The Connected Past conference in London this month was awesome! How awesome? Well you can judge that for yourself. We have made slides of most presentations available for download on Figshare. We will also make videos of most talks available online soon, so stay tuned for more!
Thanks to the World Universities Network researcher mobility grant Iza and I could do some cool work with colleagues at the University of Auckland. On 20 June we gave a presentation at the department of archaeology there, in the ArchSoc seminar series. We presented our PhD projects, which in my case was mainly an overview of archaeological network analysis and some of my citation network analysis. You can download the presentation slides through the link on my bibliography page.
Thanks to all our Auckland colleagues!
Here the abstract:
This paper will argue that archaeological network researchers are not well networked themselves, resulting in a limited and sometimes uncritical adoption of formal network methods within the archaeological discipline. This seems to have followed largely from a general unawareness of the historicity of network-based approaches which span at least eight decennia of multi-disciplinary research. Many network analytical techniques that would only find a broader use in the last 15 years were in fact introduced in the archaeological discipline as early as the 1970s. The unawareness of alternative approaches is most prominent in recent archaeological applications of formal network methods, which show a tendency of adopting techniques and models that were fashionable at the time of publication rather than exploring other archaeological and non-archaeological approaches.
The paper concludes that in order to move towards richer archaeological applications of formal network methods archaeological network analysts should become better networked both within and outside their discipline. The existing archaeological applications of network analysis show clear indications of methods with great potential for our discipline and methods that will remain largely fruitless, and archaeologists should become aware of these advances within their discipline. The development of original archaeological network methods should be driven by archaeological research problems and a broad knowledge of formal network methods developed in different disciplines.
I really enjoyed all papers in the session Anna Collar, Fiona Coward and I chaired at TAG 2011 in Birmingham. We had a great variety of research topics, theories and methods, all sharing a common interest or even passion (be it positive or negative) for networks. I was delighted we had such a great discussion during the session and I would like to thank all contributors once again!
I just uploaded the slides of my own presentation. You can find a link to download them on my bibliography page. Alternatively, have a look at my Academia or Scribd pages.
You can now download the slides from my recent presentations in Newcastle, Southampton, Leuven, Budapest and my presentation tomorrow in Vienna from my bibliography page. I know they are all very similar, but there are some slight variations. Task: find the 10 differences between them 🙂
If you want to read the research underlying this you will have to wait a bit longer because we are still writing it out. But you can always check out the abstracts (added as description on Scribd). And if you really can’t wait just send me an e-mail and I will give you a sneak-preview!
And finally I would like to give you a last-minute reminder of the workshop in Vienna tomorrow titled “Connecting the dots. The analysis of networks and the study of the past (Archaeology and History)”. It’s a half-day Workshop on 10 June 2011 at the Institut für Byzanzforschung (IBF), Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Check out the invitation here.
Archaeological Networks 