Protecting Michigan State's Material Culture
Even during a quarantine, archaeology does not stop. While we have not been able to get out into the field until recently, we at CAP have been working hard to create historical background summaries of areas that will be impacted by construction (a critical part …
Here at CAP we think a lot about different ways of sharing our research. We can—and do—present at conferences, give public lectures, and publish site reports and journal articles. While these avenues are great for communicating our work to other experts, they are probably not …
As part of Day of Digital Humanities (DH), we are going to be sharing perspectives of what doing digital means for various members of the Campus Archaeology team. Digital Humanities covers a large body of work, but primarily refers to the application of digital tools and technology to humanities problems and questions. This page will be updated throughout April 8, 2014 with new posts and updates about our digital tools during the day.
You can visit our official Day of DH page here, and learn more about Day of DH here.
12:30 pm: Katy’s Perspective
My work with Campus Archaeology has been very digitally focused- that is until this year. I’ve done work to help create a more robust mapping system for Campus Archaeology using geographic information systems. As the Campus Archaeologist (2011-2013) I usedFlickr, Twitter, Facebook and WordPress to engage with the public and share our findings. I developed an Omeka site for Campus Archaeology to create online museum exhibits. But I’ve been a little more analog this year. My current project is to accession all the Campus Archaeology artifacts, which entails giving unique numbers to artifacts in order to keep track of them and organize them by location found.
Despite the fact that the bulk of my project is analog, we’ve made the process easier by sharing documents about sites in Dropbox and our database of artifacts is all digital. I’m also helping others to make their work a little more digital. I’ve been working with intern Josh to improve the GIS by adding more attributes and adding all the survey points. I’ve also been helping with Dig the Past, this past weekend I volunteered at the event and tweeted throughout the it. By keeping track of these tweets, I was able to create a Storify version of the day.
So even though I’d say I’m not doing digital projects, digital tools are still an essential part of my workflow and help to organize my work with Campus Archaeology. I still find it fascinating of how helpful new technology is for understanding the past and engaging with the public.
11:30 am: Campus Archaeologist Kate’s Perspective
Field blogging has become commonplace for archaeologists; creating field journals that describe the day-to-day happenings of the field season. Blogs allow the archaeologist to connect to a larger audience and interact with new communities of followers. The general public can be awe inspired to learn about archaeology while fellow colleagues can offer insight. Blogs create a transparency for excavations which encourages public trust. Additionally, this transparency provides a grounding for the general public to understand what real archaeology is, rather than what is portrayed on the silver screen. Field school blogging has become an ever more popular tool used to insure learning.
Blogging has the power to strengthen a student’s field experience by encouraging the student to be fully engaged in every aspect of the field season, by allowing the student to share his/her experience with a wider, captivated audience, and by creating a system the ensures the student is understanding the archaeology. While classroom blogging fosters interactions between students, blogging in the field fosters interactions between the student and the excavation. By encouraging the student to think critically about what the artifacts and features are saying about the site, blogging lets the student interact intellectually with the archaeology. While the typical non- digital field journal is used to remember numbers, depths, coordinates, etc…the field blog is a less formal format that gives the student an opportunity to be creative and think outside of the box…or in this case the unit!
11:05 am: Digital is all around us!
10:30 am: Erica’s Perspective
When I first heard about April 8, Day of DH, my first thought was, “What is DH?” Similar to anyone with access to a computer, email is second nature to me and I have fun playing on my Facebook page, but this is where my technology experience ends. When I learned about Day of DH, I wondered, “who are a digital humanists and what do they do?” This is precisely why I would like to participate in Day of DH: to explore, to experience, and to understand what DH is all about.
Recently, I became active in a public outreach program, Dig the Past, which introduces people of all ages to what archaeologists do through hands-on activities. Participation in Dig the Past enabled me to join MSU’s Campus Archaeology Program, the parent program of DTP. By being an active member in CAP, I am learning how various forms of social media are used to educate the public about the important work that archaeologists do. I am excited to participate in Day of DH and write about my new experiences using social media to communicate about Campus Archaeology activities.
