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. 

New Book Day: A Physician’s Journey

A new year and a new book from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. We are very pleased to kick what is likely to be a busy 2024 publishing year with Robert Kyle’s memoir: A Physician’s Journey: The Memoir of Robert A. Kyle, M.D.

Bob Kyle did his undergraduate work at UND before going on to medical school at Northwestern and a distinguished career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

Here’s the back of the book description:

Regrettably, I did not know three of my four grandparents.

So begins A Physician’s Journey, a quintessential modern memoir. Beginning in the tradition of the prairie reverie with snow-filled winters and single room school houses and ending with a litany of late-life accolades, Dr. Robert Kyle details his life from the farm, to smoke jumper school, to the University of North Dakota, to Northwestern Medical School, the US Air Force and eventually a career at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

At the Mayo Clinic he met his wife, Charlene, pioneered new treatments for cancer, and started his family. The story as Dr. Kyle tells is unique, but somehow still familiar and endearing. By drawing us into his life and accomplishments, we encounter a narrative suffused with the memories of an American experience that through his work, interests, and travels had a global reach.

~

When I started my press, I was satisfied publishing quirky edited volumes that largely revolved around my interests and my colleagues and friends. After a few of these books, however, I realized that I needed to expand my repertoire both to learn to publish new and different kinds of book with different kinds of authors.

A Physician’s Journey was my first effort at a memoir and the unique character of an editorial and production process that is more personal than usual. Fortunately, I had the support of a wonderful developmental and copy editor and Bob Kyle proved to be a thoughtful and collegial author.

The book is unique in The Digital Press catalogue in that it is the only volume available exclusively in hard cover and the only formal memoir. I hope that readers interested in Bob Kyle’s life, career, and accomplishments find it a worthwhile monument.

Teaching Tuesday: More on the Practicum

Like most of America, I’m up and at my keyboard with the Naoya Inoue-Marlon Tapales super undisputed bantam weight bout from Japan, but I’m starting to fret about my spring semester classes. The man class that I’m worried about is the Practicum in Editing and Publishing. I’ve taught this class in the past, but only to a handful of students at a time. Next semester, I’ll have a full class of a dozen students. It feels like I’ll have a bit less flexibility in terms of what I can do with the class and will require a bit more of a plan.

Since there are two major projects (and two minor projects) that require attention next semester, it makes sense to divide the class into two groups. One group will focus on the next issue of NDQ and one group will focus on the Grand Forks 150th project.

 The question is how do I get these groups started on these projects. It seems to me that there  are three ways to learn about editing and publishing. You can write books and get them published and learn about how different publishers and editors do their work first hadn’t. You can read books and pay attention to how they work and how they look. Finally, you can edit and publish as many books as possible and learn on the job. For me, getting published and publishing books has informed my ability to look at books as artifacts of the publishing process in a critical way. 

The tricky thing about this is that we don’t have a lot of time to get up to speed in that both of the major projects have March 1 deadlines. This means that the teams have to not only get up to speed quickly on the content of their projects, but also come to understand something of our “house style.” 

My current plan is to offer three quick assignments at the start of the semester:

Assignment One

Explore the NDQ archive with particular attention to issues published since 2018. Think about structure and content. What kind of content appears in these issues? How is it organized?

Explore The Digital Press catalogue. What kind of books does The Digital Press publish? What are key elements of the “house style”? 

Assignment Two

Identify three of NDQ’s “peer publications.” What are their common features? How do they differ?

Using the library collection, identify some books that might offer some ideas for the Grand Forks 150th project? 

Assignment Three

Working as a team, apply what you’ve learned from NDQ’s archive and peer publications to the current group of contributions to the Quarterly. Identify themes in the work and propose a way to organize the volume.

Working as a team, establish some recommendations and some priorities for the editing and design of the Grand Forks 150th project.

 

These three assignments should get the students starting to think about both publishing and how publishing (and editing) applies directly to their projects. It should also only occupies the first month of the semester leaving them time to work on their projects in February. 

