passim in passing

Ok! Got distracted by other academic commitments, so fell off the #blogarch wagon for a bit, but back on for March and Doug's final question :   where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go?  "Where do we go from here? Is it down to the lake I fear.   Ay ay ay ay ay ay..."   - Haircut 100, sometime in the 80s.   Or, as several of my colleagues would put it, why am I wasting my time writing non-peer reviewed anything? Why would I share anything about my work when people could find out and use it themselves, without giving me credit? I've encountered time and again the repetitive mantra that blogging is at best a waste of time, and at worst an ego-stroking, publicity-seeking exercise carried out by those who just can't hack 'real' academic research. Owwww. This does rather beg the question - why bother? Well, one answer is, I increasingly don't. My personal blog languishes as research projects that really ca

Well, I thought I would expand a bit on my AR post, mostly because people seem a lot more interested in awesome hovering 3d images than in the metric qualification of surface expressions of ameloblast disruption (yeah... I know, go figure, right?). So here's an easy, totally free, step by step guide to making your own awesome bit of archaeology float around: You'll need: A webcam. Google Sketchup . This is a fantastic little offering from google which makes it ridiculously easy to create accurate 3d models. You can create any shape you like, though I find recreating structures is the easiest place to start (die, CAD, die). There's a startup guide here , but you can get fairly complicated if you'd like. You can also import stuff in; using freeware like Blender  you can easily convert 3d objects produced in other formats into something Google can read. For this example, I made a simple box, which I then painted with pictures of my (internet) face: Cool, no

A thoughtful present for the long Bank Holiday weekend from  diggingthedirt ! We are invited to view and vote for the Top 10 funny archaeological videos . Well, it makes a nice break from cats, anyway... A clear favorite emerges in the shape of the inimitable 'Don't Stop' video from the guy behind  Tollan Films . Anies' Hassan's rather unoffical tribute to the lyricality of archaeological site workers combines the glory of excavating a medieval fort in Bahrain with a respectful hommage to what, in the 70s, was considered music to demonstrate the fundamental interconnectedness of things. An ting. Simon Davis: Don't Stop!! from Anies Hassan on Vimeo .

Well, it's been a long strange trip... Middle Savagery is shoehorning the genie back into the bottle and prepping her paper for the SAAs, and all of us Archaeo-Bloggers who crawled out of the woodwork (see her summaries, or check out the list at right) are going to have to find a new way of interacting. Speaking of which, I totally skipped Week 3's question, which asked what we all want in terms of interactivity. I skipped it because I couldn't think of anything to say: I'm recently gloriously redundant, graduated, and without an excavation permit, so the raison d'être for this exercise has morphed into more of a shout in the dark than a focused outreach effort. I will say that this whole carnival has made me a lot more proactive about reading other people's material and has probably broadened my awareness of the archaeo world in a good way; it has definitely thrown up some cool visualisations of how I (and the fellow travelers) have linked together to put on t