for carleton's annual academic retreat

1. Shouting into
the Void?
Social Media and
the Construction of
Cultural Heritage
Knowledge Online
S Graham, Carleton U
@electricarchaeo

3. Ack! Blogs!

4. Ack! Twitters!

5. And Let’s
Not Talk
About
Facebook.

7. Nobody ever asks:
what’s the context of all this?

8. http://time.com/83200/privacy-
internet-big-data-opt-out/

9. Data Serfs – see Jeremy Antley, ‘Data
Serfdom in the Modern Age’
Repin, Volga Boatmen, 1873

10. So. Let’s look at the context of some
cultural heritage on the web
• Archaeologists who blog.
• Folks who’d be interested in finding out about
archaeology.

11. This is what ‘Roman Archaeology’
looked like on the web, in 2011

12. And this is what it looks like in 2014.

13. ça va faire une maudite poutine
To push a
metaphor far
too far,
how can we
extract any
nutrition from
this?

14. First observation.
There’s a lot more tracking going
on in 2014 than in 2011
At right: ghostery plugin for firefox
alerting me to 54 web trackers on
a particular website.

15. Network analysis
• Filter that cruft out
• Find communities
• Find pages that an ideal user might browse to,
given this structure
• Find pages that most users will traverse during
that browse

16. Result?
The WikiBrain

17. Zoom in on the way Wikipedia
constructs cultural heritage knowledge
Betweeness centrality (a measure of the pages one
might most often click through), we find
• ‘anthropology’,
• ‘evolution’,
• ‘ethnomusicology’,
• ‘list_of_archaeologists’,
• ‘post-structuralism’ as the top five.
• The article on the Colosseum turns up at rank 11.

18. Overall Structure: Eigenvector
Centrality
Top five:
• ‘Iron_Age’,
• ‘Margaret_Conkey’,
• ‘Marija_Gimbutas’,
• ‘Janet_D.Spector’,
‘Nautical_Archaeology_Society’,
• Amazon product page for ‘Cross-Cultural
Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern
Mediterranean, 1560-1660’ by Avner Ben-Zaken
(2010).

19. PageRank: most likely destination?
• Top nineteen pages are all category pages
– Eg,
• category:history_books_about_ancient_Rome
• category_talk pages (indicating that there a number of
articles where the content is being actively debated)
• and pages that flag the quality of the article like
‘Wikipedia:Stub’ and ‘help:Disambiguation’.
– In twentieth spot we have ‘Cambirdge_University’,
and in twenty-first,
‘Ure_Museum_of_Greek_Archaeology’ at Reading
University

20. So what?
1. Blogging is platform, not content
2. Academic bloggers talk with other academic bloggers
3. Academic content of blogs has impact on citations
4. Tracking, advertising ecosystems, walled gardens mean that the
wider world will never discover us, for the most part
5. The wider world off-loads ‘factual’ knowledge to Wikipedia
6. As far as ‘roman archaeology’ goes, the Wikipedia pages are
problematic (as the structure itself demonstrates)
7. We should use this to our advantage.

21. How?
• Surface our best
work to take
advantage of the
trackers & walled
gardens
• Become the links
to valid sources
• Become the source
pages themselves

22. DHNow & JDH

24. Don’t Shout into the Void.
Shout at
Wikipedia
instead.

25. Tim Etchells the future will be confusing Mousonturm,
Frankfurt cc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Etchells_Mousonturm.jpg
Crosa, man’s face screaming/shouting cc
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scream_crosathor
ian.jpg
Harris Matrix Composer, screen grab from
http://www.harrismatrixcomposer.com/
Jonathunder, poutine cc
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poutine.JPG
Fred Ewanuick, Mary Walsh
http://www.geocities.ws/fredewanuickfan/youngtriffie.htm