dayofarchaeology

A Distant Reading of the Day of Archaeology

The Day of Archaeology is an event where archaeologists write about their activities on a group blog. The event started in 2011 and aims to 'provide a window into the daily lives of archaeologists from all over the world'. Currently there are over 1000 posts on the blog, rather a lot to read in one sitting. Rather than closely read each post, we can do a distant reading to get some insights into the corpus. Distant reading is a term advocated by Franco Moretti to refer to efforts to understand texts through quantitative analysis and visualisation.

A quantitative method that has recently become popular for distant reading is topic modelling. To get some insights into what all these archaeologists were writing about, I've generated a topic model to find the most important themes amongst the posts. By browsing the topics I can see what they key ideas are without having to read every word of every post. This approach is inspired by Matt Jockers' analysis of the 2010 Day of Digital Humanities blog posts, and Shawn Graham, who did a similar analysis of the 2011 Day of Archaeology blog posts and has also written an accessible introduction to topic modelling.

The questions I'm attempting to answer with this distant reading include: what is a typical day for an archaeologist? What are the different kinds of day that are represented in this collection? Do all archaeologists have generally similar days or not? As an archaeologist also I'm curious to see how my day compares with others!