Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It was another red morning and it was amusing to watch all the sailors take warning on their morning strolls. Let’s hope that it was all just precautionary and the grey skies give way to clear blue ones.

So as I watch the grey morning sky burn off to blue, I’ll offer a little gaggle of quick hits and varia:

• A nice comment over at Paperless Archaeology on our developing efforts to integrate iPad based data collection into our field procedures this summer. 
• My Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Yannis Lolos, Land of Sikyon: Archaeology and History of a Greek City-State.
• More on the AIA’s strange stance toward Open Access and the AIA president’s strange-ish response (h/t Dimitri Nakassis).
• The most famous ancient dump.
• Some fantastic first year reflections over at Teaching Thursday.
• Pretty cool insights into how the New York Times makes their cool charts.
• I spent time this spring developing a typology of man-camps for the Bakken Oil Patch in North Dakota. Hybrid types of man-camps have begun to materialize already. Check out this recent story on an indoor RV park (a hybrid of my Type 1 and Type 2 camp).
• Along similar lines, check out Prairie Pubic Television’s “Faces of the Oil Patch”.
• Were Depression Era Hoovervilles types of man-camps? Check them out here and here.
• Teaching very, very large classes.
• And a digital boot camp for humanities graduate students.
• Some fun advice for graduating seniors.
• What I’m reading: 10,000 History 101 Papers.
• What I’m listening to: Chimes of Freedom, The Songs of Bob Dylan.

Because you can never have enough GRANITOID.

 

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It is glowing red morning here in North Dakotaland (but fortunately we have very few sailors, so the warning seemed unnecessary). Perhaps the red sky in the morning is to remind our students that there is only one week left of the semester. Or perhaps it was to remind faculty that this week was the calm before the storm.

In any event, it is a great day for some quick hits and varia

• How to be succinct.
• Some interesting push back to the AIA’s statement regarding Open Access in Archaeology Magazine. Here’s Chuck Jones and Sebastian Heath. And here from the Open Access Archaeology folks.
• In related news, Harvard spends $3.75 per year on online periodical subscriptions.
• More archaeology of archaeology: some cool thoughts on an archaeological field kit. 
• A conversation with Chuck Klosterman.
• More criticisms of the lecture as a teaching tool.
• Does anyone use iffttt? It seems cool.
• Some Sonic Archaeology from the Punk Archaeology section. And even more.
• Pierre MacKay on SS. Mary and Dominic (Ay. Parakevi) in Chalkis. I visited this church with Pierre when I was a graduate students and we pondered it (and it’s supposed Early Christian foundation). So, this little article brings back some great memories. 
• For deeply personal reasons I hate Helvetica (and it’s sister Haas Grostesk), but I like this story.
• I recently submitted a book review to the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. I got back some revisions this week with, hands down, the funniest editor comments I’ve ever received. I usually dread reading revisions of my writing, but these made me laugh out loud (in a good way). I like their style!
• Check out the next reflection of first year faculty at Teaching Thursday.
• Online teaching to paper books… a cool campus partnership. I keep forgetting why the University of North Dakota can’t do stuff like this.
• 100 Walks.
• The best used car ad ever.
• Revised MLA guidelines for evaluating work in digital humanities and new media.
• What I’m reading: Marcus Banks, Jay Ruby, Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology (Chicago 2011). (via Kostis Kourelis)
• What I’m listening to: Spiritualize, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s a pretty grey Friday morning here in the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World global control room, but it looks like tiny slivers of blue sky are desperately attempting to push their way through the clouds.

Despite the meteorological struggle playing outside my windows, the Friday Varia and Quick Hits must go on…

