Forum Archaeology

The future is so bright that we have to wear shades. Speculations about the future.
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Enki
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Forum Archaeology

Post by Enki »

Do you think future historians will go back to web forums and analyze what people have posted to glean topics about history?
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YMix
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Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by YMix »

It should at least give them an idea about our delusions.
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Enki
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Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by Enki »

YMix wrote:It should at least give them an idea about our delusions.
Perhaps so. It would be interesting to see. I am very curious about how the nature of 'sourcing' will alter. Maybe some historian will lock onfo some forum, say this one, and find some theories outside the mainstream of his field and make it a school of historical thought. ;)

The internet archive and Google's caching will make for some interesting reading 100 years from now.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Prunus persica

Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by Prunus persica »

.

actually, thinking about it, makes sense

history is what historians think people at certain time thought, their mindset was or subjects bothered them or made them happy and and .. but .. nobody has heard it directly from the people .. say, what people on Roman streets where saying or thinking or arguing or joking about, say daily humor etc

logic is community standard related .. meaning people on the street Roman time logic not same logic in somewhere else or sometimes later

forums an excellent place to find all that for historians


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Enki
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Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by Enki »

Also, obscure texts like, "Star of Redemption", will be indexed because of the dicussions on forums.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Ammianus
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Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by Ammianus »

A relevant article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... ne/253163/
In April, OR Books published Tweets from Tahrir, a book of tweets sent from Ground Zero of the democratic revolution that played out in Egypt last year. The book, its promotions declare, "brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Cairo's Tahrir Square. History has never before been written in this fashion."

But tweets are fragile things. A year after the Tahrir's tweets were posted, much of the information they first shared has gone missing. According to a study conducted by Hany SalahEldeen Khalil, a phD student in computer science and Web preservation at Old Dominion University, a third of the images initially included in Tweets from Tahrir -- 7 out of 23 -- seem to have disappeared entirely from the Web. A small slice of the historical record, gone -- archived not digitally, but in the pages of a book.

Those tweets, though, were lucky. Most social media content doesn't have the luxury of paper-bound back-up. Services like Storify have risen up not only to curate social media, but also to archive its content; those services, however, rely on third-party partner relationships -- they refer to media assets, rather than storing them -- and so work as archives only in the broadest sense.

On Storify, in SalahEldeen's sample, 222 of the set's tweets pointed to external resources like images, videos, and links. Today, only 198 of those tweets retain those external assets -- a loss of nearly 11 percent.

(To remove the possibility of transient errors skewing the results, SalahEldeen and his colleagues repeated their experiment 3 times over a period of three weeks before finally declaring a resource to be missing.) Overall, SalahEldeen found, a whopping 10 percent of the social media documentation of the Egyptian revolution -- for the study's purposes, the stretch between January 20 and March 1, 2011 -- has disappeared.

I just remembered a factoid from Google, don't know how correct it is, but it states the data we have generated from the last 2 years combined has surpassed the data we've accumulated in the entirety of our specie's existence. It was a stat liable to make a truly historical mind quake, tremble, and kneel at the prospects of just how to preserve and catalogue such enormity for posterity. In many ways, I fear in many ways, they will not be. One remembers Hellenistic age historiography, where despite dozens and dozens of names thrown out in later records we only have solid material of one, just one, historian, Polybius, and even then in horribly fragmented and mutilated state. Our society has yet to ponder this issue, and by the time it truly does it may already be too late.
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Enki
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Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by Enki »

Sentiment analysis, Social Networking analysis, Dimensional Modelling of Databases and other such abilities to deal with massive datasets will change historiography in a complete way.

Talking to my buddy who reads the ancient texts, it's interesting hearing about the networks that these PhD nerds have to connect with others who have studied the same source text. That is only going to become more sophisticated over time.
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Doc
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Re: Forum Archaeology

Post by Doc »

A God named Sin.....I wonder if there is any relation to a boy named Sue?


http://www.jspacenews.com/5000-year-old ... nd-israel/
5,000-Year-Old Moon-Shaped Monument Found in Israel
By: Shira Kipnees

An enormous crescent-shaped stone structure has been discovered just a few miles northwest of Israel’s Sea of Galilee. The monument, which dates back to between 3050 B.C.E. and 2650 B.C.E., is almost 500,000 cubic feet in volume and approximately 492 feet long. Originally, archeologists thought that the structure was a part of a city wall. However, when Ido Wachtel, an Israeli doctoral student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found out that there was not a city around the “wall,” he realized that it was a stand-alone monument.

“The proposed interpretation for the site is that it constituted a prominent landmark in its natural landscape, serving to mark possession and to assert authority and rights over natural resources by a local rural or pastoral population,” Wachtel wrote in a presentation for the International Congress on Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

Wachtel told Live Science in an email that the monument’s crescent shape stood out in the landscape and that the shape may have had symbolic importance, since the lunar crescent is a symbol of an ancient Mesopotamian moon god named Sin.

An ancient town called Bet Yerah (which translates in English to “house of the moon god”) is only a day’s walk from the moon-shaped monument Wachtel found. Due to this, the monument may have helped to shape the town’s borders. Despite the fact that the monument is in walking range of the city, it is too far away to be an effective way of fortifying the city.

“The estimation of working days invested in the construction [of] the site is between 35,000 days in the lower estimate [and] 50,000 in the higher,” Wachtel said in the email to Live Science.

If the lower estimate is right, it means that a team of 200 ancient workers would have needed more than five months to build the structure, a task that would have been hard for people who depended on crops for their livelihood. “We need to remember that people were [obligated] most of the year to agriculture,” Wachtel said.

According to the Archeological Institute of America, Bet Yerah, which is also “Khirbet Kerak” in Arabic, was a fortified city that existed throughout the Early Bronze Age, which was around 3000 B.C.E. Despite the fact that the town’s name seems to indicate some type of association with the moon god, and thus, a connection with the monument, it is unclear whether or not this town was known by this name 5,000 years ago.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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