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Big Changes…

Terry

– July 9, 2010Posted in: Archaeology, Graduate School, Research, St. Mary's City

I have spent most of my life in East Lansing, Michigan. I grew up here, I attend elementary, middle, high and graduate school here, my family lives here. The time I didn’t spend here was down the street, attending Kalamazoo College. I have made what I consider to be a pretty fantastic life here. This August, however, I’ll be leaving.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to many of you…I’ve been planning on moving to the Chesapeake for a while now, since that is where my dissertation research is located. Now that my proposal has been defended, I can begin the stage in my research where being close to my data is important. What has been up in the air has been the location, as it has revolved around where Ashleigh (@AshHeck), my partner in crime and life, found a new job. A few weeks ago, she was offered a fantastic job at William and Mary, working in their Career Services office, sending us to Williamsburg. We couldn’t have asked for a better spot, as it has plenty to offer both of us.

Needless to say, this is a difficult move for me. I will be leaving behind a family that lives down the street, a community of friends that I will miss seeing every day, a city that is finally pulling together and moving forward behind the strong will of so many great people, and a university that I have only recently been able to fully appreciate for all that it is, and all the amazing opportunities it has afforded me. I have little doubt that living in East Lansing and Lansing, being exposed to Michigan State’s education, and the relationships that I have made along the way, has shaped who I am as a person, and who I will become as a professional. Leaving that behind is a difficult thing to do.

With that said, Williamsburg will provide new opportunities, new challenges, new people, and a new setting. I am excited for the possibilities for both Ashleigh and I professionally. Thanks to generous funding from Historic St. Mary’s City and the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, I will be able to dedicate most of my time to working on my dissertation, and will be located only three hours from my research site and data, housed Historic St. Mary’s City. I am still working on what my schedule will look like, but it will certainly put me in St. Mary’s City, Maryland quite often. William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg will provide a large community of archaeologists to work with, a fabulous campus to explore, and a town that has embraced and celebrates its past fervently. Ashleigh has what looks to be a fantastic job with great opportunities for her as well. We will also be closer to extended family, who live in Maryland, and will have chance to see them more often.

So, in all, I am full of different emotions about this transition. I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m sad. I will be moved for good by August 15th, with Ashleigh leaving to start her new job at the beginning of August. So our near future is full of packing, wrapping up things at work, all while stuffing our faces with as many Jersey Giants, Peanut Barrel Olive Burgers, and Golden Harvest breakfast burritos a possible. Of course, I will be back often to visit family and my dissertation committee, and I will be sure to let people know ahead of time.

Thanks for everything, please stay in touch, and please, please, please come and visit. There’s lots to do in Williamsburg.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Tags: Chesapeake, dissertation, Life, Michigan, Research

Proposal: Done. Field School: Begin.

Terry

– May 27, 2010Posted in: Campus Archaeology Program, Digital Archaeology, Engagement, Public Archaeology

Although it happened a couple of weeks ago, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, and have been granted with that somewhat sarcastic (and totally unofficial) title of “ABD”, or “All But Dissertation”. The defense went well: my committee nailed me on what I expected to get nailed on (methodology), and didn’t surprise me with anything else. Some questions and suggestions definitely will help to push my project forward, and make it better in the long run. Of course, this will mean more work, but that’s fine. In all, I’m just happy this step is cleared. I will be posting on my research more in the fall, as this summer is going to be largely taken up by Campus Archaeology.

I am co-directing a field school with my boss Dr. Goldstein on campus through the Campus Archaeology Program. This has taken up most of my time during the month of May, and will almost entirely consume June.tbrokc I’ve never been involved with the planning of a field school before, although I’m not surprised with how much work goes into it. The most stressful has been the ordering and receiving of equipment; there are a lot of channels that we need to go through to make sure we are paying for things correctly, getting the correct equipment, and making sure it arrives on time.

I am also working on a special project for the Field School, which is part of my College Teaching Certification. It is my mentored teaching project, and it will be using a class blog as a means for teaching students to engage with the community about our research through blogging. I’m still ironing out details, but the main objective is to encourage students to interact with the community, and to gain a greater understanding about what they are doing in the field by explaining it to other people and applying it at a level beyond the actual field methods. We are also releasing this blog to the public, so that they can interact with the students and their posts. If you are interested, please visit and subscribe to the RSS feed.

The prospect of an on-campus field school is pretty exciting. It makes a field school accessible to a number of students who may find it economically impossible to attend a field school otherwise. Often, these schools require that students are able to take off 6 weeks of their summer and travel to a remote location. Many students can’t afford to give up that much time without working, and to toss 6 credits of tuition on top of it doesn’t help. The on-campus field school only requires 7 hours a day. Students can work part-time jobs, keep their apartment, live on campus, or sublet from someone. There are a number of cost-cutting options that make this a more economical choice, and therefore a really great thing for our department to be doing.

