Week 2 - Sept. 21 Contemporary Archaeology and Digital Archaeology

Contemporary archaeology is about using archaeological methods and techniques to investigate the world around us. If digital archaeology is about thinking through the implications of the transformations the world goes through from physical to digital and back again, then we can see obvious points of connection between contemporary archaeology and digital archaeology. In which case this week is about setting you up to use digital archaeology as you investigate a contemporary archaeological problem.

Remember: as part of your personal digital archaeology project you will

define a question of interest to you
design and build a data collection strategy/tool
use the weekly practice exercises to develop your skills as you
- collect data
- transform data
- communicate your observations/findings appropriately
- while documenting the choices and implications of those choices.

We’ll talk about the kinds of transformations involved in moving from the physical to the digital. Say you built a paper form to record your field observations. For those observations to be computational, we need to turn them into structured text. An image isn’t much use on its own, but the act of moving from image -> text -> database is complicated.

Location: our classroom; campus exploration

Have Read for Today:

D’Ignazio, Catherine and Klein, L. 2020. ‘What gets counted, counts’. From Data Feminism link

Supplementary:

Bonnichsen, R. (1973). “Millie’s Camp: An Experiment in Archaeology.” World Archaeology, 4(3): 277–291. (Note the year of publication and the dated language)
Newman, S.E. (2023). “Archaeologies of Garbage.” In Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things, U. Chicago, 37-66
Graesch, A. and T. Hartshorn (2023). “Litterscapes in the Anthropocene: An Archaeology of Discarded Cigarettes.” In Archaeology Out of the Box, UC Press. 147-132.
Walsh, J., S. Graham, A. Gorman, C. Brousseau, and S. Abdullah (2024). “Archaeology in space: The Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) on the International Space Station. Report 1: Squares 03 and 05.” PLOS One 19(8): e0304229. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304229

FYI there are archaeologies of homes and homelessness, of undocumented migration, of the COVID-19 pandemic, of space, of video games, disasters and conflict, of nuclear sites, and many more. See also CHAT.

The Plan:

Last day I asked you to build a personal data set- we’re going to start by discussing that. What challenged you, and if you can, why did it challenge you? What kind of meaningful differences would exist in your dataset if you were documenting physical materials?
Lecture on Contemporary Archaeology
Unconference: Carleton University is a pretty big place. What kinds of contemporary archaeologies might we do or find here?
We’ll build a recording sheet for use with mobile devices, then you can head out to start observing.

Next week, half of you will meet me at the Billings Estate, half of you will go to the GIS Lab for some map making training.

Skill Building

Build a recording sheet with Kobotoolbox
document-to-structured data workflow using camera photography and a python notebook deploying the PaddleOCR models. We will use a kind of vision model from a service called ‘PaddleOCR’ to turn scanned images of documents into data. (Ask yourself: who, or what, is PaddleOCR? What happens to the image data?). Take a copy of this notebook (ie, open that link in a new window, and then click File > Save a copy in Drive to create your own working version. Loading all of the pieces into memory will take several minutes. Just be patient. Work from top to bottom and read through carefully.

Homework By Friday at noon, have your research compendium for this week complete and in github. Have an initial sense of what you want your PDAP to look like - a single paragraph is fine (this is mostly for your own record keeping).