Changes [May 15, 2008]
Scott imagesTimeline:
January 2005 – June 2005: Set up wiki/blog; background research into place/space theories, history of Orkney Islands
June – August 1: Stay at Stanford and research objective and literary representations of specific sites in Orkney
August 1 – August 29 Travel to Orkney, visit sites, interview locals, etc; research there before/after seeing sites, especially local legend aspects
August 29-September 1: Travel in Scotland to get cultural background – will be paid for by personal funds
September 1 – December 2005: Final (objective) research for second half of sites; processing of findings, information; directed reading class with Professor Shanks
This is the current draft of my grant proposal for the Chappell-Lougee grant to go study archaeological sites in Orkney during Summer 2005. Any feedback is greatly appreciated, especially on what to cut out (I'm already over my word limit). Email comments to mgrowe@stanford.edu
Proposal Summary:
I intend to explore the archaeological, historical, literary, and cultural notions of place and space through study of several archaeological sites in Orkney in the north of Scotland during Summer 2005. I will work closely with Professor Michael Shanks of the Classics Department during my research, and I will record my findings and present my work on a web-based forum using social software. In the archaeology community, there is growing interest in the subjective experiences of place and the cultural connotation of specific places, especially since the United Nations has recently declared these subjective archaeological experiences to be a human right. I will explore these notions of place and space through another space, cyberspace, with my online forum. Social software has begun to be used in classroom settings, but not yet for the presentation of major academic research. My project will contribute to this emerging field. This project will allow me to explore these themes of historical places, will help me gain a background understanding for a future career in international relations, and may be the foundation for my honors thesis.
Significance:
Since the end of the antiquarian tradition in archaeology in the 1800s, notions of place and space have been highly contested. With the emergence of 19th Century nation-states and senses of national identity came the concurrent surfacing of cultural history and geography as both an academic and a popular notion. This is especially true in the case of the “Celtic revival” in the 1890s and early 1900s, during which historians and authors in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales essentially invented a Celtic history, mythology, and tradition to fill what they perceived as a lack of a regional sense of identity. In The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination, Sam Smiles remarks that “More generally, in the Romantic period in particular, many countries used mythical and archaic material to elaborate a sense of distinctness, of identity. These tactics were also and especially employed by those cultures which found themselves to be marginalized within a wider polity. The later nineteenth century saw the efflorescence of these tendencies in nationalist politics, historiography, literature, music, and art…” (26, 1994). The emergence of the field of Human Geography also contributes to these cultural interpretations of place. Paul Cloke, Chris Philo and David Sadler address these changing concepts of regionality, identity, and humanistic approaches to geography and archaeology in their 1991 book Approaching Human Geography: An Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Debates. These new approaches maintain that the people in and around a place belong in that place and space as much as the physical elements of that site, and should be considered important despite their ephemeral nature.
One’s sense of place is always historical, especially in Orkney. Citizens of the islands do not consider themselves UK citizens or Scots, but rather “Orcadians.” The Romans circumnavigated, wrote about, and traded with the inhabitants of the island, who were Pictish; the islands were later occupied by both Vikings and Scots. The cultural identity of Orcadians, therefore, is some mixture of all of these cultures, as well as a product of the history, local legends, and individuals specific to the islands. A corollary is the approach to cultural identity that is taken in the United States, where citizens think of themselves as Americans in some senses, but also as Irish-American, African-American, and other hyphenated identifiers. Additionally, because Orkney is a group of islands, it has a definite border, and can therefore be considered a controlled environment of sorts. As an American (but also a British-American and Welsh-American), I will have a unique perspective from which to view the interactions between Orcadian history, culture, legend, and place.
The standard image of landscapes and archaeological sites in Orkney and the rest of the Scottish Highlands is that of the sublime – dramatic black and white photographs with turbulent skies framing backlit ruins. The exploration of the sublime and other varieties of place has become very popular recently, as evidenced through the poetry of place and space of Gary Snyder, and new research on Humphry Repton, a designer of medieval castle gardens for the nobility and aristocracy (see hard copy bibliography). My focus specifically on the objective and subjective experiences of place as seen in a variety of archaeological and historical sites spanning centuries on Orkney is a new angle on these complex questions and issues. Likewise, the format of my final product will explore alternative academic and public fora for related research.
Due to the recent emergence of archaeological thought regarding the importance of subjective experiences of place as opposed to the traditional “academic/objective” experiences (see hard copy bibliography), it only makes sense that the rhetoric of archaeology also becomes more subjective. My project will also explore cyberspace and its uses as a forum for the coupling of these objective and subjective experiences and forms of communication.
My project thus has two audiences. First, it will be helpful to academics who are studying theories of place and space, especially in the context of cultural identities. Second, it will be useful to a wider public audience, since my site will be available to anyone with internet access. I will invite my interviewees to contribute to the site as well. The great advantage of using a social software site to present my findings is that such a site is both an academic/objective and a creative/subjective forum, and therefore allows the seamless blend of formats, audiences, and research angles. On this site I can attach interview transcripts, display pictures of the sites, and keep daily records of my findings, as well as many other useful functions. This type of collaborative software is unique because it will allow me to present my work as I undertake it, rather than only presenting it in a coherent, finished academic paper at the end. Because cultural identity and notions of place and space are always evolving, it makes sense to see my work as a work in progress rather than an isolated project that has a definite end and is only valued for the polished product.
