Distantly Reading Digital Archaeology: Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future

There’s a new volume on digital archaeology coming out via the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future. Bill Caraher let me have an advance copy of it. Instead of reading it and writing a review, I thought I’d do a distant reading instead, as befits digital archaeology, and see what I found.

I did my analysis in R, and wrote my results up in Rmd (R-markdown, that is, my written ruminations + actionable code, all in one file). I first did an exploratory top-down topic model, and then a bottom-up word vector model. I’ve also done a comparative topic model of the volume, comparing it with Kansa, Kansa & Watrall’s Archaeology 2.0 from 2011, but I haven’t written that bit up yet. Stay tuned. Done!

Part One: Exploration; Source Code – topic model of Mobilizing the Past

Part Two: Exploration; Source Code – word vector model of Mobilizing the Past

Part Three: Exploration; Source Code – comparative topic model of Mobilizing the Past and Archaeology 2.0