• Byzantium/Modernism: Art, Cultural Heritage, and the Avant Gardes will be streamed live this afternoon starting at 2:30 CST from Yale University.
• The Robert Biggert Collection of Architectural Vignettes on Commercial Stationery at Columbia University may sound obscure, but it is, in fact, fascinating.
• An interesting article on how colleges are assessing and thinking about motivation.
• The inestimable Joel Jonientz had a birthday this week.
• Matthew Sears has his hoplite phalanxes and Roman legions out on campus at Wabash College.
• Cool covers of Ian Flemming’s James Bond books.
• Doesn’t it stink when you discover your journal accidentally published a paper with “no scientific content”? Good thing they can’t retract a blog. (h/t Dimitri Nakassis)
• Some fun facts about the Wisden Almanack. Two more cricket notes: this was sort of an annoying test, but this fun story about Chris Gayle made me smile.
• I mean, seriously Phillies?
• If you go quick and look here and don’t tell many other people, you can see what Sam Fee and PKAP are dreaming up for an iPad.
• I installed a 7 day trial of Boom. It does make my Mac louder, but I’m not sure better.
• Teaching Thursday has begun its annual series of First Year Reflections.
• New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World = 34,843; Corinthian Matters = 34,879.
• What I’m reading (when it arrives later today): Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Humans and Things. (2012)
• What I’m listening to: Sun Araw, The Congos, and M. Geddes Gengras, Icon Give Thank. Frkwys Vol. 9; The Gories, I Know You Be Houserockin’ (via Kostis Kourelis)

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

The rain scheduled for Saturday will arrive today making it an idea day for some serious writing in the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Panoptic Think-Tank. But before I start my day under leaden skies, I offer up a fun (to me) gaggle of quick hits and varia.

• If you haven’t checked out the short film, Caine’s Arcade, it probably means that you don’t spend much time on the internets. It’s super cute and charming and perfect for a grey end-of-the-week. One of the coolest things about this is that people – total strangers – started to kick into Caine’s college fund. If I didn’t have equally brilliant nephews, I’d be tempted to do the same.
• Depressing news about the Greek Basketball League (via Dallas Deforest)
• Another nice short film which is on the verge of going viral is HILL. It’s the story of Alan Hill, the man who lives in the abandoned Packard automobile plant in Detroit. It is part abandonment porn and part social commentary. It fits so well into discussions I had with my buddy Bret Weber this past weekend in the oil patch, that he wrote a thoughtful response to it. I ask and he graciously allowed me to quote parts of it: (The film is less than 10 minutes and quite lovely. Bret’s comments will make more sense once you see it!):

The film suggests and, yes, romanticizes Alan Hill’s agency in relation to his home, including his comment that it “suits his purposes just fine.”  However, it is implicitly clear that he did not originally choose to go find a large, abandoned factory to live in.  In many ways his situation reminds me of a job I had when I was 18.  I was a night-time, graveyard-shift janitor for the Colorado State Highway Department.  I worked with an old Latino who was using the job to supplement his retirement.  After finishing all of our cleaning (which took a couple hours) we crawled into the cabs of large maintenance vehicles and slept until it was time to wake up in the morning and make coffee for the workers that arrived at 7 AM.   We actually kept pillows and blankets at work.

The point of that little story is that everyone knew that we were drawing full pay for sleeping, but it was cheaper to pay for two sleeping janitors than for security guards.  The decision was driven by the insurance companies who needed someone there.  The Packard plant may be abandoned, but I’m guessing someone ‘owns’ it and would be liable for problems.  I wonder what role Alan Hill is playing in that process—with or without his knowledge.  At the very best, Hill has only very limited agency here.  At the worst, he could be evicted at any time by any number of authorities (police, health, department of aging or adult protective services, etc.).

Beyond those issues, and beyond Alan Hill’s urban, idyllic home . . . this clearly is not sustainable or possible on any sort of a broad scale.  Who is paying for the electricity?  Heat?  It seems that they filmed during a relatively warm time of the year, but Detroit winters can get brutal.  What does Hill do then?  What if he becomes ill?  Is there any sense of community for Hill (beyond the rabbits and raccoons)?

I think this is similar to the situation in the Type III camps we saw: at best there is only limited agency, and at worst there is a completely unhealthy, unsustainable situation that raises social justice concerns.

