Summer Work

I’ve started to call my summer “research leave” to help my focus on doing what I need to do and to avoid getting complacent. This summer will he hectic, in a fun way, with a few different projects rubbing shoulders with one another and it help me develop a bit of stamina for what will likely be a busy fall and winter semesters.

For those of you who wonder how the average academic spends their research leave. Here’s what I’ll be up to.

1. “Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis”: This paper is due August 1, but I have a substantially complete draft of the text. I think I’ll send a draft of it to a couple buddies who have endured campus budget crises in their day and see what I can do to make it stronger and more useful. I don’t have a ton of time to work on this either this summer or when I get home. I’m hoping that I can be efficient.

2. “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication”: This is a coauthored paper with David Pettegrew for the Journal of Field Archaeology. I think we’ll work a bit on it when we’re together this summer in Greece, but most of the work on this will have to wait until September. A manuscript for review will be due September 26th, I think. So we have some time!

3. Polis I: We’ve recently learned that we need to submit the first volume of our work at Polis on Cyprus to press by the end of December (so let’s say, December 1) or risk losing funding. This is adding a much needed injection of stress to our summer work on Cyprus, but it is what it is, and fortunately, we’re close to having our part of this volume complete. In fact, most of what we need to do is the fun stuff: re-read what we’ve written and give it a bit more polish and refinement. First thing is first, though, and that’s producing a proposal for the first two volume and getting them accepted.

4. PKAP II: ARRGGGHHH… this is our long simmering second PKAP volume which is 96% done. Seriously. 96%. It is so close to being done that we could reasonably send it out for review before the end of the summer, but it has gone from being the wolf closest to the sled to just another wolf in the forest. This is less than ideal from my perspective, since I invested a good bit of energy in this volume this fall and spring, but the risk of long simmering projects is that while they might produce the richest sauce in the end, they also risk being forgotten.

5. Larnaka Sewage System pottery: This is one of those OPP (Other People’s Pottery) projects that has a spring deadline for publication. We started the work this past summer and spent some time during the “non-research leave season” collecting bibliography and strategizing how to publish this salvage material in a meaningful and efficient way. We have two weeks in Larnaka to finish our work on this material and put together some kind of very rough draft of an article to submit in the spring. 

6. Slavic Pottery from Isthmia: Last summer, we started a project to study and contextualize the Slavic pottery from Isthmia. I think our first season was moderately productive. We not only studied the material from the Roman Bath (and framed some small additional research questions), but we also came to understand both the potential and challenges of working with Isthmia data and ceramics. This summer we plan to look beyond the Roman Bath, particularly to contexts associated with the Justinianic Fortress and use these to check our contexts and typologies developed from the material from the Roman Bath. My feeling is that we’re yet another season away from producing a significant publication of this material, but we should know more or less what we want to say by the end of this summer. 

7. Hexamilion Wall Exploration Project. This is a made up name for the work that David Pettegrew and I plan to do to document what might well be some new sections of the Hexamilion Wall. We received a permit to clear some vegetation and to do some documentation and we’ll just have to see what we find. I’m optimistic. What could be very interesting is if we can connect this work with the work we’re doing with the ceramics and stratigraphy at Isthmia.

8. Publishing Work: This summer is a summer of FIVE books, I think. The Corinthian Countryside, Wild Drawing: Street Art in Perspective, The Muslims of Darürrahat, Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota, and Clell Gannon’s Songs of the Bunchgrass Acres. I’ve never had this many irons in the fire, but I’m very excited about this bumper crop of titles scheduled to appear this fall. I’m already beginning to think of ways to market this! 

9. The Slow Cooker. This fall, I’ve agreed to give a paper on my “slow cooker” idea of “Black Pseudoarchaeology.” Fortunately it is only a 10 minute paper as part of a larger workshop on Pseudoarchaeology at the ASOR annual meeting. Hopefully this gets me back to work on my next book project which will be a short book on pseudoarchaeological ideas and Black culture with particular focus on Black spiritual traditions, music, and literature. It’ll offer an alternate view to the whitewashing of the pseudoarchaeological discourse and hopefully encourage archaeologists to tread a bit more lightly when they encounter pseudo-science and pseudoarchaeological ideas in the wild. 

10. The Deep Freeze. Finally, I have a few ideas that have been shunted into the deep freeze for now. These are mostly digital projects especially related to our work at Polis. I would love, for example, to build out a digital framework and standards for publishing the archaeological data from Polis. We got a start on it may years ago so this wouldn’t be de novo. 

Three Things Thursday: On AI and LLM

At first, I was all aboard on the panic about large language models (LLM) and “artificial intelligence” in the academy. In fact, I participated in an on-campus conversation a few months ago that centered on the impact of ChatGPT in the classroom. Since then, I’ve largely grown bored of the hype and the endlessly repeated tropes that AI will change everything, we need to adapt or die, or that AI is poised to open new horizons.

Since I appreciate folks like Joshua Nundell’s efforts to respond to and critique some of the recent conversations, I thought I might add my two cents in the spirit of solidarity among bloggers, if nothing else. 

