Digital History & Digital Archaeology with Shawn Graham

In this episode, we talk with Danuta Sierhuis, digital development officer at the Agnes Etherington Art Gallery, and CU DH grad.

This week, we also talk with Fiona Smith Hale, Chief Knowledge Officer at Ingenium.

The rubber hits the road this week, as you start building things in this class; we also hear from Kristy von Moos of Ingenium, who implores you: learn a bit of code!

In this episode, we're joined by Sarah Ames of the National Library of Scotland.

This week, you start the first of two weeks prepping your selected materials for our asynchronous seminar experiment. You also begin to explore Jupyter Notebooks. Prepare yourself! What is the mindset that leads to success? A willingness to try things out, to let things break, but with a focus on the process. The goal is not perfection; the goal is not to 'perform' being a student. I'm not interested in perfection. I want to hear about what worked, what didn't. I want you to share that with the rest of us. We are joined by Dan Pett, of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, who shares his own perspectives on what this means in a professional setting.

This week, choose your own adventure through our potential readings. Also, we hear from Sean Tudor of the Canadian Museum of Nature and how he came to cultural heritage informatics.

This episode introduces some of the main themes of the course, explaining what the end goal is, and how the course is structured. In part 2, we hear from Erica Vanden Bosch, from Ingenium, the Crown Corporation that runs the Canadian Science and Technology Museum, the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum, and the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum.

You've made it! You've reached the end! A valedictory address, with contributions by Aydin and Callista. Thanks everyone.

We're joined this week by Katherine Cook of the Université de Montréal.

Last week there was no episode; this week we begin the final module in the course, 'Communicating'.  There are lots of different contexts in which we share archaeological data, and lots of different ways to achieve that. Lots of different 'publics', too! In this week's materials, we're looking at the ways archaeologists inform each other about their work, share their data, and the 'open science' movement, which aims for both reproducibility and replicability. We're joined by Dr. Ethan Watrall, of Michigan State University, who, along with his colleague Lynne Goldstein, has pioneered new ways for archaeologists to communicate with each other and the broader public.

We close this module of the course by raising the dead through simulation, and 'enchanting' prospect. We're also joined by Dr. Iza Romanowska, who offers us her thoughts on simulation and a more data-driven future for archaeology.

In this week's episode, I reflect a bit on the nature of libraries. After all, a topic model is a kind of automagically generated index showing you the discourses hidden in the very pattern of words themselves. Some of these discourses presage/prefigure/predestine? trends that later become so big - like Digital Archaeology - that they warrant their own label. We are also joined by Dr. Erin Averett of Creighton University who reflects on the nature of her training in Classical Archaeology and the disconnect between being a good archaeologist, and a good (on paper) job candidate.

As Columbo used to say, '....just one more thing'

You've learned some tools and approaches... now pull it all together!

Eventually, after many cycles of cleaning data, making exploratory  visualizations, and rerunning your analyzes, you will arrive at a point  where you have this thing that you want to communicate.

Enter into a cycle of dialogue with your texts.

Digital history is 80% cleaning data, and 20% doing the fun stuff.