In any event, over the next month I will be out in the field. I may be able to get a post or two up in the meantime (there are a few other things that have been happening in my life of relevance), but mostly my posts will be at the Campus Archaeology Blog, discussing our findings in the field. Follow along!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Tags: Archaeology, Campus Archaeology, Digital Media, dissertation, Engagement

Archaeology, Social Media, and the in-the-field workflow

Terry

– April 25, 2010Posted in: Campus Archaeology Program, Digital Archaeology, Digital Social Media, Engagement, Public Archaeology

Archaeology, Social Media, and the in-the-field workflow

I have been using Digital Social Media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to show real-time posts to the fans of Campus Archaeology while we are excavating in the field. These messages are all attached to an image, so making sure the image is visible on all three of these media are important. Until recently, this has required me to use multiple iPhone apps, going through a number of steps, and to use a number of web tools in order to make things look integrated for our users. This was a hassle on my end, as many of these tools were too unreliable, required too many keystrokes, or didn’t provide high quality posts on all the platforms. Additionally, it took time away from me supervising the work being done in the field.

FINALLY, I have discovered a way to simultaneously post to Twitter, a Facebook PAGE, and Flickr with only typing one post, and to make each of those posts show up looking as if they were originally posted from that social media site. It requires three tools, one iPhone app and two web-based twitter clients that do all the work behind the scenes. For me, I only have to take one picture and attach it to one tweet, and it gets posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Here are the tools.

gdzl.la: The first step, after you have signed up for a Twitter account, started a Facebook Page, and opened a Flickr account, is to visit gdzl.la. This tool is a Twitter photo client, and connects your Twitter photos to your Flickr account. Essentially, this gets rid of the need for TweetPhoto, or any of those other sites, and makes Flickr the primary storage home for these photos. This means that, if people want to, they can react and respond to these photos in Flickr, and also look at all of your other photos from Flickr.

Tweetie 2/Twitter for iPhone: gdzl.la has one drawback: at the moment it only works with Tweetie 2 (which has recently been purchased by Twitter and will soon be free and called “Twitter for iPhone”). I believe this is because Tweetie 2 is the only Twitter app that allows you to enter a custom primary image client. I could be wrong. This is extra unfortunate, because it also restricts the usage of gdzl.la to the iPhone. So, unless something changes, this iPhone app is a necessary component for this workflow to work properly (please, if there are other phones or apps this will work with, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it here).

UPDATE: gdzl.la himself made a comment about this topic down below, so keep on reading!

At any rate, with Tweetie 2 and gdzl.la, every photo I take from the field and post to Twitter automatically gets posted to Flickr, with the Twitter message serving as the photo title.

tweetpo.st: I just found tweetpo.st. It is another web based client that reposts your Twitter posts to your Facebook Profile. However, this goes many steps beyond what a lot of clients are capable of doing. For starters, it can link a Twitter account to a Facebook Page, something I have had a lot of trouble finding. Secondly, instead of simply rebroadcasting the tweet, along with the url in the text, tweetpo.st recognizes the url link, finds an image from it, and posts it as if you had “attached” a link to a regular Facebook Status. For those of you concerned about quality posts on Facebook, or who want a Facebook page that is full of images and videos instead of status messages with URLs in them, this is an exciting and hard to find feature. Additionally, tweetpo.st is making an effort to replace “@” Twitter messages with their equivalent “@” Facebook name. I’m not sure how this works, exactly, but the potential is pretty exciting. Another nice feature is that you can have as many pairs of Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts paired up, in case you are running a number of accounts.

So, here is how it works when these are all put together:

take a picture with Twitter for iPhone/Tweetie 2.
type your tweet.
Send.
gdzl.la sends the photo to flickr.
tweetpo.st send the photo and message to your Facebook Page.

This is going to save me a number of keystrokes, lots of time while I’m in the field, and will make the experience for our Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter communities better on all fronts.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Tags: Campus Archaeology, Digital Media, Engagement, Facebook, iphone, social media, twitter

ReThinking Digital Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement

Terry

– April 8, 2010Posted in: Campus Archaeology Program, Digital Archaeology, Digital Social Media, Engagement, Public Archaeology

ReThinking Digital Social Media for Digital Humanities and Community Engagement

I went to the Great Lakes #ThatCamp with the intention of talking about using digital social media as a means of real-time community engagement, and hoping that I would get ideas from others about how they were using sites like Twitter or Facebook to engage communities in exciting ways, particularly in regard to real-time engagement. I was surprised by the outcomes. It seemed that most of the people at #ThatCamp were using these media to push content they had already created elsewhere: Twitter and Facebook were places to advertise upcoming events or blog posts. Although this a fine way to use it, it doesn’t capitalize on the unique features of digital social media, features that I think can play a strong role in community engagement.

Digital Social Media, particularly Twitter, provides a unique opportunity for scholars to break down a divide that has existed for a long time between the academia and the community. A number of scholars already do community engaged research, where they integrate the community in the entire process of their research. I recently attended a talk by Alan Leshner, the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he made some important points about the importance for community engagement with science. In particular, he stressed the necessity of engagement so that the public understands not only what the results of our research is, but how those results are reached. This means that we as scholars and researchers need to be explicit with the public about how we do our research, how we collect data, and how we determine its usefulness. We must be transparent about how we produce knowledge. You must only follow a little bit of the “debate” about global climate change to understand how this disconnect can have dramatic effects in this realm.