Thing the First

It seems to me that some of the anxiety surrounding the impact of LLM driven AI in the classroom centers is a bit misplaced. After all, there is a massive catalogue of approaches to writing that easily sidestep the problematic temptation to use, say, ChatGPT to produce an assignment. In my department alone, I know colleagues who do low-stakes, in-class writing, some who develop richly scaffolded writing assignments that require outlines, multiple drafts, proper citations, and other elements that LLM can’t replicate, and finally, some who encourage students to work in groups where peer pressure mitigates the risk of using ChatGPT.

Each of these approaches have pedagogical merits and are well-tested tools in a teaching tool kit. In other words, creating scenarios where LLM assisted writing is discouraged doesn’t involve re-thinking how we teach. It simply involves adopting what many have argued are “good practices” for teaching writing anyway. Of course, I understand that incorporating these practices into a class involve a bit of a redesign, but it’s hardly a revolution.

Thing the Second

Recent handwriting over the role that LLM driven AI plays in scholarship is mostly ridiculous. The examples used are, of course, egregious—especially those that preserve the telltale word, “Certainly” before listing a bunch of references in a literature review—and, presumably, embarrassing to the journals where such text appears. But let’s be honest here: these are not good journals. The examples bandied about the internet are simply not good articles as even a cursory survey of their content (and despite their being far outside my field) reveals.

In other words, this does little to convince me that a wave of AI generated content is welling up in the depths of the more unscrupulous scholarly world. Of course, most academics know that a tremendous amount of poor and mediocre scholarship exists. This is not driven by ready access to LLM derived AI composition, but by the irresistible pressures to publish frequently, to develop important quantitative markers for scholarly performance, and to constantly justify a position within the academy. Of course, publishers are only too happy to take advance of the need for content. Ironically, the pressures produced by unrealistic research expectations and unscrupulous publishers rely partly over-extended and over-worked faculty who can’t (or, more tactically, won’t) fulfill their professional obligations as reviewers.  

It seems to me that this ecosystem is as much to blame for the rise in articles that carelessly make use of LLM’s capacity to generate plausible sounding text. This isn’t to absolve the “authors” of such articles of dishonest practices, but to suggest that blaming it on ChatGPT is mistaking the symptom for the disease.

Thing the Third

Over the last dozen years, I’ve shifted from being an enthusiastic advocate for open access academic publishing to more of an agnostic skeptic. This isn’t because I think OA publishing is bad or wrong—after all I run an open access press—but that I think OA publishing as part of a more complex scholarly ecosystem that isn’t necessarily an unqualified good for all participants in this system.

It has been interesting to me to see how scholars have pivoted from championing the power of OA publications as democratizing knowledge to hesitating just a bit now as it becomes clear that OA publications may form an important component of future LLMs. Without disparaging the entire OA movement, it seems apparent that the emergence of LLM and recent challenges by copyright holders whose works constitute these LLMs creates opportunities for OA texts to create a foundation for new forms of automated and algorithmically derived knowledge making. 

Of course, for this to work, the larger ecosystem has to continue to produce high quality OA texts for our new LLM to consume. If we imagine that publishers will ultimately seek to monetize LLMs and their algorithms, then the loop is effectively closing. The growing body of OA publications, which some scholars and institutions pay to produce, will invariably populating the next generation of LLMs which will, in turn, power the next batch of AI text generators. 

This isn’t some kind of radically new observations, but does, I think, help me understand the how the larger ecosystem surrounding AI text generators and LLMs works with both teaching and publishing in the academy. 

Teaching Thursday: More on ChatGPT

Early this week, I had the pleasure of participating (and I use that word broadly) in a seminar focused on teaching with ChatGPT. The participants in the seminar were really outstanding and shared range of practical and theoretical approaches to teaching with ChatGPT. I was frankly blown away by the thoughtfulness and expertise on the panel and I struggled to engage with it entirely (despite sitting awkwardly on the “digital stage”).

Here’s what I had thought about in the lead up to the panel.

One thing that came up at the end of the panel that got me thinking a bit differently about ChatGPT is that it can only offer responses based on what it reads and consumes. On some level, this means that we have to learn to write (and disseminate) information for a new class of “artificial” readers.

This isn’t an entirely new observation. In fact, we have already understood some of this which occurs under the banner of “search engine optimization,” but it strikes me that if ChatGPT can deploy its language model to produce text, it’s not a leap to recognize that the same language model could be used to assess the content upon which its responses to queries are based. In other words, ChatGPT, and its future iterations, is a reader that, like all readers, performs its task based on an algorithm that presumably adjusts to the content available.

The question then as a writer is how do we make our work appealing or maybe merely susceptible to our new ChatBOT aggregators. Surely, these kind of bots will have less interest in deliberate displays of opacity, ambiguity, or playfulness. We might even be able to retire for good the need for the compelling (or even slightly misleading) lede which students so often turn into the cringeworthy first sentence. It also calls into question the value of such awkward stylistic crutches as the “rhetorical question.” At the same time, one wonder how it assesses the presence of “irony” in ascertaining the authority or utility of a text. A query to ChatGPT tells us that it discerns irony though linguistic features, contextual clues, semantic analysis, and, perhaps most importantly, machine learning, which relies on texts that humans have marked up to allow the AI to understand what irony looks like in practice.

