Democratic collaboration and hierachy free academic communication in #phdchat

I realised yesterday that, much to my surprise, I hadn’t written about PhDchat. Usually I try to think critically about my work and study, but for some reason PhDchat just slipped through. Perhaps because I have been having far too much fun with it.

PhDchat is a conversation community on Twitter. Twitter only allows for 140 character messages and it would be impossible to include everyone from a community in a message by using their username (i.e. @RuthFT). However, by including a hashtag (#phdchat) in a message you can place a marker that other people can search for. This means that you can search on twitter for all messages (well, from the last 10 days to a maximum of 3200 tweets I think) that carry that marker.

If you are logged in to twitter that search will update (well, it’ll tell you there are new tweets) in real-time, which means that you can effectively hold a conversation with people even if you aren’t following them. PhDchat holds a real-time conversation at 7:30pm UK time every Wednesday. It lasts an hour, and is focussed around a single theme that is chosen by poll during the prior week. It is gently led and moderated by Nasima Riazat (@NSRiazat) who is a PhD student through the Open University and a teacher, though the community initially formed by a small group from the #UKed community.

I contribute sporadically to the conversation, as some weeks are more convenient than others and some topics more interesting or relevant than others. But that is one of the joys of this community: there is no exclusivity beyond, perhaps, the ability to use twitter. It does not matter if you dip in and out, listen but don’t contribute, or turn up for the first time next week and ask questions everyone has answered last year. The community is happy to have you, and everyone is happy to answer your questions anyway.

In part I suspect that this open access to the conversation is the result of limited information on each person being available. When taking part in the conversation, all you can really see is the person’s profile image, and I find that I pay little attention to them. I have no idea, unless someone tells me, whether that person is a student, has graduated, is a lecturer, has ever taught, is young, retired or in the middle of a career. There is something very democratising about not immediately feeling that one has to defer to someone else – or be intimidated or impressed – based on age/experience/status.

For me, PhDchat represents a community of experience that I can call on, and a forum in which I am free to ask for advice and help as I need it. No one need reply, but the few times I have asked for recommendations on titles, or advice, people have been very generous. I hope that I would be equally so, if someone were to ask for something I can help with. The community seems to me to have a very generous spirit perhaps in part because, unlike academia, there is no question of ‘networking’ or building relationships in the hopes of exploiting them for future professional gain. For me there is a sense of almost innocent enthusiasm for research and discovery about the #phdchat conversations and community.

In part this is reflected by the lack of strong ‘ownership’ or control over the community by Nasima. In addition offshoot projects are not controlled or owned by her, but by other members of the community. The PhDchat wiki, is ‘owned’ not by Liz Thackery, an early member of the community and there is a critical, reflective writing project dissecting the intricacies of this rather new form of communication by another group of members. In these offshoots I see a lack of territoriality and an openness to frank and genuine collaboration without status hierarchy that I think is fundamentally linked to the way that communication occurs in PhDchat as a result of Twitter’s structure.

This openness is something that, even though I interact with only sporadically, I really value. I never feel judged, nor that my questions or comments on topics are unwanted, lack value or wrong. I often come out of the PhDchat feeling energised by the sense of community and shared experience that is generated. Thinking back on the last year of PhDchat, I also find it an illuminating and relieving contrast to the world of academia, where collaboration is fraught with dangers, territoriality and rivalry.

Overhaul time

I’ve been working on an archive and news website for the Experimental Archaeology Conference series here in the UK, which I will post more on at a later date, and as a result I’ve become painfully aware that this site needs an overhaul.

I’ve also agreed to speak at the IoA Graduate Student Conference on the topic of social media and professional identity, which has made it even more pressing that this blog is brought up to scratch!

Consequently there’ll be some changes happening over the next week or so, as I rearrange pages and posts, update links and generally give the place a spring clean.

I’ve already set a new template style, which I hope you like and will enable easier navigation. I’m in the process of adjusting everything to fit. If things are a little confused for the moment, I do hope you’ll forgive me. It’ll all be in place soon, and hopefully looking even better.

 

6th Experimental Archaeology Conference, York, 2012

Wow! I got back from the 6th Experimental Archaeology Conference on Sunday evening, and it’s taken a few days for me to collect my thoughts.

I was presenting a paper on ‘Teaching and learning in Experimental Archaeology‘ (abstract here), which is one of the reasons I have been quiet recently. Along with proof-reading and chapter-writing deadlines, writing a conference paper on a topic outside my PhD was quite challenging and as a result I have been knuckling down.