Next week, I’ll work on how I’ll approach the class after the March 1 deadline!

Cyber Monday FREE Download Bundle from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota

Apparently today is Cyber Monday which marks the end of the a week of glorious (if glutinous) consumption featuring Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Small Business Saturday.

To celebrate this holiday, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is making a veritable gaggle of its books available in a simple, one-click, download.

2023 was a bit of a slow year for the press with only two titles appearing — Tuna Kalaycı’s Archaeology of Roads and Shilo Viginia Previti, Grant McMillan, and Samuel Amendolar’s Campus Building — but 2022 was a banner year with Rodger Coleman’s award-winning Sun Ra Sundays, two novels — The Cherry Tree and The Library of Chester Fritz — and Mike Michlovic and George Holley’s Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend. 

You can download all these books FOR FREE plus a couple bonus books just be clicking here. 

This is a direct download link. I don’t ask for your email, your credit card number, or even your name. You don’t need an account and you don’t need to explain yourself. You also don’t need to tell me why you like paper books better, but you are free to follow the links to the individual titles above and pick up a paper copy. All proceeds from paper books support the work of the press.

Stay tuned to this blog (and the Digital Press homepage) for some great titles scheduled to appear in 2024. This means more Corinthia, more archaeology of eastern North Dakota, some poetry (in collaboration with our friends at North Dakota Quarterly), some history, and maybe a bit of Athenian street art.  

Books in Beta

Over the holiday weekend, I’m going to take some time to finish up typesetting on book that has been lingering on The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota‘s to-do list for last year or so. It’s a textbook on the history of science and technology that is already in use in digital form at the University of Maryland’s global campus. You can check out the digital version of the book here. 

The challenge of this book for me is that it’s really not complete. That said, it is in use and the main editor of the book wants it available in paper form for students who don’t want to read it on the screen. This makes a certain amount of sense to me.

As a book that will be published under an open license, of course, being complete is a relative situation. Even if the author sees the book as final, it’s status as an open book (especially if it is released under a “by attribution” license) allows it to be adapted and modified in ways that other readers might find more helpful. This is especially relevant for a textbook which might be mined for useful sections, reorganized to fit different priorities, expanded, or even radically condensed depending on a class’s focus. In other words, books like this are in perpetual beta as they are tried and modified to meet the goals of different courses, instructors, and situations.

I’m still struggling a bit to wrap my head around “publishing” a formal version of a book that simply isn’t complete. 

That said, I’ve had a couple of other situations that could justify publishing a beta version of a book. 

I’ve recently received a nice draft of a book which offers some approaches to addressing and teaching about pseudoarchaeology in the archaeology classroom. The author doesn’t expect this book to be the last word on the subject, but see what he and his coauthors have brought together a useful start for anyone looking to teach about pseudoarchaeology. In other words, they hope that this book is expanded and adapted through use. And considering the prominence of conversations about pseudoarchaeology both across social media and in the discipline right now there is real reason to expedite the appearance of this book.

Finally, I have a brilliant manuscript prepared by students in a graduate course in English that I taught last spring. The book is a thoughtful and creative response to their experiences in one of the oldest buildings on campus, Merrifield Hall. This building is slated for a major renovation this spring and summer. Over homecoming weekend, the college held an open house that allowed faculty, students, alumni, and friends to say good bye to the building in its current form and to celebrate their memories and experiences in its broad, low-ceiling, halls and awkwardly designed classrooms and offices. 

The book was essentially done at the time of the event, but it wasn’t quite the level of polish or finish that we wanted. If I had to do it over again, I might have released a beta version for people to enjoy—even if it was just in digital form—at this event. It would have cast a stronger light on these students’ work and encouraged interested readers to “stay tuned” for the final version which will appear in the coming months.

