Show Us Your Ink!

In the way that many of the best(?) ideas do, #archaeologytattoos was born late one night when a few of us were chatting on Twitter.

We know you have them, and this is a chance to show them off!

Send me an email with a picture of your design - the information you share is up to you!

Things we'd love to know:

• Who are you? Do you blog or tweet? Where do you live? What kind of archaeology do you do?
• What inspired the design? We'd love to know not just the meaning of the image but the reason for having it permanently added to your body, too!
• Who did the work? A work of art deserves credit to the artist, so please let us know who did the design and needle work. Recommendations for great artists are appreciated!

I'll collect submissions as they come in and prepare a post when we have a nice bunch, maybe shooting for then end of January? For those of you going to the SAAs in Austin, the good news is that the weather should be warm enough for us to show some of these off in person!

#AcWriMo Brought Me Back For More

This was my second year participating in the annual #AcWriMo - Academic Writing Month. You can read more about the concept here. There's a lively online community of people participating, commenting, and sharing strategies, and as you can tell by the hashtag, much of this is done on Twitter. There's also a massive GoogleDoc spreadsheet where everyone declares their goals for the month and reports on their daily achievements. I think this year we had around 700 people declare their intent to participate. This type of constant, but slightly anonymous, accountability offered by the spreadsheet seems to work really well for me.

Last year's #AcWriMo was incredibly productive for me, as it got me on track with consistent writing and built some habits that allowed me to write a complete, but very rough draft of my dissertation in about three months. The most critical thing about #AcWriMo for me last year was finding out first-hand the importance of daily writing. It's not just a matter of slowly chipping away at a big project through steady work, but daily writing also builds momentum, and over time you are able to write more and more.

Last year I also discovered the beautiful software that is Scrivener, which I now swear by for writing anything longer than the shortest conference paper, and Skim, a FREE PDF annotation software that lets you mark up even un-OCRed documents. Added to Papers, for bibliography and digital library management, and these are the three programs I run constantly. People clued me into a host of other apps for Mac, most of which are free or run online and which boost productivity significantly. When I really want to crank out work I run FocusBooster (a free pomodoro app) and give myself some low background noise from Coffitivity. It's a blissful, productive bubble. I should also give a shout-out to the PhDometer, which has the benefit of counting total words written, not just the words you keep, which is what Scrivener or Word do. The PhDometer is a more reflection of the creation and editorial process involved in (particularly) academic writing.

Last year was so productive, and helped me develop some really great writing habits, so it was really a no-brainer to jump in again for this year's run. I even got tapped to help with the organization this time around. I'll be back with a post in the next few days reflecting on how this year's month went for me.

Blogging Archaeology Carnival Month 1: Why I Haven't Blogged

This post is a response to Doug's call for a blogging carnival in the lead-up to the 2014 meeting of the SAAs in Austin, TX this April. I'm adding my voice to many other archaeologists who blog to answer the questions Doug has set out for us this month. Briefly, he asks:

• Why blogging? – Why did you, or if it was a group- the group, start a blog?
• Why are you still blogging?
• Why have you stopped blogging? 

The most pertinent of these questions for me are the first and the third. As to why I started: I began this blog shortly before embarking on my year of dissertation research in Ecuador. I wanted a way to stay in touch with people from home, and my parents wanted a way of keeping tabs on their only child and granddaughter. Because internet access was limited, blogging was actually a good way of communicating with people - instead of writing or responding to numerous emails, I could craft a blog post, throw it up when I could log on, and then every one was on the same page. It was also a good exercise in working through some of the things I went through that were tangential to the archaeology but still a critical part of the experience, like living in a foreign country for an extended period of time and parenting a toddler. The blog was useful after I left the field as well. I, as well as some friends, have used my entries in classes to give students an idea of the experience of conducting fieldwork, and I used some of my entries as the bases for various dissertation chapters.