The paper itself went over far better than I could ever have hoped. I felt like I was taking a chance, presenting a theory dominated and teaching/learning focussed paper at a practical and science dominated archaeology conference. However the attendees gave me overwhelmingly positive feedback, which was not only a relief but in fact buoyed my spirits with regard to engagement with teaching theory in archaeology.

Beyond my own paper, the conference itself was great, with a number of really great papers. I did a reasonably amount of live-tweeting the conference papers as they were given, using the hash-tag #exparch6, which was an interesting experience and I hope went some way to increasing awareness of the conference and the work of experimenters.

Rather than write a formal conference review, which I will probably do for HMSNews/PIA or similar, I’ve put together a Storify using the tweets of myself and others. It’s very informal and, well, story-like, but I hope that this too will make it an interesting read for people not specifically engaged with experimental archaeology.

Teaching and learning styles in Experimental Archaeology

A couple of weeks ago I was very pleased to find out that my paper had been accepted at the 6th Experimental Archaeology Conference in York, 6th-7th January 2012.

Teaching and learning practices are something I’ve become really interested in, after studying for the HEA qualification earlier this year. During this summer’s experimental work I found myself thinking critically about what I was doing, and how I was communicating and being communicated to, within a framework that was drawing heavily on the research I’d done on teaching and learning.

This naturally began to form itself into a discussion in my head, and when the call for papers for the Conference came out, it seemed like a great chance to force myself to finish laying the discussion out explicitly. I was a little surprised that the abstract was excepted as a paper rather than a poster, as I had assumed the organisers would focus more heavily on practical aspects of experimental archaeology. However they’ve constructed a session called “Practicing Experimental Archaeology”, where I’m presenting with another researcher, who is giving a paper entitled “Practitioner, professional and the public. Examining the impact of experimental archaeology on different user groups.”

Whilst being the last paper on the last day of the conference isn’t ideal, I’m pleased not to be entirely out on a limb on my own, and I hope that what I have to say will be of interest. In any case, the programme looks very interesting, though I am disappointed not to see any metallurgists presenting! I can’t believe that with all the smelting and metalworking happening around the UK and Europe that no one has a paper to present.

In that vein, I’m interested in hearing anyone’s opinions on the abstract that I’ve submitted. It contains the basic outline of my ideas for a framework to describe our practices in teaching/learning. If you’ve taught or learned techniques that could be called experimental archaeology – smithing, casting, glass working, ceramics, weaving, dying, the list is endless! – I’d be really interested to hear your reflection on this framework. Be as critical as you like!

I’m also interested in hearing experiences of successful or not successful teaching experiences in experimental archaeology. So go on, have a look at the abstract and let me know what you think. Your help is much appreciated.

6th Experimental Archaeology Conference – abstract

Below is the abstract I submitted for the 6th Experimental Archaeology Conference.

Learning and teaching in experimental archaeology

The ways in which past peoples communicated knowledge is of considerable importance to studies of technological processes, and is an area in which experimental archaeology could prove highly informative. Whilst some teaching of experimental work takes place within traditional Further Education structures (c.f. Sheffield University), much of the techniques we seek to study are learnt or communicated in a strictly ad-hoc, informal, and sometimes solitary manner. In all cases, it is difficult to assess methods of past communication without codifying our own methods of teaching and learning.

In this context, I use the term ‘experimental archaeology’ to encompass not only strictly empirical hypothesis testing (Johnson 1999), but also the domains of experiential work (Mathieu 2002) and the ‘re/creation’ of past technologies for demonstration, replication and pleasure. I argue against the act of seeking legitimacy in the eyes of ‘mainstream’ archaeologies (cf. Experimental archaeology session at EAA 2006) by focussing on empirical approaches, and for a rejection of the hierarchical perspective (cf. Jones 1974) which privileges this. Rather I propose an integrated model where we accept that experimental archaeologists often work within multiple domains and that this contributes to deeper, more complex understandings of technological practices than any individual approach.

Within this structure I propose four distinct patterns to learning and teaching; describing these modes as self-taught, advisory assistance, formal apprenticeships (cf. Barab and Hay, 2001) and informal participation. I discuss their use in terms of the domains of practice discussed above, and crucially how these different teaching and learning relationships contribute to different understandings of the technological process itself. The teaching and learning environment has considerable and prolonged impact on our understanding of both the finished object and the technological process, and I explore how this has the potential to influence the way we frame and contextualise the practice of these technologies within our own work, and how this can echo beyond to confines of experimentation to the interpretation of archaeological evidence and its communication.