Additionally, one of the parts I was able to take away from #ThatCamp was the interest that the public demonstrated in the process of doing research, not just the final product. This call was coming from people who worked in museums, one of the traditional spaces reserved for community engagement with scholarly research. This and the talk by Dr. Leshner suggest that scholars have an ethical obligation to provide more transparency and engagement regarding their research, and that the public has an interest in learning about how this research is done.

Digital Social Media, particularly social networking sites such as Twitter, provides a wonderful opportunity for these obligations to be met. First, provide the opportunity for a large community to be reached immediately. Researchers can communicate with people all over the world, as long as they have a cell phone or computer. In essence, this relationship can develop a new, digital community, that has a deep loyalty to a program or project. Second, the interaction is two-way, meaning that not only can researchers broadcast information, but consumers can ask questions about it and receive answers to their queries. Third, the posting can happen in real-time, meaning that scholars and the community can go about the process of doing research together, although remotely.

This last point is the most important, because it means that researchers have a vehicle to discuss the process of their research with the community. The Campus Archaeology Program, for example, sends tweets from the field during excavations. We discuss what we’re doing, why we make the decisions we do, how our research is constrained, and how we draw the conclusions that we do. This does two things: first, it educates the community about how our research is done, and second, it engages them in the actual process of doing the research. They get to discover artifacts and features at the same time that we do, and learn about how those discoveries contribute to forming knowledge about past human behavior.

The same could be said for all other disciplines. Most of us work in spaces that are unfriendly to the public, such as laboratories or archives. We tend to be anti-social beings, who assume that most people won’t be interested in our research until it is in a museum or on a bookshelf, a final product ready to be consumed. What we need to begin realizing is that this isn’t the only exciting part about what we do. It’s the actual process of discovery that is the most powerful. The added bonus is that by making this process public, we are able to also educate about how knowledge is formed, how science and scholarship is done, and how results are determined.

What are your thoughts? Are you using digital social media in these engaging ways? What other benefits do you see from this type of engagement? Drawbacks?

image created using @capmsu’s followers at TwitterMosaic.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Tags: Campus Archaeology, Digital Media, Engagement, outreach, social media, twitter

Digging Differently: collecting field data for public archaeology

Terry

– March 25, 2010Posted in: Archaeology, Campus Archaeology Program, Digital Archaeology, Digital Social Media, Engagement, Public Archaeology, Research

Digging Differently: collecting field data for public archaeology

One of the sessions at Great Lakes ThatCamp was on Digital Archaeology. What was great about this session was the mix of archaeologists and people from other disciplines, particularly those who work in museums, who often have to take what we find and figure out how to present it to the public in interesting ways. The unfortunate part about this is that they are completely dependent on what material we give them: they essentially receive data that we have collected for our own research purposes, not for public presentation.

What was interesting about this session was that we were told that what the public is most interested in is less the object, and more the process of doing archaeology. Where did they excavate? How do they excavate? Who is excavating? What goes into doing an excavation? How are these objects found? These are experiences that are the most difficult to replicate, because the nature of archaeological methods are destructive: by removing artifacts from the ground we remove them from their historical context, thereby destroying it. We can’t do it again. The same goes for the process of removal: once an artifact is out of the ground, it can’t be removed again. So repeating the process archaeological methods is near impossible.

Archaeologists have countered the destructive nature of our methods by becoming methodical and obsessive record keepers. Each archaeologist keeps a field journal. Things are painstakingly measured and mapped. Soil colors and samples are taken. Artifacts are bagged and tagged according to what depth they were removed. Everything is photographed. This way, when we analyze the data, we are able to recreate as much of the archaeological context as we can.

Archaeologists also record about how they are excavating things. Writing down what process things are being excavated is important because that effects the type or the quality of data that is removed from the ground. For example, many sites excavate with screens of a 1/4 inch. This needs to be recorded because it will explain why certain artifacts weren’t found: they would have fallen through the screen. This is important for archaeologists to note because it can effect the analysis. However, this type of record keeping is not done for the public: it’s done for the archaeologist.

If we want to be able to present the process of archaeological excavations after the excavations are complete, we need to start collecting information that will aid in this presentation. This might mean sitting down with the museum you are working with ahead of time to work out what information might be best. It might mean purchasing small video cameras to be used in the field, so that excavation methods can be recorded. Interviews with people on the team should be recorded, so that the methods can be explained. Blogging with the public in mind is another way to provide public-oriented field notes. At Campus Archaeology (@capmsu), we have been using Twitter and Facebook to tweet live from the field, a process which also provides a backlog of what is happening when. What this does, however, is change the way archaeologists need to think about the excavations: they need to approach it with both the analysis and the public in mind.

The most exciting part about archaeology is the moment of discovery. There is no better feeling than finding something that hasn’t been touched in hundreds of years. By keeping a record of the process of discovery while in the field, each visitor to a museum will be able to take part in that moment, and hopefully share a little bit in the power that comes with it. Hopefully, we will be able to do more to ensure that this moment is preserved and shared.

What are your thoughts? Can you think of other elements of excavations that can be captured? Other means to record them?