Since I returned from the field in May of 2010 I've posted five times, the last of which was over two years ago. I guess that means I have officially stopped blogging. Don't get me wrong, though, I'd love to blog more. So, why don't I? The answers to this question are varied. Perhaps the easiest answer is that I started this blog to document my experiences in the field, and that was a finite period of time that is now over. Without that adventure the impulse to blog has diminished.

Since my heyday of blogging my life has also undergone a number of changes. The husband I write about now is a different one than the one I wrote about when I was in Ecuador. Baby Girl is now officially Little Miss, and she needs different things from me. I also started a full-time job in May of 2012, and it was a bit of a shock to the system to go from a grad student schedule to a 9-5 one. Meanwhile, I'm trying to finish writing my dissertation in my free time. None of those things prevent me from blogging, but they got in the way in the past, and got me out of the habit.

The job I have now requires me to be the social media liaison for issues we deal with, and sometimes I just don't have anything left over at the end of a day to reflect on in a personal space. I also worry about people conflating my personal views on an issue with the official views of my organization, and because I am passionate about the work we do, I have definite, personal, opinions on a lot of those same topics.

Ultimately, though, I think I've struggled with finding my voice - feeling that I have enough authority about any given topic to write a whole post about it. I think it's related to the impostor syndrome, and a by-product of my graduate training and all the road bumps I've run into trying to wrap up my dissertation. But you know what? That's bullshit. I pontificate on Twitter or Facebook,  and I jump into cyber-debates and engage with colleagues face-to-face.

So, here's my promise to myself: I'm going to party with the rest of you on this #blogarch carnival, and give this thing another whirl. Besides, I went through all that trouble to compose this kick-ass background photo, and it would be a shame to waste it.

No Anthropology in Florida?

In a statement that's gotten a fair bit of press, at least on my Facebook news feed, Florida governor Rick Scott advocated for a change in the focus of higher education funding away from subjects in the humanities and social sciences and towards those in the STEM fields - science, technology, engineering, mathematics. It's part of his plan to develop job skills in students in Florida, which of course sounds like a good thing, but really isn't that simple.


The reason he's getting so much attention, at least from my Feed, is because he specifically selected anthropology as an example of a 'worthless' major. As you can imagine there was the expected level of outrage, a letter issued by the American Anthropological Association, and general slagging off of the governor for his position. I will be one of the first advocates for the critical thinking skills that can be gained from an anthropology major, not to mention the exposure to other belief systems and ways of life. I have to ask myself, though, why did he choose anthropology to pick on?


This article I read recently may provide the answer. John Hawks, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UW-Madison, argues, among several points, that anthropology really does a poor job of engaging with and communicating our research to the public. He sees this reflected in the overall piss-poor job prospects for graduate students in anthropology, compared to other fields such as sociology or geography. Essentially, anthropology isn't creating those ties and opportunities outside of academia that are necessary to justify their existence. This isn't a far cry from the argument made by Dr. Jeremy Sabloff in his Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 2010 (note that he subtitled his talk with 'We Urgently Need Anthropological Public Intellectuals').


So, calls are coming from every direction, and some people are responding, but not necessarily with the wholesale change that may be required, and certainly not at the institutional level where a lot of the change needs to happen. Dishearteningly few anthropology programs in the States conduct community engagement programs or service learning, and this is particularly true of larger universities, those R1s, where the focus is still on 'pure' research and peer publications for the tenure process, rather than the ability to speak to the general public.


It's odd, though, that Gov. Scott should pick on anthropology in Florida. The Florida Public Archaeology Network is a dynamic and vibrant example of community outreach, teaching skills, providing employment, and showing just what archaeology (and by extension anthropology) can do. Of course, if you are a cynic like me, you see Gov. Scott's call for what it is - less funding for those disciplines that broaden minds and might contribute to a more liberal voting base.

