elanya

I am at an archaeology conference this weekend, for the Ontario Archaeological Society. This is my first time! I'm here for work and networking, basically - I'm not presenting this time, though I kind of regret that. Maybe next year?

The theme of this year's conference is From Truth to Reconciliation: Redefining Archaeology in Ontario, and there are some really cool sessions planned around those themes, and around collections stuff, and also maritime cultural resources, so.... here I am! Unfortunately there is a lot of overlap between the papers I want to see, because of course there is.

But also, the opening reception had free drinks (2 each), and actually had people wandering around with trays of food, which legit until this point in my life I have never experienced, and it was great! My favourite was the grilled cheese with smoked salmon and some kind of maple cream drizzle @_@

I stayed for about an hour and a bit, which is pretty good for me considering I really know very very few people in the room. But I talked to people I knew better first and then the people I knew less well, and then was encouraged to go talk to people I didn't know and I actually did!

Of course by then I'd had my two complimentary cocktails, and of course that's when someone asked me tough questions that I'm not able to answer well at this point in time ;p But then we exchanged cards and this person (who works at the Canadian Museum of History, in Gatineau (not Ottawa!!!)) is going to send me some interesting maritime installations and also a shipwreck from on the Hudson Bay coast which sounds cool to me :V I talked to a few folks at the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport as well, which was nice. Anyway. I did some networking, which I hate and am generally terrible at, so good on me.

And hen I came back to my hotel room and watched the end of Stranger Things with Nary. I liked this season quite a bit, especially all the Aliens references and nods.

And now it is much later than I intended to go to bed! So I better do that I guess...

It turns out today was a pretty good day! I did a bunch of cool things at work. The skype tour actually went quite well, I think - certainly better than R expected it to. I think she was encouraged by the possibility, but at the same time, it is giving away staff time and programming for free to people who will never actually come and visit here, so I can understand her concerns. The museum is poor - we need income to survive.

We also had a meeting with a group (originating in the UK but now with people in Canada as well) who develop digital/virtual technologies for museums. It was interesting and encouraging and we can probably work with them - they will help find and apply for grants and stuff to, so it isn't just a matter of us finding money and paying them to make something. They emphasized something I think R sometimes needs o be reminded of - you need to have a narrative, not just cool tech. You need a purpose of the cool tech, it is not an end in itself. We're lacking in narratives.

I had some cool ideas for ways to use AR stuff in the museum, though, form that museum. Let me grab them from the email I sent her... I have to say I feel like one of the advantages of their model of operations is that they get to hear a lot of ideas - they may not work for a particular client, but maybe a different client could use them, right? I hope they aren't just idea mining, but they do seem to be relatively successful. And they are museums professionals, with PhDs in museology from Leicester, and such. They were really cool. TBH I'd like to quit and go work for them :V

Ah ha ha I managed to send it from the wrong account great @_@ I guess that explains why she didn't answer :p

short form ideas:
-use AR(?) to project site map images onto their corresponding locations on the village, either as an AR image or as a googlemap overlay for people to look at while wandering the site

-create a couple of scavenger hunts where you collect pieces that all come together into some kind of story/image/animation - basically you get stuff along the way and a bonus for completion

-combine AR scavenger hunting for both real and virtual objects in the museum/village with a choose your own adventure game. Seriously how cool would *that* be?

VR excavation! I mean this is the next level of the sandbox full of artifacts that most museums have. You can have different difficulties, form your basic 'dig and find a thing' to offering different kinds of tools to find different things (objects and features!) and interact with them. You could totally have a shovel, a trowel, a screen, a measuring tape....

What I am also curious about doing, while I am funding and finding time for all these cool imaginary projects, is to rebuild an excavation from the notes taken during excavation. It would be.... a lot of work. You could generalize stuff a lot (randomizing objects retrieved from a particular layer or unit), but still... I mean, you couldn't necessarily 'replace' every unique single artifact, unless it was a tiny site and you could scan the entire collection some how. But I'm not sure that would be the point. hmmhmmmhmmm

Anyway you heard it here first :p

Oh, also, on my way home from work, I bought a frickin' cake. It was a cannoli cake, and it was pretty good :D

It is one hour until Hannibal. I actually watched it yesterday, but longpig is a super-invested fannibal and likes to watch the US airing on a stream and livetweet, and I join her. This week's episode is intense and amazing!