On a more basic level access to texts will surely impact how these AI bots formulate their answers. For generations publishers have sought to monetize their texts by limiting access to them and recognizing that the there remains a balance between cultivating the influence of a text and capitalizing on those who need access to it. One wonder whether in the future, the scope, speed, and reach of AI readers will mean that a text that is hard to access — behind a paywall, written in a non-English language, or even is simply opaque in meaning — will limit its influence in the kind of language models that these AI readers rely on to produce new text. In other words, the presence of quick-reading AI bots will accelerate the importance of open access bodies of texts which will almost certainly gain a greater influence over the language models that shape the ability of AI bots to “think.” 

There are those who see a future where publishers are less inclined to charge for access to individual publications. Pay-wall barriers can make it harder to for automated processes to aggregate information across a wide range of sources and as aggregators increasingly serve to privilege certain sources above others (and to amplify certain works over others). Of course, there are ways to let bots in and impede the movement of human eyes, but it also stands to reason that AI-powered aggregators will invariably draw more freely on content that is more easy to access and plentiful on the web.

In light of this situation, some have proposed an alternative business model that see publishers providing aggregation services, likely powered by AI bots, that assess the significance of publications in a field, provide answers to research queries, or even prepare regular literature reviews for scholars. These aggregation services, of course, will come at a cost and will likely introduce certain biases into the results that they aggregate, but will provide a revenue stream for the publishers. More than that, as publishers shift the cost of publishing from the readers (via subscriptions) to authors (via subventions), the cost of publishing could become a way to ensure that an article rises to the top of an aggregator’s trawl through recent publications.

Teaching and ChatGPT

I know that I’m late to the bandwagon with regard to ChatGPT, but I somehow got myself featured on a panel hosted by our campus’s teaching institute to discuss what to do about and with ChatGPT in the classroom.

I think part of the reason that I’m being included is that I’m honest enough to say that I really don’t know what to do about ChatGPT, and naive enough to admit that I expect there are some great things we can do WITH it.

As for the for the former, I remain committed to some version of the “No Cop Shit” in the classroom mentality in the classroom. I’d rather have a student take advantage of my generosity than to become some kind of heavy who tries to police student efforts at resistance. Perhaps at my weakest, I believe that I’m more likely to coop a student through understanding than I am to break student resistance with force, but I like to think that my goals don’t always involve doing what I can to subvert the last of a students innate desire to resist the structures of capitalism, authoritarianism, and discipline. 

I also discovered that ChatGPT detectors are not entirely locked down. I asked ChatGPT to produce a short essay on Late Roman metallurgy on Cyprus. I then ran it through a couple of the standard AI text detectors. At least one of them told me that it was unlikely to have been produced by AI and another gave it a 50% chance of being AI generated . All the AI text detectors recognized my blog post from Tuesday as written by a human. I credit my obtuse grammatical style (once compared to Cicero on acid) and liberal sprinkling of typos. A student paper clearly composed by an AI bot, however, — the student admitted it — met with ambivalence even from ChatGPT when I asked it if its language model produced the paper. In other words, it appears that the “cop shit” route might quickly turn into a scene from Blade Runner.   

(As ChatGPT tells us “As an artificial intelligence language model, I don’t have the ability to dream or experience consciousness, so I cannot dream of anything, including electric sheep…. However, the question of what it means to be conscious and how it relates to artificial intelligence and replicants is a central theme in Blade Runner, and the movie leaves open the possibility that Deckard’s consciousness may be artificial or implanted. Overall, the nature and extent of Deckard’s consciousness are left up to interpretation and debate… there is ongoing research into the development of artificial consciousness, which aims to create machines that possess self-awareness and subjective experiences. However, such technology is still in its infancy and remains a topic of much debate and speculation… As an artificial intelligence language model, I do not possess consciousness in the same way that humans do. While I am capable of generating responses and holding conversations, these are based on algorithms and data processing rather than subjective experiences or emotions.”)

Ambiguity surrounding the character of text generated by ChatGPT especially as its language model develops (evolves?) over time makes the job of any would-be instructional blade runner at least as fraught as the administrator of the Voight-Kampf Test in the film.  

As for the potential of ChatGPT in the classroom, I remain optimistic (if a bit naive). One of the things that I’ve struggled with consistently is when a student clearly understands a topic, has done the research, and have engaged with the reading, but struggles to express their ideas in writing. Our tendency now is to work with these students to improve their writing skills, to structure their writing process, and to produce results that are adequate reflections of their ideas and engagement. This remediation comes at a cost, of course. Generally, I think it is a fair to say that students who struggle with writing, struggle academically in a college setting. It’s a hell of an environment to find yourself behind and to make up ground. In fact, in my experience students who struggle with writing often struggle academically in general because they have to invest far more time trying to write in an adequate way than students who have basic writing skills. This invariably detracts from other tasks vital to their performance in college (reading, review, problem solving, and so on). 

Of course, as the famous saying goes… all good writers are the same, but all bad writers are bad in different ways. A student who struggles with organizing their thoughts into an orthodox paper is different from a student who struggles to compose sentences despite having a well structured paper. One wonders whether ChatGPT could, in the right situation, be a crutch that allows a students whose writing in poor to avoid losing even more ground. 