There is no precedent for using this sort of social software to document and present research. While blogging has become more popular and academically legitimate in the past year or two, and while hypertext novels provide a similar instant publishing forum, the use of personal content management systems like wikis for academic research is new. This means there is no established format for presentation on such a site, which offers me greater freedom to shape my own site into something relevant to my research. It will be quite exciting to participate in this emerging discipline. Professor Shanks maintains similar sites on the same server to present his work in progress, so I will be able to rely on him for technical support and logistical aid.
Besides its importance to academics and the broader online community, this project is important to me intellectually and academically. I will either major in International Relations or in the interdisciplinary History field (History, Literature, and the Arts), but either way, this project fulfills certain undergraduate goals. As an International Relations major, it would be imperative for me to have lived abroad for some time in order to get to know other cultures and to understand the importance of good communications on a global scale. As an HLA major, this project could become the basis for an honors thesis.
Project Design:
In order to study the differences between objective and subjective archaeological understandings, I propose to examine a variety of archaeological sites from a range of different experiences and depictions in different media. For half of the sites, I will start with the most objective, concrete facts, such as specific location and dimensions, and proceed through more subjective experiences – historical facts associated with the site, the representation of the site in historical fiction and local legend – to the most subjective experience, my personal archaeological experience. For the remainder of the sites, I will start with my personal archaeological experience and research the more objective representations only after having viewed the site for myself. I will interview locals about the archaeological experience of growing up with these sites in their backyards, and I will also interview tourists to ascertain the way in which they use research before or after their visit to enlighten their archaeological experiences. Wherever possible, I will take guided tours of the sites so I can determine how the information presented there is similar to or different from the information presented in textual and other media sources, as well as to determine how the concurrent flow of information with the archaeological experience affects that experience. To record my findings and present my research to both the academic community and the broader internet community, I will keep a weblog and an interactive, collaborative internet site (a wiki) which I will update regularly during both my objective and subjective research. I will also invite my interviewees and other people interested in the project to contribute to this site by responding to my findings or posting their own. This site will be hosted by the MetaMedia lab at Stanford, and a preliminary version of my site can be found at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/MeganRowe/Home I will do a large portion of the preliminary objective research at Stanford before I leave for Scotland and a large portion of the follow-up objective research at Stanford after I return. The research on representations of the sites in local legend and popular culture will be done in Scotland, both through interviews with participants and through work in local libraries, though the main focus of my stay will be visits to the sites. Stanford’s library, local libraries in Scotland, and interviews will provide all the secondary sources I require. I plan to borrow a digital camera from the Career Development Center so that I can load my images on my website in order to document my findings graphically as well as verbally.
I have not yet determined exactly which sites on Orkney I will research, but this is not a problem due to the multitude of fascinating archaeological landscapes and ruins in the area. Background information on many of these sites can be found online at http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/sites.htm. I would like to leave my decision of which sites to focus on until later in the project, so that I can decide based on my objective research beforehand, as well as the suggestions of archaeologists who have done research in the area. Because Orkney is so rich in historical and archaeological sites (including prehistoric standing stones, burial chambers, and settlements; Iron Age brochs; ancient towns; and medieval castles, cathedrals, and abbeys), I can choose several sites of each type for comparison. I will be happy to submit a more precise timeline when I have chosen the specific sites. I plan to visit as many sites as possible, but will choose several to focus on ultimately based my own archaeological experiences and senses of place and space, as well as those of other people, which are so fundamental to my research. While I will do in-depth research on these 4-10 sites I choose, I will blog about my experiences at all the sites I visit, in order to record my basic impressions and cursory findings for myself, for the internet community that is interested, and for other academics who may want to use my project as a framework for their own research.
I also plan to take a week or two after the research on Orkney to visit the rest of Scotland in order to gain a greater sense of the cultural identity of the region. However, in order to keep my budget reasonable, this travel throughout Scotland will be paid for by personal funds and will not be included in the budget request.
Timeline:
January 2005 – June 2005: Set up wiki/blog; background research into place/space theories, history of Orkney Islands
June – August 1: Research objective/literary representations of specific sites in Orkney at Stanford
August 1 – August 29 Travel to Orkney, visit sites, interview locals; research there before/after seeing sites, especially local legend aspects
August 29-September 1: Travel in Scotland to get cultural background – paid for by personal funds
September 1 – December 2005: Final (objective) research for second half of sites; processing of findings, information; directed reading class with Professor Shanks
Preparation/Resource People/Human Subjects:
My archaeology introductory seminar with Professor Shanks has given me the background knowledge on theories of place and space necessary for this project, and has introduced me to different ways of looking at place. For our class project, I worked on different ways of looking at Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumbria, so I read many sources about alternative views of place. This work also gave me a basis for understanding and interpreting castles in Orkney, and provided invaluable training in the use of wikis for interactive projects like mine.
The largest gap in my training is my lack of experience with human subjects and interviews, but I have completed the online tutorial and certification for Human Subjects Protocol, and I plan to take Anthro Sci 193 in Spring, which should teach me everything I need to know for this project. I plan to interview both locals and tourists (in English or Spanish). I have not yet submitted a protocol, but plan to do so in February. I also plan to take History 206 B in Winter, which should give me a more general sense of pre-field preparation.
Another gap in my training is my relative lack of experience with hosting and running a wiki, but the time allotted for learning how to do this (January through May 2005) should be ample time to work out any problems that may arise. Professor Shanks is one of the experts in the field of online collaborative software, so he should be able to help me with the technical aspects of my project as well as the archaeological and historical aspects. I will contact his colleague Colin Richards, a professor of archaeology at the University of Manchester, UK, who participated in archaeological digs of several sites in Orkney, as well as other contacts that may be able to assist me. In Fall 2005, I will take a directed reading course with Professor Shanks in order to process and analyze my findings, as well as to organize and present them on the wiki.