• Along similar lines, check out Colleen Morgan’s work in documenting the “Chicken Shed” at Catalhoyuk. The chicken shed was originally built to house the workers brought in to construct other buildings on the site. Once that job was done, it became a part time residence for dig workers and then a storage and break room. There is very little done on the archaeology of archaeology.
• This looks like a cool conference: Byzantium/Modernism: Art, Cultural Heritage, the Avant-Gardes.
• Some notes on punctuation.
• Some not so nice writing tips.
• An interesting way to think about the Facebook acquisition of Instagram.
• And some nicer writing tips.
• A nice Teaching Thursday post on the advantages of Qualtrix.
• Some mildly depressing news on the status of faculty salaries at the University of North Dakota and elsewhere.
• What I’m reading: Nothing (it’s a writing weekend).
• What I’m listening to: Orbital, Wonky; Soft Swells, Soft Swells

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Even as we speak I was rolling out to Williston to do some research in the Bakken Oil counties. So I’m hopeful that the weather in North Dakotaland continues to be generous to us!

So here is a little gaggle of quick hits and varia to keep you occupied over the (western) holiday weekend:

• Some amazing photographs from the summit of Mt. Oneion in the Corinthia by my buddy Dallas Deforest. The final photo shows the eastern summit of Onieon where there must have been some kind of sanctuary. The shattered remains of a massive pithos still rests where we saw it 5 years ago. Pretty cool.
• This is an interesting interview on recent translations and work on Homer.
• A pretty cool test of your religious knowledge from the good folks at Pew. I got one wrong.
• The 21st Annual Robinson Lecture at the Chester Fritz Library will be by Jay Jordan the President and CEO of OCLC.
• One of Kostis Kourelis’ students has some real talent (and an excellent teacher, of course).
• Freshly minted ARS knowledge on Wikipedia via Sebastian Heath.
• Some cool stuff over on Teaching Thursday.
• Drake, North Dakota meets Kurt Vonnegut.
• A month or so ago, I linked to the redesigned kottke.com (which remains both one of the iconic blogs and one of the original). It has seen quite a few redesigns over time and Jason Kottke talks about how the most recent redesign has improved his stats.
• Corinthian Matters is less 500 hits away from passing my blog.
• This is a cool study of how tweeting or blogging research (and making it openly available) can improve one’s visibility.
• What I’m reading: P. A. Schackel, Archaeology of Labor and Working-Class Life. (2009).
• What I’m listening to: Bob Marley and the Wailers, African Herbsman.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s fixin’ to be a cool and clearish day here in North Dakotaland, but the grey morning sky suggests otherwise. We’ll see, in other words, but my meteorological skepticism isn’t enough to discourage a small gaggle of quick hits and varia:

• The stolen frescoes from the little church at Lysi which had been part of the Menil Collection have returned to Cyprus.  I’m happy for the frescoes and our friends from Lysi (many of whom live today in Larnaka), but I wish the frescoes could be displayed in a less politically fraught place.
• This is funny if you think Cricket is hard or really easy to understand. (via Andrew Reinhard)
• A conference at the University of Pennsylvania on Masons at Work (pdf). It looks pretty cool.
• A Wikipedian needed for OCLC.
• This is an interesting little group of thoughts about quantifying oneself. I’ve done this for the past couple years using Daytum.
• Kickstarter + Massive Online Open Course + EduPunk. (Check out the Kickstarter page here.)
• This is almost funny.
• More on teaching with term papers over on Teaching Thursday.
• Ugh. A failed search. This is a bummer for everyone involved.
• Who is reading what, where?
• We may have another Punk Archaeologist on our hands.
• This is a pretty cool discussion of how to use augmented reality to think about alternate histories.
• If you live in south Florida, be sure to check out the Surf and Song Festival this weekend.
• If you live in North Dakota (which is actually the opposite in every way of south Florida), check out the UND Writers Conference today.
• Some cool videos on great college teachers.
• Tom Isern, a colleague at North Dakota State University, has started a writing journal. His description of his home office is lovely.
• A nicely articulated and eminently practical teaching philosophy.
• What I’m reading: Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. (Penn 2006). And, Hesperia 81.1 (2012).
• What I’m listening to: (how depressing is this?) Nothing.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

A rainy but warm day here in North Dakotaland. So I have plenty of excuses to stay inside and prepare a nice gaggle of quick hits and varia.