Understanding our own learning environments therefore forms an important part of a self-reflexive and critical approach, and is necessary in contexts where we position ourselves as experts, whether those are formal academic, informal exchanges of knowledge or experimental studies or interactions with the public. In identifying the way we have learnt our own skills by mapping these different learning environments, we are closer to understanding the modern context of our experimental practice, a necessary step towards relating our own experiences to past practitioners. Whether we consider ourselves empirical, experiential or re/creative experimental archaeologists, understanding current methods of knowledge communication should help us better ground our own practice and our research into past practitioners.

Barab, S.A., and Hay, K.E., 2001. Doing science at the elbows of experts: issues related to the science apprenticeship camp. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 38 (1), 70-102.

Coles, J.M., 1979. Experimental archaeology. Academic Press, London.

Hurcombe, L., 2005. Experimental Archaeology. In Archaeology: The Key Concepts, edited by C. Renfrew and P. Bahn, 110-115. Routledge, London.

Johnson, M., 1999. Archaeological Theory. Blackwell, Oxford

Mathieu, J.R., 2002. Introduction – Experimental Archaeology: Replicating Past Objects, Behaviors, and Processes. In Experimental Archaeology: Replicating PastObjects, Behaviors, and Processes, Mathieu, J. R. (ed),  1-11. BAR International Series 1035, Oxford.

Update: You can read about the conference through a Storify I created based on the tweets that were written.

Archaeological slags, an introductory blog series

I’ve been thinking about doing some writing about slag analysis for a while, and as I’m currently in the lab working on samples this seemed like the best time.

As I have discovered, the subject of slag analysis is like an iceberg – it seems insignificant on the surface, but once you get below the waterline it tends to bulge and grow at a worrying rate. Additionally, slag analysis has the habit of seeming rather mysterious. In the two years I’ve been working on slags, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is down to an almost complete lack of published texts on how to actually do slag analysis. By that I mean: what does the surface texture mean? Why do I want to look at the microstructure? Why are my fayalite crystals cored? What the hell is that weird thing? And what does it all mean anyway?

There are some texts available, but these tend to be named in misleading ways or be down right rare and hard to find. Very few of them focus on actually helping the reader learn to replicate the process with their own material; most are reports on analysis that just happen to be so well done they are inspiring. My particular favourite is actually a PhD thesis from the 1980s by a woman called Fells, working at Birmingham University. Luckily this is available to download, as it represents one of the first thorough technical studies of the microstructures of archaeological slags. In particular, the second volume is full of optical and electron micrographs and accompanying explanations, which really is what you need when you’re staring down the microscope for the first time.

I should mention here that I am not the world’s premier expert on archaeological slags; not their morphology nor their microstructure nor their chemical composition. But I do have a working knowledge, which I endeavour to improve, and I do have access to a great library and great colleagues.

As an aid to my own work, and hopefully to other people interested in the subject, I’m going to write a series of posts looking at different aspects of slag analysis. If I’m very lucky I might even get some feedback from other people studying the subject, which would be very welcome. I’ll try to make it interesting and reasonably accessible, and I can pretty much guarantee that there will be a lot of pictures. Hopefully it’ll be an interesting glimpse into the background to my work, and helpful for anyone trying to decode a specialist report!

Fells, S., 1983. The structure and constitution of archaeological ferrous process slags. PhD. University of Aston in Birmingham.

Museum of London Docklands – Quick Review

It’s become a family tradition that when my step-mother visits me in London, I take her to a museum. Having exhausted many of my favourites I thought I would take her to the Museum of London Docklands, which is free to visit and situated close to Canary Wharf.

Wiki image of the Museum of London Docklands

I have a lot of respect for the Museum of London and all its associated/partner organisations. The Museum of London itself is one of my favourite London museums, and I always take visitors there. It’s one of the few museums I know of where the galleries are laid out chronologically, and it really works. I’ve written before about how much I rated the new post-medieval galleries, so I was hopeful that the Docklands Museum would show the same talented design and interactivity.

The Docklands had done a lot of advertising in the run up to the half-term, focussing on their Pirates exhibition, so I wasn’t surprised to see lots of kids in the galleries. Luckily enough most of the spaces were large and open, and the Museum seemed to be equipped with lots of trail-making leaflets and activity sheets which were being dutifully utilised by parents. I think the museum designers have done well in this respect, as despite the large numbers of loud excited children it never became overwhelming.

However the large spaces were symptomatic of a major problem with the Docklands. It really isn’t a museum. It’s what a museum would be if you took out all the objects.

