Hi all,

As I had more detailed questions on how I process my notes, I thought I’d walk you through an example. I think this might show where the easy work happens, but also the hard work of thinking/linking.

I am currently working on a paper for the Society for American Archaeology on my ongoing project at the ancient site of Tiwanaku. One of the sections in this (short!) presentation will be on proto-urbanism, an issue explored in my region in great detail by the late John Janusek. This chunk of work was well suited for a short 45 minute time block I had for writing yesterday. Below are the steps I took.

I searched Obsidian, and discovered quickly that I have never actually synthesized Janusek’s thoughts on proto-urbanism (and how it is in communication with others’ work). So, I dug up a 2015 article where I knew he discussed his thinking in some detail. I didn’t sit down and read the entire paper and highlight/annotate (my usual approach when dealing with a new paper). Instead, I simply jumped to the sections where he discussed this issue, and copy and pasted into a text document.

A simple copy and paste of chunks of text from Janusek’s article on proto-urbanism in the Titicaca basin.

I then worked to synthesize down all the relevant information into key points. At this stage I added titles as a way to structure the content of the key ideas. As I tighten these down, I make sure that I am properly referencing where the ideas come from.

Processing Janusek’s thinking on various themes associated with proto-urbanism. Also starting to think about how this might connect to things I’ve read elsewhere, and relevant connections.

Once edited down/paraphrased in my own words (for my own interests), the many chunks of quoted text resulted in 4 key points: “Cities as Process” (a point that I know connects with other notes I have in my collection), “Incipient proto-urbanism in the Titicaca basin” (the issue that drove me to this article in the first place), “Late Formative proto-urbanism and periodicity” (I think I have notes on this), and “Andean Proto-urbanism and animistic ecologies” (again, linked to other notes that I have). So the next stage – and really the one that Ahrens stressed in the reading last week – is thinking further with these, and connecting them. So off to Obsidian I go.

Above I’m adding relevant information to Obsidian note. Note that when I type the # symbol it draws up all the tags in a “auto-complete” fashion. For this note, I will add tags for #religion/animism #urbanism and #relational_ontology. Also note that I have added the bibliographic information. Not yet added are the Literature notes (a note that compiles all the notes I have taken from this reading) and the relevant associated other notes.

As I add the relevant information, I’ll also clean up the note and try to think more about why I took this note and how it might connect. For instance, in the animistic ecology note, I will do a quick search of my database to see if I have notes with Urban + animism. And I do!

Above is a previous note that I took on urbanism and animism in an article on Hittite urbanisms. I add a link both here and on my previous note – clearly I have a number of themes emerging on this theme on animism and urbanism (which often is under the umbrella of relational archaeologies). I direct myself to the notes on a later Janusek article where he further develops this thinking on “eco-regime” and animism.

I continue to do this with all four notes, trying to parse the various connections and conversations that each note engages. Ahrens is useful here

“The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes – as long as the connection makes sense…the slip-box is forcing us to elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.”

So, I find other connections: to Wengrow and Graeber on “seasonal complexity” (which helps me think about urbanism as not being the same year round), to Bandy’s writing on the seasonality of raised field agriculture in the region, all of which is connected in the individual note. My note on Cities as Process connects to a much more networked series of notes I use in my Ancient Cities class (but is not immediately relevant to this writing project).

Above a “literature note” that assembles all links to all the notes taken on a particular reading, and the abstract. While not at all necessary, I like having a bird’s eye view of what I produced out of something I read. If I come back to this article in 6-months time, I may add to it given a particular issue I’m grappling with…at which point the list of permanent notes would grow.

Ok. I now have all that I can work with from Janusek on proto-urbanism. These notes now serve for a paragraph in my conference presentation on proto-urbanism.

Janusek (2015) argues that Tiwanaku “emergent centrality” came from previous centuries of “incipient urbanism”, of a broader distributed network of Late Formative centers and settlements. These places, sites like Chiripa and Kala Uyuni on the Taraco Peninsula and Khonkho Wanakne, were site of “cyclical ritual convergence”. The site of Khonkho Wankane (show image) was an example of “distributed proto-urbanism”, across both the landscape but also across the human:non-human divide. There were many such proto-urban centers that were networked, but the glue was as much in stones, mountains, as water as it was in politically-motivated leaders. In Andes both human and non-human forces and cycles were built in/embodied within proto-urban forms. Janusek argues that Tiwanaku was founded on an ” utterly pragmatic, if profoundly ritualized, animistic ecology” (Janusek 2015: 230).