• The 13th century frescoes from the chapel at Lysi which have been on display at the Menil Collection in Houston for 15 years, are going back to Cyprus.
• A graffiti project in the famous Arizona airplane boneyard is pretty cool.
• Some awesome thoughts on term papers and the terms of the discourse over on Teaching Thursday.
• If you can’t check out the Kostis Kourelis’s curated exhibit on George von Peschke, check out the online gallery – proudly powered by Omeka.
• A world without people (via Dallas Deforest).
• Next week is the 43rd annual University of North Dakota Writers Conference. Check out an interview on Prairie Public Radio with the director Heidi Czerwiec.
• Some nice applications to help us write.
• More great stuff from Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU.
• For all that has been written about the end of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s publication on paper, relatively little of it has been particularly interesting.
• I live in a corrupt state.
• This is an interesting essay both in what is says and how it says it.
• A life in numbers, and it makes my modest daily data collection routine seem lame.
• Living Byzantium.
• Where have I seen him before?
• Susie and I watched the last two overs of Bangladesh v. Pakistan in my office yesterday at lunch (what? huh? who said what?). We were on the edge of our seats. Tamim Iqbal, was  practically dropped from the side prior the the tournament. After scoring his fourth 50 in four games, he turned to the Bangladesh bench and counting his four half centuries. Priceless.
• Smell like Cyprus. Ew.
• Spiders fleeing Australian flood waters. Eww.
• This is cool, though. (via Kottke)
• What I’m reading: D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity. (Duke 2004)
• What I’m listening to: The Shins, Port of Morrow

Friday Varia Quick Hits

It’s a grey, but clearing Friday Morning here at New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Global Headquarters. They say that spring is right around the corner here in North Dakotaland.

So it’s no surprise that we have a particularly vibrant group of varia and quick hits:

• The biggest news in The North Dakota is that beloved local journalist Marilyn Hagerty has gone and blown up. Her review of the new Olive Garden hit Boing Boing and then went viral. Her response is iconic. When her daughter told about the buzz on the internets:  “I told her I’m working on my Sunday column and I’m going to play bridge this afternoon, so I don’t have time to read all this crap.” And in the Village Voice. Awesome:
• Some more cool abandonment porn (Bulgarian, Soviet style).
• For some more serious reflections on abandonment and art, check out Kostis Kourelis’ most recent working paper.
• Rahul Dravid walks away.
• Greek American radicals.
• I’m always looking to understand prolific writers’ creative processes. I’m not sure that Mark E. Smith’s (from The Fall) would be all that helpful. This is why Jason Kottke blogs. (And notice his sweet new design).
• After over 8 years Cliopatria is shutting down. I wonder why?
• A book ark.
• This is how you cite a tweet.
• So we all know our names COULD form cool anagrams, if we had the time to sort that all out. Now, there is technology to help us. Bill Caraher = Arch Liberal.
• I’d be interested in messing around some with QGIS.
• Crowd Sourcing a microbrewery. (via Aaron Barth)
• The American Historical Associations Archives Wiki.
• An interesting follow up to recent discussions of long-reading on the internet: Kindle “Singles” which run about 20 – 25,000 words seem to be filling a similar (if longer) niche in the Kindle reading public.
• This is what happens when you make requests.
• New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World: 683 page views this week and 30,883 over all; Corinthian Matters: 854 in the past week and 29,739 over all. It’s only a matter of time.
• What I’m reading: M. K. Gold ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities. (Minnesota 2012).
• What I’m listening to: The Men, Open Your Heart; Milt Jackson and Coleman Hawkins, Bean Bags.

Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s an overcast, but vaguely warm Friday morning here in North Dakotaland. We managed to miss the storms this week and had only a few inches on a blustery and snowy weekend. As spring sits poised on the horizon, we are starting to hope just a tiny bit that we have survived the most mild winter in living memory.

As hope springs eternal, I offer a few varia and quick hits:

