anne Kelsch, the Director of University of North Dakota's Office of Instructional Development (and the patron of Teaching Thursday) is now on Twitter complementing the Office of Instructional Development's own Twitter feed OIDatUND.  So you can see the leading edge of our new social media presence.  Which brings me to...
• Checked out the most recent Teaching Thursday?  It's fantastic!

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It's still pretty dark here in North Dakota so it's a bit hard to predict what the day will be like, but it nevertheless seems like a fine time for a short quick hits and varia.

• There's some activity over at Punk Archaeology.
• And there is some really good activity at Teaching Thursday. And my collaboration with the Office for Instructional Development at the University of North Dakota has extended to include a Twitter account (OIDatUND).  Follow us!
• This is a pretty neat blog post on an archaeologist's relationship with their tools.
• Kurt Vonnegut on semi-colons: "Don't use semicolons. They stand for absolutely nothing. They are transvestite hermaphrodites. They are just a way of showing off. To show that you have been to college." (via Kottke.com).
• Google Kills Google Wave.  Google announced that they would no longer develop Google Wave, which to me is sort of a tragedy.  I quite liked Wave and saw it's potential in the classroom. In fact, I used Wave to coordinate an practicum on public history that I ran with a small group of graduate students, and it worked really well to integrate "real time" communication (particular walking a student through an operation on a piece of software) with "more traditional" types of "bloggy" or discussion board type written communication.  Anyway, I wonder if the very deliberate and gradual roll-out strategy made it difficult to gain the kind of critical mass of adopters necessary to make Wave a useful tool.
• An interesting NYTimes article "Wringing out Art of the Rubble in Detroit" that complements my recent little essay on Detroit as a context for punk and spolia, and a great radio interview with Queen's Brian May on NPR. (both via Kostis Kourelis)
• It's curious that Marcus North has such a strong hold on a spot on the Australian Test side.
• What I am reading: Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs : a Low Culture Manifesto. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad.
• What I am listening to: Arcade Fire, The Suburbs.

I'm off to Greece so the blog might be a bit quiet for the next couple of weeks or not.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It's a rainy Friday before a (hopefully) sunny weekend, so we have some fun varia and quick hits to get your day going right.

• A nice response to my short review of T. Huston's Teaching What You Don't Know.  There is nothing more humbling than advising graduate or undergraduate research. Student research consistently reminds me how much I don't know even in my own field and energizes me with new and refreshing approaches to familiar topics. Most importantly, however, student research reinforces the importance of process in my own work.  It makes me want to be more systematic, more organized, more exhaustive.
• Punk Archaeology is back.  I have a couple of most posts brewing in my brain. But the blog might not last for much longer, so if you haven't checked it out, it's probably best to do it now.  And fear not, something else is in the works.
• I started using HootSuite this week (instead of Tweetdeck).  While I appreciate the aesthetic of Tweetdeck and actually like the Adobe Air built interface, it may be the Hootsuite is more useful as I look to juggle several Twitter accounts this fall.  So it's Hootsuite on my laptop, Seesmic on my Android Phone, and Tweetdeck on my iPad.  But to read my social media on my iPad nothing beats Flipboard.  For a cool little review of it, check out this post on ProfHacker.
• I also purchased a copy of MarsEdit this week. I've been looking for blogging software for my Mac that would rival the simplicity and ease of Window's Life Writer.  I tried Ecto for a year and found it just a bit too quirky for my taste. (Actually, I was annoyed that I could not change the font size of the text I was writing without changing the size of the font in the blog).  I like MarsEdit better.
• As an historian with a serious professional interest in archaeology housed in a history department, I am increasingly aware of how the professional credentials amassed in my strange interdisciplinary space do not neatly align with those of my colleagues.  For example, I do not get any explicit credit for running my own archaeological project and my collaborative publications (often with 3 or more authors) - standard practice among archaeologists - does not look like the more solitary scholarly efforts of my colleagues.  In any event, I was interested to see how closely my work fits into the new set of best practices for Public History recently approved by the AHA, OAH, et c.  Check out the details and commentary at Found History.
• This is a cool article on how to use Kickstarter to fund a publishing project.  It gets me thinking about Phase Two of Punk Archaeology.
• Marcos Ambrose is leaving JTG Daugherty Racing at the end of this year.  I hope he manages to upgrade his ride.  Rumor has it that he might move over to fill one of the two vacated seats at Petty Racing.
• England v. Pakistan will show whether Pakistan is really that good or Australia is really that bad.  So far, England appears committed to keeping things interesting.
• What I'm Reading: R. Price, trans, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553 : with related texts on the Three Chapters Controversy. (Liverpool 2009); Hesperia 79.2; M.T. Fournier, The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime. (New York 2009)
• What I'm listening to: The Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