As recent writings stress, however, such ancient urbansims were likely cyclical in nature (see Graeber and Wengrow 2021 on “seasonal complexity”). Janusek points to a range of evidence – including ephemeral surfaces covered by thin layers of erosional sedimentation and short-term hearths – to suggest that these were “sparsely inhabited centers of recurring periodic gathering and ritual activity.” The implication of this “cyclical mobility” is that not all those that built these centers or participated in the rituals lived in the center. As we will below, our efforts to understand the earliest occupations of Tiwanaku are driven by a goal to take seriously both the human and non-human, but also the seasonal complexity that may have characterized this dynamic place.

It is still a “shitty rough draft”, and will likely change as other aspects of the paper develop. But I have now woven in how my take on other issues – namely the importance of non-human entities and seasonality (both which Janusek only briefly touches on in his discussion) – aligns with the theme of proto-urbanism. And I know that there are a series of connected paths I can explore in my network of notes if I need to engage an associated topic. Next time I have 45 minutes, I’ll be grappling with a section in the text on how our new phasing of the site is transforming our understanding. Here I *know * that I have ~6 or 7 existing relevant notes I can simply lay out and play with to synthesize this argument.

A last point to remember: this is just *my system*. This can all be accomplished in fewer steps or more analogue driven approaches. The critical point is the thinking that goes with the note-making, and how the writing happens at each step along the way.

Hi all,
A few follow ups on today’s discussion of info-glut tools. I gave a lecture last year at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship. Much of it touches on issues we explored today, but perhaps of interest. The recording and associated links can be found here and here.

Some of you are interested in having a go with Obsidian, but haven’t used markdown. Here is a quick primer. Here is a converter if you have word files you want in that format.

Anyways – happy to help if you want some basics of getting things started.

A reminder: please get me your Annual Reviews to the Dropbox folder once you have identified the piece you will writing about.

Hi all,

Before our class tomorrow I wanted to share a couple of books that I am always pushing on people. Let’s start with an oldie but goodie (which is also available for free on the internet as a PDF)

I’ll discuss the book in more detail next week, but for now, here is a great quote from his Chapter 9:

Every book has a skeleton hidden between its boards. Your job is to find it. A book comes to you with flesh on its bare bones and clothes over its flesh. It is all dressed up. I am not asking you to be impolite or cruel. You do not have to undress it or tear the flesh off its limbs to get at the firm structure that underlies the soft. But you must read the book with X-ray eyes, for it is an essential part of your first apprehension of any book to grasp its structure.

You know how violently some people are opposed to vivisection. There are others who feel as strongly against analysis of any sort. They simply do not like to have things taken apart, even if the only instrument used in cutting up is the mind. They somehow feel that something is being destroyed by analysis. This is particularly true in the case of works of art. If you try to show them the inner structure, the articulation of the parts, the way the joints fit together, they react as if you had murdered the poem or the piece of music.

That is why I have used the metaphor of the X ray. No harm is done to the living organism by having its skeleton lighted up. The patient does not even feel as if his privacy had been infringed upon. Yet the doctor has discovered the disposition of the parts. He has a visible map of the total layout. He has an architect’s ground plan. No one doubts the usefulness of such knowledge to help further operations on the living organism.

Well, in the same way, you can penetrate beneath the moving surface of a book to its rigid skeleton. You can see the way the parts are articulated, how they hang together, and the thread that ties them into a whole. You can do this without impairing in the least the vitality of the book you are reading. You need not fear that Humpty-Dumpty will be all in pieces, never to come together again. The whole can’t remain in animation while you proceed to find out what makes the wheels go round.

This reflects some of the themes that I have been bringing up all semester. Underlying structures of writing matter…but they should also impact how you read and annotate.

The other book may be a nice complement to my discussion of PDF management and info-glut this week. This book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, is written by Steven Johnson. It is a fascinating read (and you can watch a short animation here of some of the ideas), but in particular his discussion of common-place books.

The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here’s an excerpt from his “instructions for use”:

“When I meet with any thing, that I think fit to put into my common-place-book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example that the head be EPISTOLA, I look unto the index for the first letter and the following vowel which in this instance are E. i. if in the space marked E. i. there is any number that directs me to the page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first vowel after the initial letter is I, I must then write under the word Epistola in that page what I have to remark.”

Locke’s approach seems almost comical in its intricacy, but it was a response to a specific set of design constraints: creating a functional index in only two pages that could be expanded as the commonplace book accumulated more quotes and observations. In a certain sense, this is a search algorithm, a defined series of steps that allows the user to index the text in a way that makes it easier to query. Locke’s method proved so popular that a century later, an enterprising publisher named John Bell printed a notebook entitled: “Bell’s Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke.” Put another way, Bell created a commonplace book by commonplacing someone else’s technique for maintaining a commonplace book. The book included eight pages of instructions on Locke’s indexing method, a system which not only made it easier to find passages, but also served the higher purpose of “facilitat[ing] reflexive thought.”