• The American School of Classical Studies at Athens is streaming its annual meeting this afternoon at 11 CST. Clemente Marconi (James R. McCredie Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) offers the annual lecture, “New Investigations on the Akropolis of Selinunte, Sicily: The Archaeology of a Greek Colony in the West”. And Jack Davis (Director, ASCSA) will review the work of the School in 2011.
• As well all knew all along: map is not territory. Check out how Google Maps almost caused a war.
• I’ve always considered 8 hours of sleep a night is for the weak, but now, perhaps studies confirm this.
• Is there a movie about the past that historians actually like?
• Meanwhile, Theodor Mommsen says “Hey girl”.
• And Grammar Girl asks “Where are you at?”.
• The remarkable decline and fall of TechCrunch.
• A documentary on Jean Reatard: Better Than Something: Jay Reatard. It’ll be screening at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio with an introduction by Eric Davidson. Davidson is a member of the New Bomb Turks – an Columbus, Ohio institution – who has written We Never Learn, 1988-2001 about cats like Reatard, the White Stripes, the Oblivians, et c. I listened to a ton of Reatard this summer while assisting Scott Moore in the Polis Archives. Don’t tell anyone.
• Very efficient use of urban space.
• Nick Feltron has published a Biennial Report for 2010/2011. It’s an event.
• There is a good bit of buzz about two new television shows that appear to glamorize looting activities at historic sites in the U.S. One is on Spike TV who have often used fake shows to generate viral marketing for their otherwise unremarkable programing. In fact, I think this is a new technique that many niche cable channels use. So I won’t like to the shows, but I will link to the response from the Archaeological Institute of America’s response.
• My wife FINALLY let me get an iPhone. I am still getting it set up. Richard Rothaus has had a couple of good posts last week on his digital workflow in the archives. It’s pretty impressive, I need to up my game.
• Via the same Rothaus: The Lively Morgue (photos from the NYTimes).
• A new article on Twitter in the classroom.
• I definitely think that R. Scott Moore needs to get PKAP a light field photography camera.
• Page views this week: New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World = 636 views; Corinthian Matters = 882. (Total Page Views: New Archaeology = 30,111; Corinthian Matters = 28,736). It’s only a matter of time.
• Sexy private libraries.
• What I’m reading: P. R. Mullins, The Archaeology of Consumer Culture. (2011).
• What I’m listening to: Lambchop, Mr. M.; Field Music, Plumb.

Friday Quick Hits and Varia

It’s a snowy and cool morning here at New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Headquarters in its top secret North Dakotaland compound. And we’re supposed to get more over the weekend. We have snowblower, but I’ve never used it. This weekend might be the time to do it.

A tiny gaggle of quick hits and varia to keep you busy, educated, and entertained until then:

• A couple good posts on using Twitter in the classroom (and outside of it) here and here.
• John Fea – one of David Pettegrew’s colleagues at Messiah College and a brilliant blogger – felt the wrath of the internets this week. Presumably this is the offending column (it is odd that Fea did not link to it in his post on his blog) and here is the article from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.
• Kostis Kourelis’ Objects-Buildings-Situations is blowing up these days with found objects collected on his time spend in the area around the Lancaster train station. Richard Rothaus pointed us toward this, similar, project.
• Richard also has a nice little post on using Evernote in the archives. My Droid Incredible has slowly died over the past 4 months, and the application that I miss the most is Evernote. Finally, my long suffering wife, gave into my whinging and let me get an iPhone. Provided snowpocalype does not stay “these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”, I should be back in the Evernote by the end of the weekend.
• How to make a proper Old Fashioned.
• The open access battled and recent battles of The Research Work Act (H.R. 3699) has brought in the heavies: a letter from 11 of the most powerful university provosts in the country.
• This is pretty funny video. And so is this. (One, of course, is real and the other a fairly subtle parody. Credit to Dell, however, for responding to it gracefully.)
• I’d like to read Susan Heuck Allen’s book, Classical Spies (Michigan 2011).
• On Tuesday, I posted on both Corinthian Matters and this blog a response to a series of blogs written by Chris Cloke on Corinthian Matters (here, here, and here). Over that time, Corinthian Matters has seen 421 page views with 25 of them being direct views of my post. This blog, however, has seen on 266 page views with only 5 being direct views of that post. As of 7 am CST today, my post is the most recent on Corinthian Matters which as 178 posts most of which date to 2011-2012; over that same time my blog has 302 posts. Corinthian Matters has 27,777 views; my blog has 29,384. It’s only a matter of time before Corinthian Matters has more all time page views than my blog, and the recent daily averages put my blog to shame. Nice work, Dr. Pettegrew!!
• What I’m listening to: The Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know; Frankie Rose, Interstellar.
• What I’m reading: Y. Lolos, The Land of Sikyon (ASCSA 2011).