Your Research

Second Term Research Projects

The second term will be taken up largely with your own individual research projects. In exceptional circumstances, I’m willing to allow other configurations of work provided that the individuals involved work out in writing who will do what and who is going to be responsible for the overall management of the work.

In general

The projects should:

  • address the core themes of this course
  • demonstrate mastery over a body of material, in terms of the issues raised and the relevant scholarly literature
  • make a new contribution to a body of research addressed in this course

The technical aspects

The projects should:

  • have a public facing project page hosted on Github.com using Github Pages
  • make all code available (consider also the use of Jupyter Notebooks + Binder to make your code instantly replicable and actionable)

  • have a data repository using osf.io where you give Dr. Graham access. We will consider together whether or not (or in what circumstances) your data can be made public.

  • Digital work is a team sport. I expect you to be present and to have meaningful collaborative engagement in the second term ‘workshopping’ sessions.

But I’m not techy!

You will be. If you can write an essay on your computer, you can collect, explore, evaluate, and analyze data. We will be using the Open Digital Archaeology Text and the Workbook for Crafting Digital History to bring your digital literacy up to par.

Possible topics

Off the top of my head, I can think of a wide variety of topics worth exploring:

  • human remains in Canadian collections
  • unprovenanced artefacts in Ottawa museums and collections
  • abuses of archaeological knowledge in an age of resurgent neo-fascism
  • archaeology in the service of Mussolini/nationalism/nation building/racism…. etc…
  • genetic tests, personal identity, and archaeology
  • digital colonialism and ethical digital archaeology
  • popular archaeology and unpopular archaeology: academics and entertainers
  • data mining / text analysis of newspaper articles pertaining to archaeology

You should settle on a general idea for your project by early November; I want this pinned down by the end of November.

In the second term we will meet periodically to compare notes, troubleshoot, and workshop what we’re working on.

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