Revive, Redesign, Reengage

So, if you scroll down just a bit, you'll notice that I haven't updated this blog in over a year. There's a reason for that - well, a lot of them, but the main reason is that the blog, in its previous incarnation, had served its purpose. I was done with fieldwork, my family had been able to follow what I was up to, and I no longer had the 'place excitement' of being in Ecuador to drive my posts.


So, I'd outgrown the old format, but that doesn't mean I don't have things that drive me now that I'm back at the University. They're just different things. In the last year I've engaged more with pedagogy withing archaeology, and anthropology more broadly, and as I go on the job market this year I'm thinking about how structural decisions at institutions impact both education and careers in academia. I am also, in part through my teaching, engaging with public uses and misuses of archaeological and anthropological ideas and data. 


So, rather than a travelogue, when you come here you can expect to find a mix of my thoughts on teaching and scholarship, responses to popular news articles, and the occasional dose of moaning about dissertation writing and the job market. I hope my posts keep you interested, and maybe provoke a deep thought or two.

Where I've Been

I found something today that perfectly demonstrates the love/hate relationship that I and many other grad students have with our dissertations:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd080910s.gif

Particularly because I was so eager to get home, and kind of tired of Ecuador after a year, it's been difficult for me to return mentally to that place to think about the data I collected.

Fortunately I had a great lunch with an old friend last week who has kicked me back into gear, and now I'm actually excited to work on my dissertation! I'm currently working with another colleague to get a session together for the 2011 Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting, which means I need to come up with a paper to present. I've also decided to go ahead and try to beat the Mr. to the finish line of the dissertation writing experience. Maybe we can get there together and put this grad-student life behind us!

Drowning in Documents

In preparation (or is it procrastination?) for getting started on writing the dissertation I've decided that I need to organize my electronic files in some sort of bibliographic software. The goal is to know what I have so that I can figure out what I'm missing and then know what I need. Simple enough, right?


I began the process of converting my physical library into an electronic one before when moved to Wales in 2007, since I knew I'd need to write grant proposals while all my books were packed away into storage. The work that I put in then (hours and hours of scanning) have paid off in two ways: 1) My entire academic library fits onto one Billy bookcase, and 2) I always have my resources just a mouse click away, as the computer is infinitely more portable than a bag full of books. There is a downside to this process, though.


I am drowning in electronic documents. As a conservative estimate I would say that I have 1000 files on my computer that need to be recorded in some type of bibliographic software. Most of the files are centralized (two folders - Ecuador Stuff and Everything Else), but there are others scattered throughout my computer, sitting in the folder of the class when I downloaded it to write a paper, or, even worse, languishing in the catch-all "Prelim" folder that contains everything I used to study for my comprehensive exams prior to fieldwork. Not only do I not know what I have, but I don't even know where it is!


My husband has BiblioScape, so I downloaded their free version, BiblioExpress, to give that a try. The program is quite simple, and reminds me of a more basic version of the EndNote 9 that I had once upon a time. It's limited, but it could record it all, which is the point of this exercise, and best of all, it's free. 


Through our university library we have free access to RefWorks, which is an online based application. I downloaded it a while ago, but I could never get the offline version to work correctly. Even though spotty internet is no longer an issue for us, I still prefer the ability to do the data entry on my computer, and not have to navigate a website. A friend recommended Zotero, which sounds awesome, but it's a plug-in for Firefox, and I'm using Chrome. Also, it's web-based.


My preference, at the moment, is EndNote X4. I downloaded a free 30-day trial from their website, and if I like it I can buy it through our university for a very reasonable sum. One of my favorite features is that I can import the PDFs into the program, which means that even if I move files around during subsequent housecleaning the program will still open them for me, which is a big plus in light of the disorganized state of my files.


So the question remains, how should I organize my electronic files on my computer, and how should I organize the references within EndNote? One giant folder, my current two and a bit, or detailed sub-folders by category? The same for within EndNote: should I keep an Ecuador library and a non-Ecuador library (even though there are some cases of overlap), or put them together and separate them into groups by topic within the program?


Any of you out there with experience in this kind of thing, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.