These three examples have given me the idea of creating a “Books in Beta” catalogue at my press which will allow us to release books that aren’t quite (or won’t ever be) finalized. It’ll also acknowledge that in the 21st century, digitally-mediated world, publishing isn’t ever the final step, but just another step in knowledge making. As such, it is perfectly acceptable to recognize publications that exist in various states, from the polished, authoritative, and complete, to the rough, tentative, and provisional.

Would you download a book in beta from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota?  

Cyber Monday from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota (feat. North Dakota Quarterly)

It’s Cyber Monday which, to my mind, isn’t really a thing. That said, we live in a world where quite a few things that aren’t things (e.g. the entire internet) seem to exist and go about their daily business. As a result, it seems wise to at least acknowledge Cyber Monday has a kind of existence even if its “thingness” should be qualified.

Once we get to the point of acknowledging its existence, it makes sense to celebrate it in some way. 

So, here’s the deal.

Below is a link, click the link and download the entire 2022 catalogue from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and a special gift from North Dakota Quarterly. It’s free. The books are good, and since I’m not charging anything, I feel like I’m doing my part to subvert the commercial non-thing energy of Cyber Monday and to replace it with something more joyful, more convivial, and more positive. 

CLICK HERE.

With that one click, you’ll get:

Rebecca J. Romsdahl, Mindful Wandering: Nature and Global Travel through the Eyes of a Farmgirl Scientist. 2021. From Bookshop.org.

Epoiesen 5 (2021). From Amazon.com.

Michael G. Michlovic and George R. Holley, Archaeological Cultures of the Sheyenne Bend. 2022. From Bookshop.org.

Brian R. Urlacher, The Library of Chester Fritz. 2022. From Amazon.com.

Jurij Koch, The Cherry Tree. Translated by John. K. Cox. North Dakota Quarterly Supplement Series, Volume 2. 2022. From Amazon.com.

Rodger Coleman, Sun Ra Sundays. Edited by Sam Byrd. 2022. From Amazon.com.

And remember, if you really HAVE to buy a book in paper, proceeds from each sale helps The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota continue to publish more books and make them available for free! Likewise, consider subscribing to NDQ.

New Book Day: Rodger Coleman’s Sun Ra Sundays

This is a big NEW BOOK DAY for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

We are very excited to announce the publication of a long simmering book project: Rodger Coleman’s Sun Ra Sundays, edited by Sam Byrd.

And, yes, I did schedule the release date for the book to be the day before the annual ASOR meeting!

This book is an incredibly accessible and personal guide to Sun Ra’s most artistically vibrant decades of the 1960s and 1970s. For those of you who don’t know Sun Ra, this is the perfect place to start to explore the work of this important jazz visionary, Afrofuturist, poet, and thinker. And this is the perfect time to familiarize yourself with his work as the Smithsonian readies its landmark exhibition on the history of Afrofuturism.

The book is a heavily revised and reorganized version of Rodger Coleman’s iconic blog series “Sun Ra Sundays” (2008-2016) which anticipated the revival of interest in not only Sun Ra’s musical legacy, but also Afrofuturist music, art, and culture more generally. As Irwin Chusid, the administrator of the Sun Ra estate, remarked: “The opinions herein are exhaustive, authoritative, and worth reading. They are a valuable addition to Sun Ra scholarship…”

For a recent review of recent scholarship on Sun Ra, check out this review essay that appeared in the most recent North Dakota Quarterly.

What makes this book unique in the recent flurry of work on Sun Ra is that both Rodger Coleman and Sam Byrd are musicians. This produced perspectives are not only accessible and entertaining, but steeped in the sensibilities developed over decades of playing improvised and jazz music.

For Rodger, this book also offers a tonic for our age: “In our current era of profound cynicism and bad faith, it is all too easy to dismiss Sun Ra’s schtick as so much showbiz hokum, filtered through a nostalgia for a “Space Age’ future that never came to be—but that would be a mistake. Whatever you might think of the music, there are lessons to be learned about discipline, DIY entrepreneurship, and the virtues of collective action…”

As with all Digital Press books, Sun Ra Sunday is available as a free, open-access, download. If you like the book and want to support the Digital Press’s approach to open access publishing, please consider buying a paper copy.

