Life
Do we need an Industrial Archaeology?
Jul 24th
Cromford Canal. Click for larger image.
It’s easy to take a World Heritage Site for granted when it’s on your doorstep. I had thought of shooting a short portfolio of Cromford for a competition. They required ten photos. After looking into the project I’ve decided that the competition isn’t going to happen for me, but a short photo essay on Cromford, or possibly the Derwent Valley Mills, remains an interesting idea.
Industrial Archaeology can get short shrift from other archaeologists. Often there’s written records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archaeology necessary? Mark Henshaw, the Archaeology Dude, makes a good argument that Archaeology can draw multiple lines of evidence to inform histories of the past. I wouldn’t discount that, and I think his point, Archaeology isn’t just about digging, is very important from an American perspective because there Archaeology is seen as a branch of Anthropology. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archaeology paired with History or Classics. So do we really need Industrial Archaeologists when there so many Early Modern Historians.
I think another factor Archaeology brings is spatial thinking. Looking at the early days of the professionalisation of Archaeology in Britain, one of the More >
AoB Blog goes live (or what I’m doing on my summer holidays)
Jul 21st
AoB Blog is now live at aobblog.com. The design looks similar to this site, and that’s partly because I’ve been using this site to test some code. It’ll be part of the web presence I’m building for the Annals of Botany. Surprisingly there is some archaeological relevance. Papers are open to non-subscribers after a year and some of those are archaeobotanical.
I’ve emailed a couple of people about an interesting story on reburial. I’m trying to get a bit beyond the press release, but I’m not sure if that will happen soon as they’re both likely to be very busy.
In the meantime I’ve blogged Moving beyond the ‘One-dinosaur-fits-all’ model of science communication at AoB Blog. It probably has some relevance to archaeological / historical outreach too.
“You’re being quiet”
Jul 8th
No, no, no! I’m being extremely noisy, just in a place where you can’t hear – yet. I’ve been asked to participate in a blog and we’re doing the initial set-up for it now. There’s a few people involved, so it’s not scheduled to be live till the end of August. I’d rather not go into detail until the project is signed-off. However, some of the innovations there will feed back to here in the autumn, unless something else derails me.
It doesn’t help that I have a new toy. It’s an R72 filter. It blocks the visible spectrum from entering the camera and that makes the viewfinder totally black. However, the CCD in the camera is also sensitive to infra-red radiation. The photo below is my first attempt at getting an image out of it.
Leicester Botanic Garden in infra-red.
Distract yourself with free materials from the Open University
May 24th
Via @skepticbarista I’ve found a collection of Open Educational Resources from the Open University. They’re listed at their Open Learn site, and there are stack of interesting courses to browse from Introductory to Master’s level. There’s all sorts of things that make this interesting. There’s the variety of the material from Aberdulais Falls (a case study in Welsh heritage) to Zoology. There’s the quality of the material. There’s also the extra element. It might not be a taught course, but there’s still thought in how you can use the material.
There’s fora, learning groups and a tool called FlashVlog for recording video diaries. That seems above and beyond the call of duty for OER material. The whole thing is CC licenced, so I had been thinking about working through a module here. The difficulty is that if you see the full list of courses, it’s a bit like being let loose in a sweet-shop.
Photo Credits
May 4th
The west door of Croxden Abbey
I unexpectedly went to Croxden Abbey recently. Until just over a week ago I didn’t even know it existed, but it’s a nice place to go – if it’s sunny – for photos. I’ll blog a bit more about it in the future. Right now I thought to give credit to people on the web who helped me with my photography skills. They used to be awful but now, call me arrogant if you like, sometimes I think my photos are quite literally adequate. I think I messed up the perspective a bit here, but standing in the right place would have meant trampling someone’s flowers, so this is good enough for me.
The biggest help was Aydin Örstan who gave me a very simple piece of advice: (more…)
Is this thing on?
May 3rd
Every so often I get a yearning to sign up with a blog network. The big reason I don’t sign up is that I like to have the option of putting the blog down for a while, like last month. I’ve been busy on a couple of things, one of which you can see for yourself. Leicester has put up student packs from its Interdisciplinary Science and Physics courses online as OER (Open Educational Resources) and I’ve been working on that. Frustratingly, the pack I made the biggest contribution to – Prophets and Powers – isn’t online due to copyright issues. It’s a shame as it’s a neat module covering basic archaeology, physics and geology. I’m working on putting together a copyright friendly version of the Stonehenge-themed module, but that will happen when it happens.
