Friday Varia and Quick Hits
It’s a winter-weather day here in North Dakotaland, but the fireplace is going in New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World and my laptop is keeping my lap toasty warm. So there seems to be nothing better to do right now than for me to prepare and you to read a little list of quick hits and varia.
On the top of everyone’s list this week is the story of the remarkable finds at Byzantine Myra in Turkey. The coverage in the New York Times is well-worth using one of your 10 free articles to read. Any excitement over the Byzantine period in the popular media is great. Let’s hope that this interest extends to sites with well-preserved foundations immediately beneath the plow zone!
Keeping in Byzantine times: thanks to Kostis Kourelis for the kind words on my work with Amy Papalexandrou in the Polis: City of Gold exhibition catalogue.
Lots of fun stuff with maps this week. First, Australian Bureau of Meteorology had to use a new color on their maps to indicate temperatures over 50 degrees C. My wife has family in Alice Springs and they confirmed several days of over 50 degree C weather. The need for a new color on the maps smacks a bit of “this amp goes to 11”, though. We also saw maps of the best places to be born and, in some ways the opposite, a vintage maps of 20th century lynchings in the U.S. Here’s a link to Harvard’s WorldMap project. It’s pretty cool and I’m very tempted to use it, rather than Google Earth, in my History 101 class this semester.
If people don’t quite understand what hockey is like here in North Dakotaland, they should read this article.
More North Dakotiana: How much does a one-bedroom apparent rent for in Williston? For more on the North Dakota Oil Patch, check out Black Gold Boom.
Apparently, this author thinks that teachers “secretly hate grading”. Most of us openly hate grading and some most of the reasons that the author noted, but since most of us understand these things, the onus is more or less on us to create assignments and a classroom culture to mitigate these factors.
Corinthian Matters turned 3 years old this month and has celebrated that landmark with a nice group of interesting posts. Of particular note is David Pettegrew’s Digital History syllabus. At last weeks, AIA/APA annual meeting, digital humanities was described as an intervention caused by the temporary crisis of the digital world. I wonder whether David’s syllabus marks a turning point in the place of digital technology in ancient history and archaeology. David is as smart as they come in Mediterranean Archaeology, but he is not someone with a singular interest in digital practices. His teaching of a digital history course shows that certain barriers have lifted. We are all digital historians and archaeologists now.
The Modern Language Association meeting (as well as the American History Association meeting) takes place this time of year and that means a bumper crop of digital humanities musings. I have read or discovered them all, but I like Bethany Nowvisikie’s paper.
What I’m reading: K. Sessa, The formation of papal authority in late antique Italy : Roman bishops and the domestic sphere. Berkeley 2012.
What I’m listening to: Kishi Bashi, 151a; Father John Misty, Fear Fun.
Smith Tower, Seattle
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