It has been a while since I've done any kind of major update.

I still have no job. I have been dooing very poorly at applying for jobs.

For the past two weeks I have been volunteering for two afternoons a week at the Ontario Museum of Archaeology. It's been.... very nice actually, even though I have done much that is particularly complicated or anything. Just getting out of the house and having something to work at is nice. I've done some re-boxing of artifacts and last week got to play 'where's Waldo' with a bunch of lithics that a donor wanted returned. The collection had been removed from its mounts with permission, but then the donor recanted about one particular show piece, so we had to find all the points (mostly points) on the original mount based on one picture, and then remount them. I got to do a lot of both of those things. They keep saying they are going to get me to write a blog on nautical archaeology, but we'll see. The commute is about an hour each way, including wait times for buses. I've been getting quite a lot of knitting done in that time, to the point that i am trying to plan my next bit of bus knitting.

This weekend was Nugsy's actaul birthday party, which was held at the local Children's Museum. It was dinosaur themed, and went quite well overall. He was a bit distracted for the activities but he loves the employee who was hosting for us, who was very good with him. And then when it was done, they all went off and played in various bits of the rest of the museum.

It was also a treat for me, not only because naryrising? and forthright came up, but also because they brought me my vey own tablet! I now have a piece of actually portable modern technology :V I am greatly appreciative! Forthright is very good at making the point buy system for Shoppers Drugmart, and basically managed to get it for free/by buying lots of dishwasher tablets on sale. Because that's how he rolls. They've gotten several other tablets and similar electronics the same way, and I am very happy and grateful to be the recipient in this case! To be fair, I am pretty sure that Nary wanted me to have it so we can stay in even closer contact, but I am quite okay with this! London has theoretical free wifi downtown, and I have been going places like McDonalds with Longpig and the kids where it will be very nice to be able to have some way of communicating with the saner outside world ;) Plus it gives me another device for using skype.

Hmm, what else. I have been doing a little bot of clickwork, but I'm not terribly good at it. I was writing adverts for car rental places in Germany, but they want them all to be very distinct and it is just not worth the time/effort/annoyance! i mean, I knew that's how ti would go. You don't get a reasonable wage for the jobs. But there is a line, I think. We'll see. It might just be more of a learning curve or a matter of experience. I am getting better, but I've yet to have enough of my work approved to make it worth while, either. I'm not giving up on it, but we'll see.

I keep running in to things that make me regret some of my life choices, or make me feel deeply ambivalent, anyway. For example, there is a conference on maritime archaeology and maritime landscapes in Britain this year that dovetails so perfectly with my interests that it is still a little painful. or trying to explain to people why I'm in London, and so on. Part;y bad luck, partly bad choices, partly.... I don't know. On the one had, there have been a lot of circumstances I couldn't really control, but I am often left feeling like I could have done more to mitigate them if I had *really* wanted to succeed. And then I look at how basically content I am in my life currently, and wonder if maybe I didn't actually want it that hard. And if that's the case, then what was I doing with my time and energy, and what do I have to show for it? And of course, always, where do I go from here?

On that note, I have been plotting with Curtana to trying and write some niche-market original stuff for self publication, to see if we can have any success with that. I guess we'll see. I think we have some solid ideas, but we still have to make them into stories before we can even really try and do anything with them.

I also had the independent thoughts that I could try and get some arch field work work, but that I would need good boots (and possibly other gear), and also that I'd kind of like to NPC at least for the local Underworld LARP branch (Ralinwood), but that I would need, at the very least, good boots. Something to consider, as I did finally get my last check from A&M.

So life update - wavering between contentment, ambivalence, and existential crisis. But today I had a very nice day.

( I had a crazy dream! ) and then I woke up.

