I was very happy to keynote last week’s first ever Twitter archaeology conference, Public Archaeology Twitter Conference, hosted by Dr. Lorna Richardson. I chose to speak on how to find meaning in online discourse in an increasingly noisy world. I collected the tweets on Storify:
And here’s a PDF:
Kris was waiting for me at the Starbucks in the Convention Center a couple of hours before the session. We were in the same session together at the SAA in 2007, when I urged my fellow archaeologists to use spatially-aware social media for outreach and she had enthusiastically supported me in her comments on my paper–it was good to see her again! I was a little late because I wanted to see Randy McGuire’s talk in the Activism in Archaeology session. (Thought provoking, but there is a fundamental disconnect rampant in public outreach and archaeology that I’ve been dared to blog about. We’ll see if I get up the courage.)
We chatted about the upcoming session and I groggily admitted that I had depleted most of my resources just to get to the conference, but after some coffee and a sandwich I was ready. I usually like to check out the room ahead of schedule and spend some time getting to know the space. I stood at the mic and welcomed an empty room to the Blogging Archaeology session at the meeting for the Society for American Archaeology.
The session participants began to show up and I told them the routine, asked if they had any questions, then spent a bit of time making sure Shawn Graham’s presentation would work. We didn’t have any computer speakers so the wonderful Sacramento Convention Center AV staff member (Hi Max! Thanks!!) gave us an extra-long mic cord that I held next to my computer for the talk.
And the show began.
The speakers were beyond excellent. They gave compelling, intelligent and surprisingly funny talks about the place of blogging in archaeology. The energy in the room was great and our audience stayed with us–I was in the front most of the time, but I did a quick headcount and came up with about 75 people in the room early in the session. Later it would grow to 100-125 and I spotted the friendly faces of colleagues, students, and my former CRM boss! Whispers went around–was that John Hawks in the audience?
A summary of the papers seems unnecessary because the whole session was live-tweeted, the results of which have been collated by @archaeologist at Storify and Shawn Graham and John Lowe have posted their papers online. Needless to say, I believe that between the blog carnival and the strong session presentation and discussion, we have a firm foundation to pursue publication.
As the community has become self-aware, some have taken it upon themselves to implement key questions and interests that were raised by the carnival and session.
Past Thinking has published a list of archaeology blogs, along with a bundle in Google Reader for the RSS-dependent like myself.
Alun Salt has expanded on the idea of a group blog – this is essential reading for bloggers who are interested in the possibility. The carnival was harder work and took longer than I anticipated, and editing a group blog would only amplify the amount of work and attention necessary to create a quality outcome.
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in this timely and essential conversation about the place of the short form in archaeology.
While I won’t be presenting (on the advice of my most sage and beloved advisor, I’ve been trying to publish instead of presenting at conferences all the time), I’ll be attending the Stanford TAG this weekend. TAG stands for the ‘Theoretical Archaeology Group,’ a conference that is traditionally in the United Kingdom, but has been brought to the States by…well…people who like conferences, I guess. Besides, how could all that theory stay cooped up on that little island?
Anyway, several of the papers look pretty interesting. Here are just a few that I’m looking forward to:
Cuts, Dissections, and Holes: Consequences of Breaking the Surface
Douglass Bailey (San Francisco State University)
Cyber-archaeology: theoretical overview and virtual embodiment
Maurizio Forte & Nicolò Dell’Unto (University of California: Merced)
No More Figurines: Questioning Homologies Between Present and Past
Rosemary Joyce (University of California: Berkeley)
An Archaeology of the Aesthetic: Examination of the Güzel Taş from Fistikli Höyük
Jayme L. Job (State University of New York, Binghamton)
Snapshots of History and the Nature of the Archaeological Image
Travis Parno (Boston University)
Pyramids and Palimpsests. Object, Event and Assemblage in the Archaeological Record
Gavin Lucas (University of Iceland)
Symmetry in the archaeology of technology: microscopic points of departure
Krysta Ryzewski (Brown University)
Archaeological prostheses and media ecologies
Timothy Webmoor (Oxford University)
I’ll try to give my run-down of the sessions that I attend in a post next week, but I’ll also be live-tweeting from the conference, where I expect my colleagues to scowl at me while I’m rudely tapping away at my cellphone while presenters diligently flip through their powerpoints and read from their papers. Anyway, if you’d like to follow along, my twitter feed is here:
Colleen Morgan 