The press release is “below the fold” as they say:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sun Ra in the Spotlight:
A New Book on the Music and Art of a Foundational Afrofuturist

As the world eagerly awaits the next episode in Marvel’s Black Panther film franchise and the Smithsonian prepares a massive retrospective on Afrofuturism, the visionary musician, writer, and thinker, Sun Ra enjoys growing acclaim as the grandfather of Afrofuturism.

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is proud to announce the publication of Sun Ra Sundays. This groundbreaking book offers readers an accessible window into Sun Ra’s musical legacy from 1961-1979, which includes many of his most revolutionary and inspiring releases.

Born Herman Blount, Le Sony’r Ra (or Sun Ra) took his new name when he moved from Birmingham, Alabama to Chicago. In Chicago, he became active in the booming post-war music scene and assembled a band comprised of some of the best young musicians in the city. Under Sun Ra’s direction, this group produced some of the most sophisticated jazz music the city had seen and combined it with space age costumes, stories of alien abduction, and distinctive interpretations of Black history. By the late 1950s, Sun Ra relocated with his band, known as the Arkestra, to New York where he became a mainstay in the city’s experimental music scene and recorded and released a bewildering number of albums. The number and variety of releases has long overwhelmed the casual listener.

Rodger Coleman started Sun Ra Sundays on his blog NuVoid as a way to introduce Sun Ra to a wider audience. His weekly posts exploring Ra’s discography ran for several years before he got discouraged and “pulled the plug” on his efforts to unpack the complicated history and legacy of Sun Ra’s music. By then, however, Coleman’s musings had already become an invaluable touchstone for Sun Ra fans and curious newcomers alike.

Coleman remains modest about his work: “Ra’s discography is vast and bewildering and these scribblings were my attempt to at least partially come to grips with it.”

Sam Byrd, who took the lead in editing Rodger Coleman’s blog posts into the book Sun Ra Sundays is more forthright: “There is no one proper way to approach Sun Ra’s massive output, but Rodger Coleman gives us a start with comprehensive overviews and in-depth musical analyses of every official Sun Ra album from 1961 to 1979, as well as invaluable examinations of an astounding number of unreleased concert recordings and other rarities.”

What makes this book unique is both Byrd and Coleman are musicians.

Coleman notes: “It wasn’t until Sam and I started covering some of Sun Ra’s music back in the ‘90s that I could really wrap my head around it. Make no mistake: no matter how “out there” the music may seem to get, it remains deeply rooted in the entire history of African American musical practice. These roots may be obscured but can still be discerned.”

When asked why someone might pick up this book and explore the music, thought, and legacy of Sun Ra, Coleman offered this observation:

“Whatever you might think of the music, there are lessons to be learned about discipline, DIY entrepreneurship, and the virtues of collective action. Over the course of decades, Ra attracted a core group of gifted musicians who eschewed fame and fortune to fulfill his vision of self-sufficiency and artistic integrity.”

Like all books from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, Sun Ra Sundays is available as a free download or a low-cost paperback.

You can listen to some of Sam and Rodger’s music here:

https://rodgercoleman.bandcamp.com/

And their adventuresome cover of Sun Ra’s “Dancing Shadows” as the first track here:
https://wavelengthinfinitysunratribute.bandcamp.com/album/wavelength-infinity

New Book Day: The Library of Chester Fritz

It’s homecoming week at UND and we have a homecoming themed book for New Book Day! It’s the first book in what should be a pretty exciting 2022/2023 publishing season!

Brian R. Urlacher’s, The Library of Chester Fritz, is the first novel published by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, but is very much in keeping with our focus on the history of the state, our campus, and the region’s remarkable characters.

