O brave new media-world that has such synergies!

I don’t know what Kathy was talking about a few posts back: everything that I do is sexy — not least of which is data entry. One of the truly fun things for me as I went along, transferring data from the paper site forms to the digital database, was that I got to relive my field experiences from 2008, and even, on occasion, learn about new Munsell soil colors that I didn’t even know existed.

Well, so “10.5YR” probably wasn’t the intended hue in the Munsell system, and it remains a mystery as to what the recorder actually meant by it in reference to the color of the soil matrix in a certain stratigraphic unit (SU). Apart from that peculiar situation, however, I have been able to clear up various scribal errors encountered along the way (“sandy day loam” might be a good name for a cosmetic) and, in doing, call back to memory many a scene at Pyla-Vigla. Now we are finishing up the 2009 data, but it was fun to visit a bit with those forms before they move on down to the ol’ genizah. Actually, if I understand correctly, they might be making their home in the UND Chester Fritz Library‘s special collections.

Speaking of the good ol’ CFL, Dr. Caraher recently gave a talk there about archaeology, inter/trans/cross/post-disciplinary “synergy“, and the implications of the “New Media“. For me, at my vantage point as a MA student, much of the “new world” that Bill is heralding is hardly odd or novel to me. Sure, some of this is a function of my proximity to Bill, but I was already becoming acculturated into this world before I even met Bill Caraher. I am really no more tech-savvy than my colleagues, Sara and Kathy, but I have not known archaeology prior to the use of computers for data recording, storing, and processing. Sure, I wasn’t necessarily the one “doing” it, but digital media was always a companion, even in the gritty, windswept wastes and sage-choked gullies of North Dakota.

Sure, back in the day, they didn’t have computers. I get that. I even have some idea of how they did archaeology in the absence of digital technology.

But I didn’t think, at the time, that it needed any more persuasive explanation than what could be given for any other tool in the archaeologist’s methodological toolbox. As an educated member of the “Millennium Generation”, my response to the question of whether or not there could be a beneficial rapprochement between scholarship and digital technology would have been something along the lines of:

duh!

But, for all of the audience members who might still have been wrapping their minds around the idea of such a rapprochement (I doubt that any current faculty members actually were), that wasn’t the point of Bill’s talk, per se.

To be honest, I paused for quite a while after typing that last sentence. Since then, both Bill and I have attended panel discussions on the already decades-old “new media” at the UND Writers Conference featuring such artists and luminaries as Stuart Moulthrop, Mark Amerika, Scott T Miller, Deena Larsen, Cecelia Condit, Frank X Walker, Saul Williams and Art Spiegelman. Bill has shared his musings on the conference presentations, here. (I attended the same panels as he did.)

I get what the hubbub is about. I’m just having a hard time mustering the patience to join the hubbub for any length of time. Yep, it’s crazy. I can write an article on this website which people can read on their telephones next door and in Singapore — at the same time.

Crazy.

OK, moving on …

As relatively “at home” as I am with this medium, it really comes more easily to Kathy to notice and to articulate the peculiarities of it. Even Bill has to work harder, I think, although he makes up for it in the time and energy which he has put into considering the matter over the years. I’m pretty sure that Homi Bhabha wrote something about this phenomenon somewhere. In effect, Sara and I are more indigenous to this “culture”, that is, this collection of signs. Oddly enough, even though I had no real experience with the internet prior to my freshman year at the university, I have still taken to it quite readily. I was eased into it in many ways. It expanded on and synthesized many other languages to which I had already been exposed. All I needed was an occasion to “speak” the language, and its relationship to the other languages already conditioned me to find occasions and to seize on them without waiting to puzzle over them.

We are all multilingual, even if we do not think of it in those terms. And, as with conventional languages, there aren’t really hard-and-fast boundaries between languages more broadly considered, despite attempts to demarcate and to standardize. I learned to write with a pencil and with crayons. I first encountered language as sound filtered through the flesh of my mother’s belly, and I have no recollection of when I first recognized that sound as being related to a conscious effort to communicate thought. I’m pretty sure that I was more concerned with my physical dependency on a world external to myself to keep my body from protesting at the lack of nourishment. If I had to guess, I would guess that my earliest cognisance of language was tied to that very practical concern.

And so began my adventure in semiotics.

(I know that it is considered to be bad style in English written composition to begin sentences with conjunctions.)

(But I’m blogging, baby!)

As fun as metanarrative can be, however, it is also a good way slip into the pond and completely lose one’s train of thought. I had hoped to write something profound about the synergistic possibilities of the “new media”, but I got bored and a bit perplexed with all of the new media hullabaloo and I still have a hard time not thinking in terms of synergistic research. Can someone please help me? I’m not really Miranda in this story, nor am I Caliban, nor am I the castaways. To use one of Kathy’s favorite concepts, I’m not hubristic enough to claim to be Prospero. Maybe I am one of the spirits, the cultural hybrids. Publishing and the new media, peer-review and the new media, authority and the new media, class and the new media, professionalism and the new media, profit and the new media … I get it, I think. Perhaps it is the perceived rigidity of these older concepts which constitutes the “brave new [old] world” for me.

