Week 6 - Oct. 26
Module 2 Considering & Critiquing Data
There will be stats.
Location Classroom
Theme Statistics and Archaeologists and What Happens When the Past Can Be Computed
Have Read for Today
- Graham’s cheat sheet on archaeological databases
- Kansa, E.C. 2026 Archaeology in the AI Era: Demystifying powerful and problematic systems shaping the future of the past, Internet Archaeology 71. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.71.15
- Perry, Sara and James Taylor. 2018. Theorising the Digital: A Call to Action for the Archaeological Community. In Oceans of Data: Proceedings of the 44th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Mieko Matsumoto & Espen Uleberg, eds. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 11-22. link
The Plan
When did archaeologists first start thinking ‘computationally’? How does early archaeological work on human remains from North Africa connect with the current LLM hype? Eugenics, early computers, simulations, statistics, patterns in language… today’s conversation will cover a lot of ground.
- we’ll try rewriting the ‘working with structured data’ pieces from the DHP to handle archaeological ideas.
Skill Building In the DHPrimer, there are a series of lessons on Working With Structured Data. Give those a try. They’re written from a generic DH perspective. Given what you’ve already seen and given the nature of the course, try to re-write the code sections of the DHPrime to use archaeological examples, once you’ve gotten the hang of the DH examples.
And now that I’ve had you doing things in Python, I’m going to do a rug-pull and have you try things in R! This notebook can be opened in Google Colab. It works just like other notebooks we’ve seen, but the underlying language is R. Many archaeologists use R to handle their statistical work so it’s important that you see it. This one comes with some commands to load up some pre-cooked real archaeological datasets. The final section of it lets you load in some graveyard data generated by students in this course from a few years ago.
Finally, we’ll take a look at a particular kind of ‘structured’ data that archaeologists use to work through the sequence of deposition at a site called a ‘Harris Matrix’. Often archaeologists build one of these by hand, but I’ve built a little tool that can do this either from a csv of data or through a graphical interface.
Homework By Friday at noon, have your research compendium for this week complete and in github. Think about the space between the action of counting, and the reality of the things that have been counted. Who are you missing? What does this suggest about the differences between ’the past’ and ‘history’ or ‘archaeology’?