9:30 am: Adrianne’s Perspective
My work for the Campus Archaeology Program has largely involved creating and overseeing the “Dig the Past” monthly series of hands-on educational workshops that CAP hosts at the MSU Museum. “Dig the Past” is an education and engagement project sponsored by the Campus Archaeology Program in which kids learn what archaeologists do by doing it. Workshop participants dig, sift, and sort their way towards learning about how archaeology builds knowledge about the human past. The program involves hands-on activities targeted towards children as well as adults which promote learning and disseminate information about the history and archaeology of MSU and its campus. Because the program is, very intentionally, about physically interacting with cultural material and hands-on learning activities, my digital heritage activities for the project have not been particularly in-depth. I have used social media platforms like Twitter (@archaeoAD) and Facebook to promote the program and to connect with other content experts and public programmers interested in informal learning. I’ve written a few blog posts describing and reflecting upon aspects of my experience working with the program, which can be read on the CAPBlog. I have also created a Flickr account to archive photos taken at Dig the Past sessions, which can be viewed here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/97088955@N02/sets The blog posts and photo archive are valuable records of the activities, especially as they have evolved since Dig the Past started, and will complement the wealth of other content developed for the program since its inception.
8:30 am: Amy and Nicole’s Perspective
In order to benefit future researchers interested in the historic campus, we catalogue all notes regarding historical documents, photographs, and artifacts in a digital reference database. Campus Archaeology uses the Zotero software to share and disseminate this information. Our integrated project demonstrates the usefulness and importance of combining archaeological excavations and archival research to further our understanding of MSU’s rich academic and social history.
7:15 am: Good Morning and Happy Day of DH!
6:00 am: Doing Digital Campus Archaeology: Andrew’s Perspective
One of my functions within Campus Archaeology is to monitor and disseminate scholarly archaeological content via our social media outlets. While tangentially related to DH, it does bring the field or archaeology, from various perspectives on various subjects around the world, to our readers who might not otherwise have found the same content. As professional archaeologists, it is our connection to the scholarly community which allows us to bring interesting and informative content to readers who may not be professionals, in a way that is easily understood and accessible.
The Day of DH is a national celebration of the range and variety of people, projects, and groups involved in digital humanities (DH). This year the event is hosted by MSU’s own DH center: MATRIX: The Center for the Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. It is a …
Digital learning day was started by the Alliance for Learning, and in partnership with the National Writing Project. “Digital Learning Day will celebrate innovative teaching practices that make learning more personalized and engaging and encourage exploration of how digital learning can provide more students with more opportunities …
This is a post by CAP intern Paige on her final project.
By this time I’ve more or less completed my exhibit. In short, it compares research that I’ve found at the archives with some of the artifacts the 2010 and 2011 Field School students found at MSU. The final product of my work is a digital museum exhibit: Artifacts vs. Archives. By using a program like OMEKA, we are able to organize images of artifacts with data and present them like you would see them in a museum.
I separated my exhibit into fours main sections; one about building materials, another on academic materials, another on everyday activities or common items, and a final section on whiteware. The layout of the exhibit displays an overview page, showing all of the artifacts or quotes used in that section, with an explanation of importance underneath. Another page goes deeper into each artifact or quote directly, relating each to its own specific importance.
For example, in the section “Building Campus” there is a quote from The Eagle about brick glazers that were at the time on campus, painting the Greenhouse as well as other buildings. This backs up the evidence of the artifact in question, the glazed brick that is also in the same section. The brick itself is described in full detail, which can be seen by clicking on the photo. You can view the metadata of each item, and it gives an even more in depth look at the artifacts themselves, as well as specific quotes that have been used. Metadata is information about the items, whether it be quotes or actual items. The metadata tells us more details about where we as researchers got the items, and some of the historical information.
Similarly, in the section entitled “Everyday Campus,” we see the very interesting artifact of human hair, trimmings like what you would expect to find at a barber shop. This is exactly what I found as I discovered ties between the hair itself and barbers doing their work on campus. As the area we excavated in our Field Schools happened to potentially be where people dumped their unwanted items, this coincides perfectly. It makes sense that the barber, when he was finished with his work, would take the hair left behind on his way out for the night, and throw it out.
A couple other examples, briefly, are the glass items CAP found related to chemistry, such as test tubes, some whiteware with a painted design, an in-tact inkwell, and a pig mandible. But to understand how each of these artifacts correlates to the MSU Archives, and life in general at this time, you’ll have to take a look at the exhibit.
Check it out on CAP’s OMEKA site: Campus Unearthed and click on Exhibits. While you are there, check out the other exhibits.
Author: Paige