A recent paper in ACS Nano, by too many authors to list, “Best Practices for Using AI When Writing Scientific Manuscripts” goes a step further and argues, as near as I can tell, that part of what makes ChatGPT convincing is that much like human generated prose, it struggles to produce the kind of bad writing that we all know (and love) from our students:

“The human-like quality of the text structure produced by ChatGPT can deceive readers into believing it is of human origin. It is now apparent, however, that the generated text might be fraught with errors, can be shallow and superficial, and can generate false journal references and inferences. More importantly, ChatGPT sometimes makes connections that are nonsensical and false.”

These problems are probably not with the language model itself, but with the text from which the language model is generated. While we may have developed beyond the idea of garbage-in, garbage-out in computing, what strikes me with ChatGPT is that it appears in my rather superficial experience with it to create text that is remarkably uniform in its badness. In other words, it produces bad text that is bad in only some, rather limited ways. In contrast, the worst student papers tend to be replete with grammatical and organization problems. ChatGPT seems to mitigate these quite effectively, but leave many of the common thinking, referencing, and evidence issues in plain sight. 

What this means for teaching is hard to know. As any faculty member who reads a considerable quantity of student work will tell you, part of the joy of reading student work is not just in its often bizarre and wonderful content, but also in its style. Students offer a window into the future of writing, thinking, and speaking English. ChatGPT seems intent on mitigating the dynamism of the English language and one wonders, at the university level at least, whether this is where it presents the greatest risk.

Teaching Thursday: Listening, ChatGTP, and Teaching More

I’m hunkered down by the fire with a hot cup of coffee as we brace for the second winter storm in as many days, but this has also given me a bit more time to think my past semester, listen to the current buzz, and to look forward a bit to the spring (semester, but also to spring in general!).

In the spirit of Three Things Thursday, here are three gentle thoughts about teaching inspired by last semester, the moment, and the future.

Thing the First

One of the things that I’m really trying to work on in the classroom is unrelated to teaching goals, pedagogical methods, or even content. I’m trying to listen to my students more. This involves not just listening to how the students are doing in my class or in the classroom, but also how students are faring outside the classroom. 

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that I have any interest in becoming involved in my student’s lives when their not in class, but it has helped me come to recognize that the greatest variable in student performance often has nothing to do with what I am doing in the classroom. I think as an early career instructor, I assumed that if I got everything right in the classroom, then learning would happen and I would achieve whatever outcomes that I had set out. As I’ve spend more time in the classroom and had the good fortune to teach students at multiple levels and in a wider range of settings, I’ve come to appreciate that my planning for any given lesson or class, is only one variable in the complicated matrix that has to exist for a positive student learning outcome.

Listening to my students talk about their weeks, being flexible with my demands, and trying to anticipate patterns in their off campus lives that impact classroom performance should, ideally, make me a better instructor and help me cater my class to the students that I have in my classes rather than the students who I imagine when I construct my syllabus.

Thing the Second

I’m very much enjoying the current conversation about the impact of the AI large language model driven chat and writing programs. ChatGPT3.5, which was launched in November, is the most prominent of these programs and it has a remarkable ability to engage in conversations and produce plausible blocks of texts based on certain prompts.

Any number of teachers have pointed out that despite the uncanny ability of this software to produce plausible sounding text, they are rarely accurate or insightful. At the same time, the very plausibility of the text that this software generates has caused some alarm among faculty responsible for teaching writing. The ability to write well (or at least plausibly) has long been a hallmark of an educated individual and a foundational element of a college education. The seemingly sudden appearance of a computer program to perform a task that has long represented a key element of social differentiation in our society has (once again) remind us that the markers of social status are often not especially difficult to attain or at very least mimic.

This should cause us to reconsider (or at least reflect upon) what we think education is doing, the role of writing (or speaking) well as an indicator of clear and critical thinking, and the status afforded to individuals with so-called “expertise” in contemporary society. It may be that ChatGPT could not have arrived at a better time in our development as a society. I’m not ready to say that it will reveal that the emperor has no clothes, but I hope that it at least supports continued reflection on why we afford some individuals more respect, prestige, and status than others.

Thing the Third

I’m teaching a lot in the spring and despite some lingering anxieties about workload and such, I’m pretty excited. I’m teaching an internship in public history, another semester of a practicum in writing, editing, and publishing for our English Department, Roman History, our department’s methods course called The Historians’ Craft, and at the introductory level Western Civilization I.  

It should be hectic, but I often find that these hectic teaching semesters help me refine what I’m doing in the classroom, build the kind of intellectual stamina necessary to manage a range of subjects in a range of classes at once, and contribute to me becoming a better teacher in the future. Even now, as I look ahead to next semester, I’m starting to think about ways to cut out unnecessary or distracting content, assignments, and exercises, and focus my courses on a small number of neatly defined educational outcomes. 

It’ll also remind me that when students take 15 credits a semester (and are expected to work, have personal and family lives, and negotiate all the little things that we all do every day to survive in the world), their lives are busy and the margin for error is slim.

At the risk of sounding privileged, I’m excited about the spring and the opportunity to teach five classes on five very different topics. 

