At the 2011 SAA conference, I was privileged to be asked by organizer and Berkeley PhD candidate Colleen Morgan (who writes the popular Middle Savagery blog) to act as chair and discussant for a session on blogging archaeology. The papers were from an eclectic group of bloggers, all professional archaeologists: graduate students, cultural resource managers, tenured faculty and public outreach coordinators (most wearing two hats); and from Canada, Sweden, Florida, Texas, Arizona and Michigan.
Blogging Archaeology, week 5. Image by Colleen Morgan
So I guess it's no surprise that there was a wide range of ideas that was brought out in the papers; but there were also some threads connecting them. There was a sizable crowd at the presentations (not to mention those tweeting #blogarch during the sessions); but I'd like to take a bit of blog space here to summarize the papers, and maybe help the discussion along.
Session Papers
In their paper, Sarah Nohe (Florida Public Archaeology Program) and Terry Brock (Campus Archaeology Program at Michigan State) described how they have included social media--blogs, Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube--to connect directly to the public. It struck me that they are connecting to an entirely new public, and I wonder if their efforts are increasing interest in traditional public archaeology venues--amateur groups and publications, and economic and political support of heritage issues such as preservation.
Michael E. Smith, professor at Arizona State University, runs three separate topical blogs: Publishing Archaeology, Calixtlahuacca Archaeological Project Blog and Wide Urban World. Mike gave us a presentation on the state of the art of blogging archaeology, and he posed an interesting question: can you use blogs for serious scholarship? Although his conclusion was "probably not", I think there were some rumblings throughout his paper and the session that seemed to indicate that while peer review will be awkward to fit into a blogging-based scheme, research and discussion of scholarly topics indeed takes place in this widely disrespected forum.
John Lowe is a cultural resources professional, working primarily in Texas and blogging under the title Where in the Hell Am I?. John described how he is using his page to illuminate how CRM projects work, from survey to excavation, and he's hoping to connect with the farmers and ranchers that he sees in his work. Now isn't that an interesting idea? I know of at least one CRM professional who was moved to create his own blog after listening to John's paper.
Shawn Graham, assistant professor of digital humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, blogs at Electric Archaeology. He couldn't make it to Sacramento--which works out for you, because you can see and listen to his paper in its entirety at Signal versus Noise: Why Academic Blogging Matters, a Structural Argument. Shawn presents a description of how the Google search engine determines page rank--how high in search results a particular site should be placed--and uses Gephi to support his argument that scientific blogging can establish connections and points of academic-based scholarship on archaeological topics.
Terry Brock, who is currently conducting research at Historic St. Mary's City and blogging at Dirt, described how the Michigan State CAP program used blogging as part of the teaching curriculum. Students were taught to blog their progress in the field school excavations, and learned quite a bit more than how to use Word Press. Terry's students picked up on the ethics involved in reporting archaeological information in a real world study. Fascinating stuff.
The final paper was by Johan Normark, a post-doc researcher at the University of Goteburg, Sweden. Johan's blog Archaeological Haecceities started out as a way to discuss his research in non-human-centered archaeology in Maya studies, but he found himself changing into a debunker of the Maya 2012 phenomenon. His paper described how that happened and how he deals with it.
Three Threads
As I sat listening to these papers, it struck me that there were three threads that tied all the papers, disparate as they were, together.
First, public archaeology. Are bloggers building permanent connections with the new communities that are being reached through social media? Traditional public archaeology has a suite of things we'd like to see the public support: site preservation, consideration for indigenous peoples rights, economic and political support for archaeological research. Are we doing that? How do we measure that? (I didn't say I had the answers, mind you).
Secondly, many of the papers, at least tangentially, mentioned handling negative or even nihilistic responses to the things that we present. I don't know that any of us really know the best way to stave off or soft-pedal such responses, although not allowing anonymous comments and editing or even deleting the most outrageous comments were suggested by the audience members.
Thirdly, and most interestingly, I noticed that all of the papers talked about the changes that blogging had caused in them, as researchers, educators and writers. Shawn talked about how to change our techniques and try to teach Google how to include scholarly research; Johan talked about how his blog had been hijacked by Maya 2012 conspiracists, but also allowed him to write and think about his Maya research in new ways; Terry discussed how blogging had changed his students; John described his blog as converting from a way to keep his friends and family apprised of his research to a description of CRM practices; Sarah discussed how FPAN had expanded its presence into social media in a very short time; and Mike intimated that he might be changing his mind about the scholarly aspects of the medium. I'm amazed and excited at these changes which very well may be changing the way archaeology itself is conducted.
Thanks, so much, to the presenters, the audience, the tweeters and most especially to Colleen Morgan, for inviting me along on this illuminating session.
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