Another reason for spending less time online is the election. I’m not spending much time on Twitter at the moment as the UK election isn’t really relevant where I live. My house has been moved from a marginal to an ultra-safe Labour seat. The way I see it I’ll have more influence on future policy if I write to the parties directly rather than voting. It’s More >
The limits of fiction
Mar 1st
Station V by Les Chatfield
Just over a week ago Sidney Perkowitz suggested that film-makers should limit themselves to one big scientific flaw in a film. All sorts of critics have had fun with this. writerJames has posted an interesting response arguing scientific accuracy can enhance a story. I’m going to go a bit further and argue that the one BIG flaw idea is a good idea, for a given definition of BIG.
It’s not a new idea. Brian Stableford made it one of the key points in Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. He argued good SF introduced one new BIG idea, which he called a novum, and explored the consequences. That sounds limited, and it’s rare you’ll get big crowds shouting for more limits on what they can do. Yet Stableford’s reasoning isn’t that it’s good for science. It’s good for the story. Terry Pratchett came to a similar conclusion when he eventually made the map of Ankh-Morpork. Initially he was against pinning down places because it limited what he could do. He then realised that it’s the limitations that make a story. The Door You Cannot Open. The Path You Cannot Take. It’s the lack of an easy route that makes More >
Talking Bollocks with Andreas Moritz
Feb 19th
To be honest I wouldn’t have heard of Andreas Moritz if he hadn’t been a bit silly. Andreas Moritz is someone who thinks cancer is a healing mechanism. Student Michael Hawkins criticised Moritz, so Moritz is naturally responding by providing evidence to support his argument threatening lawsuits and getting WordPress.com to pull his weblog. You can judge the sanity or otherwise of Moritz’s debating technique here. One upshot of this is the news of Moritz’s threats is spreading through various blogs.
There’s all sorts of problems with debating cranks. The arguments can get lost in irrelevant detail, invented terms and then often the various people tend to talk past each other. What people want to know is: Is Moritz right when he says things like “As you will find out, cancer does not attempt to kill the body; to the contrary, it tries to save it.” or “Today’s conventional approaches of killing, cutting or burning cancerous cells offer a mere 7% “success” rate for cancer remission, and the majority of the few survivors are “cured” for just a period of five years or less”? Or is he a dangerous lunatic profiting from lethal advice? How can you measure success? I have the answer.
COLD HARD CASH More >I ATEN’T DEAD
Jan 16th
I’ve been busy recently with OER work. The iScience department will be putting course materials into various archives with Creative Commons licences. Most of the courses are Physics-based, but one will be Prophets and Powers, the opening Archaeoastronomy/Physics/Geology module of the Interdiscipinary Science BSc. This is a problem based on studying the Egyptian pyramids. If I can get clearance I’ll see if we can release the Stonehenge-based version of the same module.
Another difficulty is that my ISP cut my internet conection on Wednesday when someone mucked about at the exchange. They now say it’s fixed and the fact we still don’t have broadband is nothing to do with them. This morning they cut the phone too, but that’s been fixed for now. The broadband will be ‘assessed as a priority within 72 hours’, which is better than saying “We’re doing nothing about it for half a week.’
In the mean time there’s this nice write up on Matt Parker’s work at Bad Science. It’s exactly the sort of thing I should be reading, because it pokes fun at exactly the sort of mistake that I can easily make. In fact in the depths of my hard drive I’ve found More >
Bookmarks for 16th of November through to 18th of November
Nov 18th
These are my links for 16th of November through 18th of November:
- The Academic Journal Racket « In the DarkTelescoper explains how academic publishing works. The only thing that would improbe the post would be the theme from 'The Naked Gun' in the background.
- A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’ – NYTimes.comYou can make arguments in favour of repatriation of antiquities. You can make arguements against. Being on either side doesn't make you inherently foolish. But when you write that the British Army took the Rosetta Stone from the French and "returned it to the British Museum" then something has gone wrong. It's probably a case of momentary brainfade rather than idiocy, but it matters because the whole question of ownership of the Rosetta Stone is about where it rightfully belongs. Using the word 'returned' builds in the assumption that all antiquities are inherently British.
- Notes & Queries; Sledges – Theoretical Structural ArchaeologyGeoff Carter concluded he didn't have evidence for a staggeringly early cart shed in Poland. Could it have been a used to house a sledge? I've just realised I know absolutely nothing at all about the history of sleds and sledges. Not only that, but I can't recall much attention More >