Three Things Thursday: Plagiarism, Laptops, and the End of Antiquity

I submitted grades, my summer plans are coming into focus, and I’m almost ready to decamp for the Mediterranean for the first time in two years. I feel like everything is going on at once, and this is more or less a good thing and it feels like a solid backdrop for a Three Things Thursday.

Thing the First

Earlier this week, there was a moderately interesting long Twitter thread in response to an incident of plagiarism in academia. The situation was discovered at the peer review stage and other than a bit of outrage, the harm seems to have been minimal. That said, whenever someone talks about plagiarism in academia, they tend to complain about the crime rather than the underlying system that makes plagiarism both unethical and problematic. To be clear, I’m not condoning plagiarism and I realize that I’m writing from a position of privilege. At the same time, I wonder whether our tendency to become outraged at incidents of plagiarism serves to reinforce a system that is fundamentally toxic. Stoking outrage at incidents of plagiarism in academia reinforces as system that seeks to commodify knowledge and connect the public good that might come from new ideas, processes, and products to private gain.

Of course, we all like it when a colleague recognizes our contribution to our field and citation, in its simplest form, represents a kind of acknowledgement. Unfortunately, over the past seventy years, institutions and the market has weaponized this gesture of collegiality and turned it into a way of measuring and even quantifying impact, reach, and significance. As is so often the case, publishers and institutions have found ways to leverage our desire for collegiality and recognition to support a system designed to generate profits and prestige. The rise of i10 scores, h-indices, and journal rankings that leverage citations to track impact and influence is yet another effort to sort and rank academic labor and to find new ways to profit from both the media through which scholars gain influence and the tools that measure such influence and reach. Plagiarism in this context is as much an economic crime as a breach of scholarly decorum.

By sounding off about plagiarism, then, we both reinforce an age old system of academic recognition, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but also bolster system that allows individuals and institutions to profit from the working of scholarly networks. To my mind, over the last 30 years, the tail has come increasingly to wag the dog with the desire for measurable accomplishments increasingly shaping the landscape of academic work. At the same time, academics celebrate the call to be “against cop shit” in our classrooms and finding ways to subvert the status quo. We also have brought critical attention to the way that the COVID pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities in the world. Maybe it’s this recent willingness to consider burning it all down that has made social media outrage over plagiarism ring a bit hollow or at least leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Thing the Second

You might not be able to tell, but I’m writing this post on a Dell laptop rather than my trusty MacBook Pro. For better or for worse, I’ve been an Apple guy for the last 15 or so years and have appreciated the tidy integration between my phone (and especially its camera) and my laptops. Each summer, though, I switch over the my PC which I need to run Microsoft Access and ESRI’s ArcGIS which don’t have native Mac implementation. Usually, I bring along a MacBook Air when I go to the Mediterranean and use it for writing and blogging and to access my Apple ecosystem more easily and natively. My MacBook Air is pretty long in the tooth these days and while it can do what I would like it to do, it’s battery is no longer what it was, its pre-Retina screen is pretty underwhelming, and it’s tiny hard drive makes it more like an early-21st century netbook than a modern laptop. I just wonder whether this year is the year that taking my PC and using it for my writing.

This is a bit nerve wracking because I can’t help but feel that abandoning my Mac will make some part of my work more difficult, even if I’m not entirely sure what part of my work it will negatively impact. I suspect this reflects the success of the Apple ecosystem in making us feel dependent (or at very least comfortable) in their world. What is the most remarkable thing to me is how it descends to the gestural level. My years of working on Macs has shaped how I interact with the keyboard, touchpad, and applications and these habits are profoundly hard to break!

Thing the Third

Yesterday, I posted my annual “Summer Reading List” post and a number of friends reached out and said, in various ways, “whoa! so little ancient history!” This was mostly an oversight. I have considered reading Jack Davis’s new book: A Greek State in Formation: The Origins of Civilization in Mycenaean Pylos (2022) which is available Open Access from the University of California Press. I also want to read Alex Knodell’s newish book: Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History (2021). If I had all the time and energy in the world (and just a modicum of discipline), I would certainly read Nathan Arrington’s latest: Athens at the Margins: Pottery and People in the Early Mediterranean World (2021) from Princeton.

California has also continued its long tradition of publishing novel and significant works in the study of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity. Since it’s open access, I’d be keen to check out Mary Farag’s What Makes a Church Sacred: Legal and Ritual Perspectives from Late Antiquity (2021).

I also have a copy of Michele Salzman’s The Falls of Rome: Crises, Resilience, and Resurgence in Late Antiquity (2021) from Cambridge which is not open access, but would help me think about my class for next spring on Late Antiquity.

A Memorial for a Digital Friend: Diana Gilliland Wright

Yesterday, I learned that Diana Gilliland Wright had died earlier this month. I didn’t know her very well and, in fact, I can’t exactly remember if I had ever met her. I knew her mostly via email, comments on my blog, and her own voluminous blogging output.

Over the last decade, as my research interest shifted toward the Argolid, she and I corresponded a bit more regularly as she offered us the occasional insight based on her years of work on the city of Nafplion and its environs. From what I can gather she wrote her dissertation on a 15th century Venetian administrator at Nafplion, Bartolomeo Minio. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read it. Nor have I read any of her formal scholarship. What I did read, quite regularly, were her blogs.