I’m usually the first person to complain that there aren’t enough interpretation panels. One of my problems with the V&A’s new galleries is that they are just glass cabinets full of shiny objects with very little information. The Docklands is the complete opposite. As with the Museum of London we’ve got chronological galleries leading you through London’s docks and ports history, from the Roman period onwards. But in the vast majority of cases these galleries are filled with large interpretation panels, massive quantities of text and lots and lots of panels with scanned reproductions of original documents printed on to them. The later became rather tiring in their regularity.

It’s hard to express quite how bare this museum is – and to be honest, I’m not sure if it really is a museum in the classical sense of the word. It isn’t a treasure trove of delights. It doesn’t contain glass cases filled with strange and wonderful objects. It contains lots and lots of panels, some paintings, and the occasional thing in a box. For the traditional museum visitor like myself and my step-mother, it was a big let-down.

There are a few saving graces. The model of London Bridge in the 1400s was delightful, and set us dreaming of what it would be like to see that today. The blacksmith’s workshop is rather unexcitingly displayed and lacks much interpretation or explanation, but I was pleased to see a collection of traditional tools, the Victorian forge and even the ceramic tuyure – even if it was unceremoniously propped next to the forge with no real context. The ‘Sailortown’ walk-through reconstructed alley-way was good, though it did seem a little like a preparatory piece for the Museum of London’s much more impressive Victorian high street gallery at the Barbican site.

The Docklands Museum does tackle some very important issues, including the slave trade and the profiteering which occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries. It tries very hard to make you interested in this worthy subject, and the history of London’s ports, but without the objects to communicate with it ends up feeling a bit like reading an extended essay. Having re-read some of the promotional literature it seems like the Docklands focuses more on children and families, so perhaps adults aren’t its main target audience. I don’t know whether the limited number of objects is actually a benefit in this context or not. Certainly the small size of the Museum, which we’d finished with in about two hours, probably helps with this, though I was sad to note how many of the ‘interactives’ were broken. However it does seems somewhat incongruous that the cafe facilities for families were limited, whilst the expensive bar-restaurant clearly aimed at adults was much larger.

For an adult audience, I really can’t recommend the Docklands unless you happen to be in the area and looking for somewhere to spend a spare hour. It isn’t worth going out of your way to visit, and don’t expect to have your mind set afire by the contents of the Museum. It’s well-laid out, and well-meaning, but so dry it tends towards the boring. Unfortunate, as I really do love the Museum of London’s main site, but it seems like the Docklands suffers for being the poor cousin.

#AcBoWriMo – What type of writing counts?

As I explained earlier, I’m taking part in #AcBoWriMo. As the whole idea is Historical Metallurgy Society’s Research in Progress meeting on the 9th November and haven’t written yet.

I feel that the thesis is what I should be writing, the articles clearly count as academic, and the conference paper is a bit cheeky but – considering it’s on my thesis work – probably counts. However the question remains – should I include blogging? I do have two blog entries waiting in the wings, and my writing here is related to my academic work. But is it cheating? It’s very easy to knock out a blog post – whereas it’s a lot more taxing to write-up analytical work. Opinions, as ever, gratefully received.

Introducing Nanowrimo for academics… AcBoWriMo

I’ve watched with envy for the last few years whilst friends took part in NaNoWriMo, a project where people try and write 50,000 words of a novel during November. I had been thinking about trying to do something similar with my thesis for some time, when lo-and-behold, the PhD-to-Published blog decided to trial something they refer to as AcBoWriMo, or Academic Book Writing Month.

Their idea is to set yourself a word goal that seems reasonably impossible, and to participate in a month of writing to try to achieve that. One of the major selling-points of the Nanowrimo idea is the community support, and knowing that other people are involved in the same terrible, awkward, difficult, intimidating business of writing. As I have a lot of writing to do at the moment, as well as a lot of analytical work, I’d certainly appreciate the support of doing so in a community.

One could argue that being in a university department with one of the biggest bodies of post-graduate students would provide a suitable community, but that hasn’t proved true. It’s a commonly held belief that doing a PhD can be a very lonely experience, and even here in UCL that remains true. In archaeology many students travel for field trips, and many more are foreign nationals and often travel home or work in their home countries for portions of time. Some live outside London, as I do, and more prefer to work from home rather than an office. As a result of this broad demographic, the chances of anyone actually being in the office when I am is usually pretty slim – though this has picked up as my cohort has hit the third year running.

People often express doubt that an online ‘community’ really can really offer much in the way of true support, but my experience with #phdchat argues that it can. #Phdchat is a weekly discussion held at 7:30pm -8:30pm using Twitter and the #phdchat hashtag. Every week people talk about a different topic, asking questions, offering advice, and just chatting. It’s developed into a regular, reliable community and people continue discussions informally throughout the week, making new friends. Even students such as myself, who are lucky enough to be in large departments full of other PhD students undertaking similar problems, benefit from sharing their concerns and chatting with others.