More importantly (especially to anyone without a real connection to North Dakota or UND), the book is a good story. Urlacher’s novel weaves his story into the real journals of Chester Fritz to produce chimerical narrative where Fritz’s words, Urlacher’s story, and the landscape of early 20th century China combine to create a world where the line between truth and fiction is so blurry as to be almost indistinguishable.

If that sounds pretty cool to you, you can download the book for FREE from The Digital Press website or buy it for the low, low price of $7 from Amazon. Remember being a paperback copy offers more than just the fine sensation of holding a paper book in you hand, but also supports The Digital Press’s mission to publish more open access books in the future!

https://thedigitalpress.org/the-library-of-chester-fritz/

If you’re still on the fence as to whether to download a free book, I offer a slightly more dramatic version of the book’s plot below:

Fate has entangled a library, a businessman, and the future of humanity. A trail of documents left behind by an eccentric businessman, traveler, and philanthropist Chester Fritz is the only way to understand the urgent danger. This book brings together Chester Fritz’s journals and follows his travels through war torn China and his ascent to the heights of global capitalism.

As World War II plunges the world into chaos, Fritz and his traveling companions wrestle with what to do and what forces are too dangerous or too dark for humanity to wield. But something must be done, and the decision will fall to Chester Fritz.

Thank you, as always, for supporting The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and, if you like this title, do share your enthusiasm over twitter (@digitalpressund) or Facebook.

If you don’t like this title, that’s ok! It was FREE. And I’m pretty sure we’ll publish something that you DO like later in 2022-2023 season!

The formal press release is below and you can download the book’s full media kit here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Time is Running Out!

The Chester Fritz Library holds the secret of its mysterious donor and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Anyone who has spent time on the University of North Dakota’s campus knows it to be an enchanted place. A new novel takes this feeling to the next level.

The Library of Chester Fritz, is the debut novel by Professor of Political Science, Brian R. Ulacher. This daring and imaginative work hints that the power of the UND campus might go far beyond its well-kept gardens and collegiate Gothic architecture. Urlacher’s novel traces the travels of former UND student and benefactor, Chester Fritz, through early 20th-century China and speculates that his experiences on this journey introduced him to a powerful, and dangerous, secret.

Chester Fritz’s journal a version of which was published by the University of North Dakota Press in the 1980s and describes his work and travels in China prior to World War II. Fritz was born in Buxton, North Dakota and attended UND before heading to the West Coast and then abroad to make his fortune. In 1950 and 1969, Fritz made sizeable donations to UND which funded the library and auditorium that bear his name. Urlacher built from this manuscript and developed his story in a way that integrates seamlessly with Fritz’s own words. The result is a chimerical narrative where Fritz’s words, Urlacher’s story, and the landscape of early 20th century China combine to create a world where the line between truth and fiction is so blurry as to be almost indistinguishable.

Urlacher points out that Fritz’s journals themselves offer more than enough fodder for the imagination. He said, “I’m fascinated and frankly perplexed by Fritz’s choice to travel across China in 1917. He was utterly unprepared when he set his course through the heart of a civil war in which warlords, bandits, and crusader armies vied for every inch of territory.”

In Urlacher’s novel, Fritz’s mysterious experiences abroad become entangled with his monumental library at the heart of the UND campus. Urlacher explains that he was inspired by the Chester Fritz Library: “I’ve spent a lot of time just wandering among the stacks. I’m not sure if other people experience this, but I get a static tingle in libraries. Something about massing books, each representing a lifetime’s worth of experience, in such close proximity is powerful. There are so many stories about books being more than just pages, and libraries being more than just buildings. When I sat down to start world building, there was never a question of where to anchor the story. It had to be the Chester Fritz Library.”

Urlacher noted that something of Chester Fritz’s spirit lingers on our campus, observing, “Fritz had this unshakable optimism, and it comes through in his journal. He writes with an understated North Dakota humor, which is makes for very charming prose.”

Like all books from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, The Library of Chester Fritz is available as a free download or as a paperback book from Amazon.com.