Year ago, when blogging was still fresh and exciting and filled bloggers with hope, we envisioned a world where bloggers read each others’ work and reached out to one another and commented and shared each others’ work through hyperlinks and blogrolls and ultimately forged relationships across networks of blogs. Diana Wright did all that and was a regularly commenter on my blog from its earliest days (on Typepad!). And even as the promise of blogs as a corresponding medium faded a bit, she continued to reach out via email to offer comments and ask for publications. I remember sending her a few copies of North Dakota Quarterly at some point as well and hoping that she found the poetry and fiction in those pages interesting.

From what I can piece together she ran two blogs. The blog that I knew best was called “Surprised by Time” and it largely focused on the Medieval Morea (or Peloponnesus). Her interests were wide ranging and did much to make transparent murky waters separating the Medieval and Early Modern worlds. The scions of Byzantine elite families rubbed shoulders with Venetian administrators, on assignment, Ottoman officials, and Mediterranean diplomats, literati, and ne’er-do-wells. Palaiologoi cross paths with Italian merchants and Ottoman travelers, Pashas, and poets. Each of the over 200 entries, offered a startling glimpse into a world often overlooked by scholars preoccupied by tidier narratives of rise and decline of empire and neglectful of the messier interface of daily life among those most effected by political and cultural change. To Dr. Wright’s particular credit, the blog exists under a CC-By-SA license meaning that anyone can share her work as long as they credit her and make their work available under an open license. The blog appears to be fairly well archived by the internet archive, but I would be keen to entertain ways to preserve it more formally. 

For many years, she also maintained a landing page of sorts called “Nauplion.net” where she offered an index of her work and the work of her partner Pierre MacKay which featured regularly on her blog. It also featured links to many scans of hard to find primary sources some of which were translated on Surprised by Time. This site is no longer working and hadn’t been updated in many years, but it is preserved on the Internet Archive.

[By coincidence, I’m teaching Evliya Çelebi this week and using Pierre MacKay’s translation of Evliya’s visit to Corinth in my class. Diana Wright posted bits and pieces of Pierre’s translation and the story of his discovery of Evliya’s manuscript on her blog.]

Her other blog, Firesteel is an anthology of poetry gleaned from ancient and modern sources and from Greek, Ottoman, Arab, Italian, French and English language poets. I don’t know whether the poetry posted here and her more academic content crossed paths in some kind of formal way, but it really is an amazing collection of work (which I suspect violates all sort of copyrights, but I get the sense that Diana Wright just didn’t really care). 

~

As a small, digital memorial to Diana Gilliland Wright’s passing, I would encourage you spend a moment looking at her online legacy and recognizing it as a gesture of a kind of digital kinship that could connect individuals who had never met. For whatever reason, her profile included a link to John Coltrane’s 1957 recording of “While My Lady Sleeps.” It feels like an appropriate soundtrack for a visit to her digital world. 

. . . a little wine for remembrance . . . a little water for the dust.  

Terrace Tuesday is NOT a Thing (But It Should Be)

This weekend I read an article in the most recent issue of Antiquity titled “Agricultural terraces in the Mediterranean: medieval intensification revealed by OSL profiling and dating” by (takes a deep breath) Sam Turner, Tim Kinnaird, Günder Varinlioğlu, Tevfik Emre Şerifoğlu, Elif Koparal, Volkan Demirciler, Dimitris Athanasoulis, Knut Ødegård, Jim Crow, Mark Jackson, Jordi Bolòs, José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo, Francesco Carrer, David Sanderson, and Alex Turner. 

The article, as the title implies, uses optically stimulated luminescence to date terraces from across the Mediterranean. The date of terraces is a perennial problem in the archaeology of the Mediterranean countryside. Not only are terraces ubiquitous in many areas of the Mediterranean basin, but they present a series of intriguing archaeological challenges. For example, terraces often functioned for multiple generations, underwent repairs, and contributed to landscape that reflected a palimpsest of economic, social, and political relationships to rural agricultural production. Developing a system to date terrace walls successfully and at scale has become a bit of a white whale for archaeologists interested in the Mediterranean countryside with targeted excavations, complex GIS analyses, and ethnoarchaeological approaches offer limited, but at times valuable insights.

The project described by Turner et al. uses optically stimulated luminescence at scale to date terrace walls from sites across the Mediterranean. From what I understand, OSL allows one to date samples according to when they were last exposed to light. This appears to involve some kind of science. By taking a series of samples at various depths from behind terraces, Tuner et al.’s work was not only able to identify how the terrace was built, often by recognizing the reverse stratigraphy associated with a cut-and-fill approach to construction, but also, in many cases, date the terrace. Since the article is open access you can go and read it and appreciate the authors’ careful attention archaeological process in their evaluation of the the OSL dates for terrace walls. Note that they also provided the data that supported their arguments as a download, but oddly presented it in as an .xlsx file rather than as a more basic file format. 