I had a complicated dream last night that I only remember bits and pieces of. There was archaeology stuff, including finding some really good historic glass and pottery in the lower levels of a dig in the "cornfield" of an old farmhouse. I put cornfield in quotes because it felt huge when walking through it, but there was a map later on and it was really just a few rows deep :p Because dreams. I remember an almost intact blue transferware plate, and an almost complete wide pitcher that was very thing purple glass - maybe amethyst glass, maybe alexandrite for extra fancypants.

There was also a cache of historical clothes - possibly two caches of them, one from some kind of provenanced location that had to go to a museum or belonged to some kind of collection that had gorgeous really good condition things that I desperately wanted to have and to wear. I remember a pair of knickers - I guess knickerbockers is the proper term, so as not to confuse the Brits - that were a dark brown corduroy with some bright orange accents on the cuffs (they were so so so awesome, you have no idea. I would kill for pants like that >.>). They might have come out of the farmhouse? Someone else had some similar clothes but they weren't a historian, and had no qualms about actually wearing them, and I was suuuper jealous ;_;

The for some reason I was in a recorder ensemble with some friends of mine, including Kennesaw who apparenlty played the bass recorder, winnifreddirective possibly on ...tenor? And one random faceless person. I was on alto, which I do play in real life. We were waiting to perform at Memorial Hall, the theatre from my undergrad.* We were hanging out on the stairs up to the balcony, sort of lounging, and possibly we were dressed up quasi-medieval in the costumes we had for the recorder consort I was actually in in high school. The person who got to wear the historical clothes (which actually may have been MiB?) went wandering by in them, and I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't wear mine. And them someone, possibly naryrising told me that I should be grateful that we live in a society that cares about these things, where "these things" meant preserving our history and related material culture. And then I woke up :)

* I have performed there a lot, but really probably spent more time outside of the theatre or on the stage, not in the audience, so the link pic above is a weird perspective for me

So, I need to get a Bunch Of Shit Done, still. Let me try and make a list of that shit, all prioritized like:

OMG why haven't you even done this yet why are you even writing this D: D: D:
-organize pictures + save to various backups
-Get pipestem Bore diameters
-organize binders + logs
-pack artifacts

Do tonight
-Offload Jola (call Crismans about picking her up?)
-pack clothes (laundry if necessary)
-sort toiletries and stuff
-recharge Walkman
-make sure you have ALL THE FILES
-eat?
-sleep?

Do before bed or first thing in the morning
-write down info for traveling

Can do on trip but do it before if you can!
-finish data entry from paper to electronic log
-burn DVD of pictures and files
-final revisions of talk
-make PPt

Need to do once you're there at this point:
-print talk
-print FB check list

Have already done:
Packed travel documents and $$ in new purse that conveniently arrived today

I am on the mailing list for the Society for Historical Archaeology (of which I am a member and have been since about 2004). Lots of times there is randoms stuff of vague interest and little bits of debate, people looking for artifact identifications, etc. Today there was a link to a website documenting the maritime cultural landscape survey of Shirley Plantation. The plantation is Virginia's oldest plantation, as the site will tell you. It is still fairly intact, and it has had a fair amount of terrestrial archaeology conducted there previously and a very deep historical record. The survey is looking for and documenting maritime landscape features like wharves and jetty's associated with the maritime operations of the plantation. They've done some core sampling as well, to get an idea of how the river has behaved and how deep the submerged archaeological record might be around some of these features.

I'm excited to see this kind of work being done on plantations, which had, and needed, strong maritime connections. In Virginia especially, the waterways were what connected the planters to each other. Its a true cliché to say that the rivers were the main method of transportation, but it goes a little beyond that. They provided a place, as well as a means, of social interaction. I'm excited to see what comes out of this so that I can use it to think through some of my own work a little more. I want to think about how much these connections made, or didn't make, these plantations into maritime communities, and whether you can really draw a clear line. Maybe there were maritime subsets - people on the plantation whose lives were more closely ties to the river - how connected were they to the broader maritime world? Maybe that connectedness (in the sense of being tied in some way to the broader maritime world) is something I need to focus more in my own work. Anyway - if the data is available, I'd love to see if I could use the plantation as a comparative site :D