Whether AcBoWriMo can be as successful as #phdchat is entirely down to getting a big-enough buy-in from students and having a dedicated moderator. With PhD-to-Published introducing the idea very late in October it’s unlikely many people will take part, but they’ve introduced it as a ‘trial’ for a bigger version next year, so it could work very well. And for those of us taking part this year it’ll hopefully get us in the habit of writing daily, which considering I’m beginning third year has got to be a good thing!

Fisbourne Roman Palace – quick review

As PrimTech finished by lunch time on the Sunday, I thought I would spend the afternoon at Fishbourne Roman Palace. The weather was beautiful, which was an advantage as part of the Palace attraction is listed as the formal gardens.

Fisbourne's most famous mosaic. Photograph copyright Fred Dawson.

The site is situated just around the corner from a big main road, near to Chichester, and I realised pretty quickly that the palace on show at the actually museum is about a quarter of what was actually once present on the site. At least part of that palace and its surrounding gardens and buildings lies under the main road, with another chunk under the 1960s housing that backs onto the palace garden.

The site itself was discovered when a utilities pipe was being put across a field prior to plots of land going on sale. Despite uncovering some stunning stuff, the lack of proper protection laws in place means that the owner of the land was able to keep selling off large chunks of land. This means that one whole wing of the palace is underneath houses and gardens that were only built recently, and could have been saved. This is exactly the kind of situation I foresee returning if the government gets to go ahead with its current bonfire of planning protection.

Luckily enough a local man who was interested in archaeology and happened to be the inheritor of a large fortune managed to secure the remains of the land, saving the north wing of the palace from destruction. Excavations uncovered a sequence of rooms with some really stunning mosaics, both in terms of number and skill. It is these mosaics that form the body of the museum, preserved in situ under a long low building which also houses a small gallery describing the history of the site and some of the finds. Recent additions include a very nice cafe and a large storage building for all of the objects recovered from this, and nearby, sites.

Model of Fisbourne Palace - today only the remains of the left-hand-side are preserved at the museum. Photograph copyright David Highbury.

The museum itself is run by the Sussex Archaeological Society, who have guardianship of a small number of properties in this area. Considering that they lack access to everything English Heritage or the National Trust have, they do a really good job here. The buildings are a little dated in appearance, and the gallery is in need of a modernisation, but that’s nothing that a Heritage Lottery Grant couldn’t fix. The people who work there are clearly very dedicated and very knowledgable.

If you visit, make sure you take advantage of one of the talks run by a volunteer, as these people seem to be fonts of knowledge and really make the context of the building come alive. In addition you will need to buy the guidebook to get much benefit from the site, but it is very reasonably priced. The extended information on each of the mosaics and interpretation boards is great, but the guidebook’s more intensive discussions of the site are rather hard to make sense of, and I found it very difficult to relate the previous buildings it discusses to the current palace.

Much is made of the fact that this palace is very early, and very luxurious, and that can’t be denied. However if you visit the audio-visual display as well as speaking to a guide and reading the book (as I did) this point is a little laboured. At least half the site is covered with an imitation of the formal gardens that they say there is archaeological evidence for, which are okay but not exactly exciting. A small side garden designed to contain Roman period plants and interpretation boards was a little lack-lustre when I visited and is symptomatic of the general lack of updating at this museum.

Formal gardens at Fisbourne, with museum in top left corner. Photograph by David Spender.

If you don’t make the most of the site, the admission price of £7.90 for an adult (a rather measly 90p reduction for students) will seem like mediocre value as you’ll be round the gallery and mosaics in an hour or less. Add in the guide’s talk, the audio-visual, the gardens and buying and reading the guidebook brings up the price to almost £10, but will extend your visit to two or three hours. Go a little bit further and enjoy the very reasonably priced cream tea in the lovely cafe next door, and you’re there for a long Sunday afternoon.

All in all, the museum and site is well worth a visit, but only if you’re interested in the Romans or mosaics. For a general visitor it lacks something, particularly when compared to the big sites run by English Heritage. In particular you can’t help but get the impression that the hey-day of the site was the 1970s-1980s, and that the gallery and museum buildings have changed little since. I don’t believe that’s any fault of the Trust necessarily, and particularly not of the staff and volunteers. If this was a site run by a national charity or government I would be much more critical, but with the limited resources available to small archaeological societies, and the massive importance and fragile nature of this site no doubt limiting what they can do, I can’t be too harsh.