Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology

On the blog called GIS for Archaeology and CRM, Matt reports on the occurrences at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) meetings, held last week in no-doubt-delightful Fargo North Dakota (Brrr, North Dakota in April). It's pretty clear from Matt's discussion that the conference covered many of the technical aspects of computer modeling, as well as XML, ABM and all those other geeky initials we secretly love to read about.

In particular, Matt discusses the papers on folksonomies, which is the name for the unsystematic language developed by everyday people who use the Internet. You realize, there's no 'authoritative' keyword list on the Internet, except for what has been created by people searching for things and other people labeling their webpages with those search terms. Since the advent of sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, where people store things they like using a new set of keywords, folksonomic terms have exploded in number and variety. Folksonomies are one of the hottest web ideas floating today, sort of a reinvention of a librarian system like the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress methods of book cataloging, except by yutzes like you and me instead of professional cataloguers. The long-suppressed linguist in me is fascinated by this idea, but it's not really archaeology, so I'll leave it to Matt.

GIS for Archaeology and CRM blog
Folksonomies in archaeology, Matt's discussion
Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata, Adam Mathes