Maybe I am Miranda.

Miranda: … O brave new world that has such people in’t!

Prospero: ‘Tis new to thee.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest; Act V, scene I.

"Prospero and Ariel" by Eric Gill. BBC Broadcasting House

PS: I think that there is one point, at the very least, which ought to be clarified. The “sandy day loam” was a typo and that means that it was typed and that, in turn, means that there has been another step in this process — other elves at work — besides the steps with which the UND spring 2010 team have been involved. At least one of Dr. Pettigrew’s students at Messiah College in Grantham, PA has done some work in preparing the PKAP data from 2008-2009, most notably by transposing the prose portions of most of the site reports onto a Word document. This has been of immense help to Sara and myself.

On Historionomy

 

“Historionomer:  One versed in the laws which regulate the course of history.”  So it is written in my wonderful 1955 Oxford Universal Dictionary.  I have to admit that, prior to looking at the many definitions for “history,” I had never heard the word “historionomer,” but I love it.  I love it because it so mirrors the term “astronomer.”  Both are professions which claim to be versed in laws which regulate the course of something, suggesting that we humans have the power to accomplish such a phenomenal task!  Of course we do not regulate either the past or the universe, but we do impose certain laws upon both.  The question is, “Why?”

It is a rather big question, which I will not answer here, or anywhere else, in full.  But I will address it.  I think it is because we see patterns in both and so attempt to order them so that they make sense to us.  Different people see different patterns, so they write about different things and create different laws.  We call these patterns “theories.”  Academics, and, (to my way of thinking), especially historians, love to debate theories.  In many ways, this is easier to do if you are a scientist, such as an astronomer, because the theories are testable.  Gravity, for instance, has worked pretty much the same since we gave it the name of “gravity” centuries ago.  History is more fluid and slippery than that.  It follows, then, that theories of history tend to be a bit more fluid and slippery as well.

I’ve recently read a theo-historical article titled “Christians and Postmoderns” by Joseph Bottums.  Written in 1994, the author dizzyingly discusses how postmodernists, because they were born, bred, and/or influenced in the era of modern theories, cannot divorce themselves from modernist thinking.  The new theories erupting from the union of the modern/postmodern union strikingly resemble medievalist, or premodern, thinking, sans God.  Yet, the author notes,  because time does not flow in reverse, this “new” thinking is not medieval at all.  My brief and naive description of this article is merely a teaser that barely addresses the nuances of its many complex themes.  Nevertheless, it helps to illustrate the debates that swirl around the numerous historical theories that exist.  As the author duly notes, the terms themselves become convoluted when writers use them not as they are intended, (to describe the history of ideas), but as eras.  Thus, even those who create the theories and laws sometimes break their own rules, or as Foucault would say, “rupture the discourse.”

I, too, enjoy the debate.  I enjoy discovering patterns as I read the translated letters of Paulinus of Nola.  I love the thrill of ordering these patterns so that they fill some gap left in the historiography of Late Antiquity.  I roll my eyes at some historians’ interpretation of the same readings, feel dejected when I find that one of my “discoveries” was made two decades ago, and relish the thrill of victory when a current expert in the field writes, “More work needs to be done on this topic,” when that is the very topic I am exploring.  Sometimes, however, it all swirls into a confused mass in my brain and I want to walk away and clear the fog.

This internship helps me to do that while still making meaningful, if not quiet, contributions to the field.  The Lakka Skoutara slides and digital pictures are all now downloaded into Omeka and I am helping to label them.  This work reminds me of gardening for many reasons.  The first is that I’m no great gardener and, as past blogs will tell, I’ve not exactly mastered the computer.  The second is that you can really see progress when you garden.  What was a mess of a flower bed after a long fall and winter, strewn with rotting leaves and the dead stems of last summer’s flora, easily becomes a blank canvas for this year’s masterpiece.  All it takes is pulling, raking, bagging, and preparing the soil.  In the same way as there are a  finite number of leaves and stems, there are a finite number of slides to label.  Every time I input data, I see progress.  I also know that I am “prepping the ground” for future generations who may look to these slides for their own research.  Their research, in turn, is meant to enlighten and stimulate more debate, perhaps even changing the laws of history as we know them. 

Does that, coupled with my research, make me a “historionomer?”  I think so.  As a small example, I offer that I am agreeing with both a certain data base and my advisor that these slides should be ordered “just so.”  We are placing them in a pattern that makes sense to us in order to retrieve them in similar ways.  These “ways” are inherently fraught with meaning.  What works for us might not work for others.  At this moment, I am unconcerned with that.  Future generations, however, may find that our way of ordering things is incongruous with theirs.  They will change the laws.  The great debates, then, will continue.  One could even argue that, in this way, history will repeat itself.  Of course, time does not flow backward, so that’s not possible.  Since there is an ongoing argument among astronomers as to whether or not even that is true, however, well….