The article is more than just methodology. The authors’ argue on the basis of the samples that the terraces that there were two major periods of terrace building and modification: the mid-12th century and the early-16th century. On Naxos, where some of the samples were taken, these periods did not necessarily coincided with known settlement in the same region. More significantly, the dates associated with the terrace walls do not seem to coincide with artifact scatters on the surface or more monumental features in the landscape. 

In other words, the construction of these terraces is not something that left a marked trace in the landscape. Of course, it is hardly surprising that the construction of terraces didn’t leave a material trace in the landscape, but one would have liked to see traces of increased activity associated with the terrace walls. At the same time, it’s interesting to think of terraces not as necessarily productive features in the landscape, but as aspirational features that reflected the hope for increased agricultural productivity. It may be that the factors that encouraged the investment in terraces at one point in the past did not mature according to plan or perhaps only supported episodic use. In other words, the scenarios that resulted from the increased investment in the landscape may not have left a clear material signature outside of the investment itself.

In this context, the ability to date a terrace or a terrace system consistently offers a window into a aspirational landscape that may or may not coincide with other material traces. This alone offers a distinctive perspective on rural life.      

Three Things Thursday: Teaching, Narrative, and Classics (again)

As another hectic week staggers toward its inevitable close, I’m lucky enough to have so much on my plate that I can’t decide where to start. As a result, we’re going to once again take the buffet approach and offer a little three things Thursday sampler. As always, I hope to turn one of these into a full and proper blog post in the future, but it’s a bit hard to see when that might occur!

Thing the First 

I know it’s cliche these days to talk about Zoom fatigue and my disappointment with our hybrid, hy-flex, teaching model. The way it works at my institution (and I expect many places) is that I have a small group of students in class and a gaggle of students on Zoom. I then try to juggle my attention between the students in the physical classroom and those attending via Zoom. The contrast couldn’t be more stark. The students in the classroom are attentive and engaged (or at least making a sincere effort to be). The students in Zoom might be engaged and attentive and I have some evidence that at least some are, but many are just black boxes with names who appear at the start of class, remain politely muted for the duration, and then vanish once class is over. I hope that this is what they wanted from their educational experience, but I really can’t tell.

One of the ironies is that in a number of committees on campus, I’m hearing about the importance of retention to the financial and academic health of my university. Some of the funds that we are receiving from the CARES program, for example, are being used to support students in the battle for retention. One thing that is particularly difficult, however, is the lack direct contact with students. Our Zoom mediated interaction eliminates many of the simple ways that faculty connect with students. From chatting with students before and after class to reading the room and paying attention to the comportment and level of engagement from a struggling student. Whether we like it or not, face-to-face classes represent an opportunity to claim the majority of a student’s attention and to make the kind of connection that help a struggling student succeed.

This isn’t meant to be a complaint about students who are using Zoom or some kind of old-man rant about kids and their technology. I obviously understand that many students and faculty are using Zoom out of necessity in our COVID era. Instead, I’m interested in how limited our technologically mediated methods are for engaging students and making them feel welcome, supported, and encouraged in our community. We can also add to this list any number of the various digital methods designed to track student progress and  target students who are struggling. 

I’m not a Luddite, but our embrace of Zoom this semester has made me more confident than ever that current technologically mediated approaches to retention are unlikely to be successful. Human contact is key.

Thing the Second  

Earlier in the week, I posted on Kim Bowes’s remarkable new article on the Roman economy. One of the points that she makes is that the recent (re)turn to cliometrics has accompanied a turn to big books, filled with big arguments and offering big conclusions. In many cases, the narratives found in these big books retrace well-trod paths of rise and fall and seek monocausal explanations to understand political, military, economic, social, and cultural change. 

I wanted to suggest that the attraction of these big books and their big ideas might well reflect our recent interest in big stories. From the resurgence of Star Wars, to Larry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the various epic Marvel films, and Game of Thrones, there is a recent fascination with stories set in brilliantly constructed immersive environments. Not only do these big stories share the kinds of narrative arcs present in big books—with rise and fall being only the most obvious—these narratives also support and almost infinite number of interlocking (and usually monetized) story lines which follow similar narrative profiles. Even as Star Wars, for example, has sought to “think smaller” with stories like the Mandalorian, the writers cannot resist entangling their story with both major narrative arcs (the rise and decline of the Empire) and also tracing similar narrative trajectories in their own smaller stories. These kinds of stories reduce even complex imagined worlds to plodding, monocausal narratives that serve to entertain, but rarely enlighten.

It goes without saying that this same kind of thinking is characteristic of the rise of conspiracy theories that often rely on darkly cinematic narratives that revolve around contests between good and evil that determine the rise or fall of this or that political entity. Moreover, these conspiracy theories, however misguided, appear to rely on the same kind of massive aggregation of related data points that the most expansive historical and archaeological seek to trace and reveal. 

It’s hardly surprising, then, considering the nature of our media consumption that our historical arguments and conspiracy theories share many of the same elements. It does make me wonder whether diversifying our media diet and reading more small stories filled with greater ambiguity, that avoid easy resolutions, and that cannot be reconciled as part of a recognizable whole. These kinds of small stories are often more challenging, they’re rarely commercial, and they often encourage us to view our world as a place filled with difficult contradictions, uneasy juxtapositions, and overwhelming and irreducible complexity.

