I’ll start with the easiest one this year. Normally Best Post would be difficult to predict because it’s often a personal choice. For example there’s a couple of posts which come to mind which I really liked.
Using Flickr to Geospatially Embed Archaeological Interpretation by Colleen Morgan at Remixing El Presidio is, I’ll admit a hard sell if you’re not into things like GIS. What it looks like is a series of instructions to make something work on a device that not a lot of people have. In fact it’s such a stunningly good idea I’m trying to think of how to steal it.
Within ten years most people will have geographically aware devices with some form of connection to the internet. What this post is the first sign of is what you can do with that. What this is, is an extraordinarily easy way of embedding archaeological information onto aerial views. Now Google is moving Google Earth to mobile devices, it may get even easier to superimpose your location onto an archaeological map. This could even work indoors if a museum is thinking, because a lot of devices can work by triangulating a position from wifi transmitters.
If / when I get an iPhone, this will be the reason why.
The other post which caught my eye was The Sun Disc Chariot by Christina Seehusen. It’s a review of what sounds like quite a bad presentation of prehistoric material. In fact it’s presented in a way that reduces your ability to see it. Again this raises a lot of questions. How should you present archaeological material? What are you presenting it for? I read it and thought there was potentially a couple of papers which could be written around that.
But this year I really cannot see past one post for this award. ‘What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do? A Few Meditations on Women’s History and Women in History’ by Claire B. Potter which you can read at Tenured Radical or Cliopatria. You’d think by now it’d be widely accepted that women are around 50% of the human population, but there are still pockets of resistance. Potter’s post, a response to a bout of brief but puzzling idiocy, is short and powerful. She makes the point: “illuminating what it means to be human is what women’s history does, but as it happens, humans come in different bodies that engage universalisms (for example, what it means to be “human”) differently.” Women’s History isn’t a parochial field, but can even help explore concepts of masculinity. Potter brings this out perfectly.
She also said “know that you are losing your audience in the blogosphere for every additional paragraph you write.” So I’ll stop there.
Agree or disagree? Leave a comment on Cliopatria’s Best Post nomination entry.