 

Three Things Thursday: Data, Books, Teaching

This semester feels very odd to me. Not only did I start the semester a bit more tired than I expected to be, but I also didn’t have a clear set of goals and deadline ahead of me. After I submitted my revised book manuscript at the end of August, my fall semester seemed oddly under scheduled. It’s taken me a while to recognize that this is probably a good thing and more of a feature than a bug at this point in my career. 

This sense of being under-committed this fall has given me the space to work on a number of other projects in a less frantic way than I have in the past and today’s Three Things Thursday is about that.

Thing the First

Earlier this week, I posted about my work with the Isthmia data and my effort to corral and clean up various datasets produced by the Isthmia excavations over the past 50 odd years. My primary goal has been to work on Roman and Post-Roman material from the excavation and to focus particularly on Byzantine and Roman pottery. Earlier in the week I finished recoding the inventoried Roman and the Byzantine pottery so that it can be integrated with the stratigraphic data and context material from the site.

Then I moved on the the lamps from the site, figuring that most of the lamps found in the Ohio State and Michigan State excavations at Isthmia were Roman and later. Fortunately, Birgitta Wohl has just published a volume analyzing the lamps from these excavations, but her substantial catalogue identifies the lamps according to the inventory number and the area where they were found, but not their stratigraphic context or even trench. This is annoying, but perhaps not too unusual. 

More vexing is that I don’t have a table that includes all the lamps in Wohl’s catalogue. Instead, I have a partial table that I excavated from an Access database whose creator and purpose is unknown and I’ve spent about four or five hours now transforming Birgitta’s catalogue into data. This, of course, is both absurd and a completely normal part of archaeology as early-20th century practices and late-20th century digital tools continue to find opportunities for incompatibility. 

Thing the Second

This summer, I spent a good bit of time fretting about the number of projects I had wending their way through The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. In particular, I was worried about a collaboration that I had hatched with our sister project, North Dakota Quarterly. This project involved the publication of a translation of Jurij Koch’s novella, The Cherry Tree, which would be the second book in our emerging NDQ supplement series.

Our current plan is to release this title on October 11th. In fact, we don’t even have a landin page for the book yet, but the translator convinced us to accelerate the timeline so he could take some copies with him to Croatia next week. Because my fall is under scheduled, we were able to make this happen and while the book has not officially dropped yet, you can, if you know where to look, find a copy from a major online retailer. 

Thing the Third

Finally, I continue to think about whether being under scheduled is a privilege or something that university faculty should aspire to, and this has started to impact how I teach. In some ways, the current “syllabus as contract” driven environment creates an expectation that the schedule on the syllabus represents an accurate summary of student work during a semester. Because faculty (and students) recognize that under representing the quantity of material creates problems with student expectations, we tend to over represent the amount of material (or at least represent the maximum amount of material) that we hope to cover in a semester. This tends to compound a sense among students (and even among faculty) of being over extended or scheduled “to the max.” 

This doesn’t feel very healthy to me.

A Book By Its Cover: The Cherry Tree

This fall looks to be a busy one for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. We not only have three (and maybe a four!) books on tap for the next couple of months, but we also have plans to publish our first two novels. 

The second novel scheduled to appear this fall is in collaboration with our friends at North Dakota Quarterly as the second volume in our little NDQ Supplement series. The first volume in the supplement series was Snichimal Vayuchil, a collection of Tsotsil Maya poetry translated by Paul Worley. In 1984, NDQ published its first full-length novel, Thomas McGrath’s This Coffin Has No Handles. 

Today, we’ll share a copy of the cover of our next novel, Jurij Koch’s The Cherry Tree, translated by John K. Cox whose talented wife Kathleen T. Cox designed the fantastic cover.  

Without giving too much away, the cover captures the role of motion and movement in Koch’s compelling tale, while preserving the sense of mystery at the core of the story.

If you want to read a bit more about the book and what it’s about, go here.