In completely unrelated news: things that the new household is never going to run out of, ever:
Spices
Dishes (esp plates, utensils, and glasses)
Pans
Books
Towels
Vacuum cleaners

....yeah @_@

I also made the mistake of leaving my aloe plants outside for a few days. They bleached to a translucent off-white and drooped, and now look like some horrible alien tentacle plants. One of them is reviving with water and the relatively cooler temperatures outside (and lack of direct scorching sun). The other may be a wirte of. if I had my camera here, I'd take pictures @_@

I'm also thinking about bringing Jola home, 'cause I miss her :(

Things I need to get done before I leave on Sunday, but starting with stuff I need to do today!

Today
-Confirm SB tonight with Heather
-Prep letter of interest/CV to send to the gallery people
-Work on/write SHA abstract
-Work on artifacts @_@
-make sure I have the stuff work abstract/letter/cv stuff with me for SB tonight if I don't do it this afternoon
-bring home camera

Specific things:
-work tomorrow, see if I can get home earlier
-BBQ tomorrow night - bring extra snacks? Find out where/arrange transport

General things:
Check out my tent
Check tent reviews online
Borrow tent from Brad?
Get some waterproofing spray
Get batteries for air pump and lantern
Get (wind up?) flashlight?
Check and pack archaeology tools
Laundry....somewhere... -_-
Find lease and check move-out date
Contact people to look at apartments @_@
Pack
Divest self of pets for the summer (;_;)
Clean out fridge?
Make/freeze stock?
???

Stupid field season :|

I'm here! I left with Brad around 5:30 this morning. We made it here just after 8, despite some nasty traffic. he managed to get registered, and i got into the room I'm sharing with Catherine and Dana. I need to arrange for a cot for tonight though!

The first session I went to was really cool, even if it was kind of random (looking at economics and class in Nevada mining towns). I sat through about 3-4 sessions tis morning before I needed to crash - despite downing a GIANT vat of tea. went to a few more sessions this afternoon, but it looks like the bulk of stuff I want to see will be tomorrow, so keen. I'm still really tired. I'm also reminded how terrible I am at the sort of networking and, well *talking to people* you are supposed to do at conferences. Feh - I can barely talk to the other people in my program :p I have see, and briefly caught up with - some old friends and acquaintances, at least, but I always find myself feeling needlessly isolated at these things, and it is totally my own fault :p

In other news, the Hilton is very nice, but it is also one of those hotels that assumes that if you are willing to pay a zillion dollar per night, you are also willing to pay $6/hour for internet in your room. LOL! No. Fortunately, lobby internets are free. But don't expect to hear a whole lot from me while I'm here - hopefully I'll have other fun things to do.

Some lulz, from In Search of the Social: Steamboats, Square Wheels, Reindeer and Other Things, in Journal of Maritime Archaeology vol 3, p. 21:

For the purposes of this paper, I argue: it is not that objects and boat structures were nonsocial— i.e. it is not that we are fetishising boats and other objects in maritime archaeology. Rather, it is the various depictions of social in the rest of the social sciences, which exclude or omit boat structures and other objects that need changing. In addition to boats, we study a wide variety of people-and-things (for a discussion of topics and theory in maritime archaeology see McGrail 2001, pp. 1–13; Adams 2002, 2003, pp. 2–46; Flatman 2003). However, besides maritime/nautical archaeology, no other field of the social sciences is dedicated to the socio-cultural, technological and historical exploration of boats, ships and other forms of watercraft. Therefore, it is necessary to stress our importance in academia and argue that discussions of society, in many other areas of the social sciences (i.e. besides our own), need to start including boat structures, objects, things, materials, animals, landscapes and technologies, on a more equal footing with people, minds, agencies and social structures because objects are a part of the social. They help make the subject. They are part of what makes society possible.

...to quote Steve, "God-damn, why do people who are essentially right have to be so pretentious and dumb?" I'm sure other non-maritime archaeologists will be thrilled to know that they aren't paying enough attention to objects.