Thing the Third

I want to draw some attention to an intriguing blog post over at Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s Classics at the Intersections blog. She and her partner outline the situation at their small Classics department at a small liberal arts college. The post is interesting mostly because it offers a perspective on the “Crisis of Classics” that isn’t situated at the level of PhD granting institutions invested in both reproducing the discipline and preserving or growing their departments, but rather at a place committed to preserving a version of Classics that is relevant to students who will likely major in something else.

This got me thinking (once again) what a similar essay would read like that focused on institutions like my own where Classics isn’t a department but a program in languages that is supported by a loose cluster of related classes across history, English, religion, languages, and art. As I’ve noted before, I suspect that the future of Classics will look a lot more like with RFK described on her blog or what I experienced at UND than how the discipline is currently structured in elite departments.   

Three Things Thursday: Fiction, Archaeology, and Reading

It’s a Thursday and just after the mid-point of the semester. Most years, the wheels start to come off about now, and I’m certainly feeling a greater sense of general urgency than I usually do. 

As a gesture to a rather frantic time, it feels right to do a little “Three Things Thursday” to clear the deck of wandering blog material that is bound to get caught up in the machinery of daily life and bring everything to a stop.

Thing The First

Last weekend, I read Don DeLillo’s new novel, The Silence. It’s short and like so much “Late DeLillo” atmospheric. It describes a world when all digital technology simply stops working and five people are forced to encounter life in a fundamentally different way. 

For archaeologists interested in issues of ontology, the book is short enough to be a “must read.”  As the five individuals lose their digital tools (and the digital tools that make the contemporary world possible), they lose part of themselves. The loss of their digital prosthetics leave them with phantom memories that bubble up through their consciousness suggesting that the disruption of digital technology is not enough to entirely divest ourselves of the imprint of our digital tools.

The book also engages with time in interesting ways (and here it seems to pick up where Point Omega, his 2010 novel leaves off. In Point Omega time alternately slows down and speeds up as the characters encounter existence through various modalities including the vastness of the desert, a slowed-down version of the film Psycho, and the structure of a haiku (which apparently give the novel its structure). In The Silence, time appears to stutter, lurch, and double back on itself. One character begins to recite Einstein, the other the fractured commentary on the Super Bowl, while another attempts to understand how they arrived in New York after crossing the Atlantic on a flight when all technology stopped. The staccato stratigraphy presented through DeLillo’s dialogue will be immediately recognizable to the archaeologist who is asked to make sense of the sequence of events (which are so often non-linear) as well as the definition of each object.

Thing the Second

I also enjoyed Anton Bonnier and Martin Finné’s recent article in Antiquity, “Climate variability and landscape dynamics in the Late Hellenistic and Roman north-eastern Peloponnese.” As readers of this blog know, I’ve become increasingly interested in historical climate change and they way in which changes in climate shaped past societies and their archaeological remains. Bonnier and Finné’s article consider climate proxies from three caves in the Peloponnesus and attempt to correlate this data with evidence from intensive pedestrian surveys in the Argolid and the Corinthia. Needless to say this is a messy project, but the results are suggestive.

They propose that a shift is visible away from land on hill slopes during the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods. They then suggest that there exist the political and economic explanations for this: the shift away from diversified agricultural strategies associated with the “family farm” toward less diverse practices associated with the supplying of urban centers with grain. They add to this explanation the possibility that the Late Hellenistic and Roman period was also notably drier than the Classical and Hellenistic era. As a result, more marginal fields on hill slopes with thinner soils that were less likely to retain moisture, for example, were abandoned for better and more erosionally stable fields on the valley bottoms. They make clear that climate change was not the primary driver of this putative shift, but could have been a contributing factor.   

Thing The Third

I’ve been thinking a bit about how we read in the 21st century. In my introductory level World History class, I’ve asked the students to engage in non-linear reading of the class’s open access history textbook. Instead of moving chapter to chapter, region to region, I’ve suggested that student use the search function and read across certain themes, ideas, phenomena, and situations. Searching for topics such as “joy,” “love,” and “anger” connects Confucius’s quip on the joys of a contemplative life, the joy of Buddhist nirvana, and the joy of a Classical Greek religious festival. Love brings together Chinese and ancient Egyptian love poetry. Anger connects the fate of kings, the wrath of deities, and daily life in the Levant. For me, this kind of reading is exciting and disorienting, but for my students, it’s frustrating. Without the coherence and context of narrative (preferably supported by a strong sense of progress!), history becomes a cacophony of unrelated events.

I spend far more time working as an editor and publisher these days than I do as a conventional researcher and writer. As a result, I often find my day defined by oddly juxtaposed texts. Snippets of emails, poetry, typeset text, and academic prose jostle with each other more attention. On some days, it’s deeply fatiguing mostly because like my students, I want to encounter some kind of pattern. I want to find that rhythm of meaning that comes from sustained reading of a single or related texts. In its place, I find jostling voices and snippets of conversation overheard at a crowded bar. On my best days, this feels more real than a tidy narrative or a scholarly argument. The orderly style, tone, and forensic detachment feel inadequate to represent the chaotic realities of everyday life.