This week has been an exciting one at the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.  We hosted our first guest blogger, David Pettegrew, who gave us an overview of the work this summer at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  David's review of the season will continue on Monday, in the meantime check out the first three posts:

PKAP Season in Review
Processing Pyla-Koutsopetria Pottery
Experiments in Intensive Survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria

So other odds and ends:

• Imagine! Using blogs, photos, and other "new media" techniques to get students to engage with their experiences while studying abroad.
• I love the idea of using QR codes .... somehow.  I can imagine a world where the barcode on a book in the library serves as a QR code and opens to the student various user-generated data attached to that specific books. It could be anything from book notes, to citations for a good review, another book that challenges the author's thesis, tips on getting the most from the book, advice on reading time.  At the University of North Dakota, at least, these bar codes are unique to our library and not particularly stable (e.g. when a book loses its bar code a new one is simply added and a attached to a book's record).
• In more important news, my favorite cheap beer (I am not hip enough to drink PBR) is undergoing a facelift.  Miller High Life has a new(ish) look. Don't worry, the lovely High Life lady continues to feature in the new design (after all, she is the oldest icon in American brewing).  Check out the critique here.  My favorite aspect of the High Life is the shape of the bottle which was designed to evoke a Champagne bottle and its moniker: the Champagne of Beers.
• I am not sure exactly how I would use this software, but I have to admit Notational Velocity is pretty slick. It allows you to take notes quickly on your computer and, more importantly, find those notes in a super efficient way.  The program follows many of the basic guidelines of hipster software: it lacks most bells and whistles, is open source, and does what it does really, really, well.
• Planned Obsolescence and a flurry in the Twittersphere reminded me that it has been five years since Ivan Tribble's famous and critical Chronicle article on blogging.  This article and the responses probably motivated me to start my blog more than any other (even though it took me another two years to overcome my worry about the technical aspects of blogging).  It made me think that I was going to be doing some transgressive, that I would be upsetting people like Tribble, and that I was defying convention and somehow making my life and career more notable.  (I suspect this is the same reason why I took a year off after I finished my Ph.D. and before I went on the job market.  By taking the year off I flagrantly ignored people who told me it was career suicide and made me feel, if just for a minute, that  convention did not apply to me.)
• Alun Salt is messing around with a nice new blog design.  He does a nice job integrating social media and more formal blogs as he describes here.
• Australia is keeping things interesting in their second test against Pakistan.  All out for 88 and as of this writing 218/5 and 48 ahead of Pakistan??? Things don't look good for them.
• I am reading: K. Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity.  (Cambridge 2008) and David Fischer's, Historians Falacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. (New York 1970).
• I am listening to: Detroit Cobras, Mink, Rat, or Rabbit; Amanda Palmer, Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele, and  Alphaville, Forever Young.

 

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Some quick hits and varia on a gorgeous Friday morning in the Grand Cities.

Lots of talk about blogging on the intertubes lately.  First, CNN tells us how to keep your blog popular.  The Economist suggests that blogs are becoming more specialized, occupying cybersilos, and becoming the place for longer writing.  In a recent interview, UND alumnus and new media star, Rex Sorgatz, credits blog culture for his own rise to cyber stardom, but when collaborating on a new media project said: "Just throw out the blog, I don’t want another blog,' cause I have this antagonism with media companies who come along and think, 'I have something innovative, I am going to do another blog.'"

I'm listening to: Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot... The Sone of Chico Dusty; Damian Marley and Naz, Distant Relatives; Mulatu Astatke, Ethiopiques, Vol. 4; The National, High Violet.

I'm reading (and summer reading is the BEST reading): Matthew Johnson, Ideas of Landscape; Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don't Know; Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Some UND profs get some good press. Jack Russel Weinstein has an article in the NEH Magazine Humanities about his call-in Radio show WHY?  Check out WHY? on Sunday at 5 pm to hear a follow up report from Paul Sum who has returned from a year long Fulbright to Romania to discuss, "Exporting Democracy Revisited: A Report from Romania".  Elsewhere, chemist Mark Hoffman demystifies his research.

If you haven't followed Rangar Cline's work in Umbria, check out his blog Under the Umbrian Sun.  Also check out the Archaeological Institute of America's Interactive Dig at Sagalassos.

Enough for this morning. Have a good weekend!