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association. The historian Robert Darnton describes this tangled mix of writing and reading:

“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings.

But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.”

A few pages later Johnson discusses DEVONthink as a useful way to do such work digitally. (You can read some of this on a shorter blog he wrote).  I’ll discuss this software tomorrow 

Below are a few themes that students have taken on in recent years. (I’ve simply posted the title along with their introductory paragraph). Hope this helps!

“In conversation: Histories in the Making”:
“This week’s blog takes a look at current issues of history, or what constitutes the past within the disciplines of religion and anthropological archaeology. Exchanges between a religion studies student, Sam M., and an archaeology student, Stefanie W., take place to first understand the differences between these disciplines and to highlight the variety of approaches in search of multiple truths that cross-cut the making of histories. Underwriting this in our conversations between religion and archaeology is the focus on misnomers of “objectivity” and “accuracy,” as well as our perceptions of what history constitutes in the interpretations of identities and worldviews amongst different individuals, communities, and societies.”

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) : Making of a Hindu India
“Earlier this year, riots in Delhi resulted in the death of at least 51 individuals, with the majority being Muslims (The Guardian, 16 March, 2020). These riots were the direct result of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a controversial citizenship bill passed by the Indian parliament in December 2019. This act offers citizenship rights to the so-called persecuted minorities of India’s neighbouring countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh) where Muslims are the majority population. According to the CAA, Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Christian migrants from the aforementioned countries who took refuge in India earlier than December 2014 would be naturalized as Indian citizens under the basis of religious persecution. However, those who claim citizenship under this Act are not required to prove said religious persecution. Identifying as non-Muslim is sufficient to claim Indian citizenship, making it clear that with the CAA, the ruling party of India, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), is trying to create an environment of existential fear amongst Muslim Indians. This blog will explore the rise of religious nationalism and discrimination in India through an examination of the region’s religious and political history and archaeology; discussing initially India’s history of mistrust, followed by a study of the Partition Era and archaeology’s role in the creation of Indian identity, and then the attempted erasure of tribes in India – an underrepresented minority in the country. Having provided this context, we will discuss the role of the BJP in appropriating the past in order to spread false narratives about what it means to be Indian, equating Indian identity with the Hindu religion.”

“Blurred Prospects”
The anthropology graduate student experience can be incredibly rewarding on a personal and professional level but remains marked by institutional, sub-disciplinary, and individual uncertainty. We invoke the metaphor of “blurriness,” a quality of haze and ill-defined sight, to discuss our thoughts on the academy as two first-year doctoral students. Loa Gordon is a social-medical anthropologist who studies the self-administered care practices of Ontario university students with mental health struggles. Julien Favreau is a geoarchaeologist who studies 2 million-year-old stone tools from East Africa to determine from which outcrops human ancestors procured raw materials. Below we will reflect on the precarities we face as hopeful academics. By discussing the blurriness we encounter in the academy, in our respective sub-disciplinary niches, and in our individual research, we will delineate common feelings among our cohort and provide a platform on which to openly address these pressing issues.

“Identity and Interdisciplinary Studies: a comparison of archaeological and bioarchaeological perspectives”:
Identity is a broad and encompassing topic that touches on every aspect of our lives, so it makes sense that anthropological engagement of identity takes many forms. This blog post looks at two of these engagements, archaeology and biological anthropology, to (1) see where differences and similarities lie in the investigation of identity, and (2) to explore if one sub-discipline really needs the other. To do this, two articles were selected by specialists in the respective fields: one of us is a biological anthropologist looking at Roman diet through stable isotopes, the other a paleoethnobotanist exploring early hunter-gatherer diet, subsistence, and foodways in the south-central Andes. A brief description of the articles are presented below, as well as discussions on common threads and divergences between the articles.

“Anthropologists are ‘Story Telling Animals“
The concern for narrative and story telling is one theme that cross-cuts anthropological archaeology and social anthropology. We have covered this topic in class but there are particulars that are unique to each sub-field that we wished to cover in this week’s collaborative blog. The one commonality that the two fields share is the troublesome notion of objectivity. In the following paragraphs, we would like to examine narrative and its effectiveness in the two anthropological sub-fields.

An Experimentation in Collaboration: A Dual Approach to Traditional Ecological Knowledge:
Inspired by Koster et al.’s (2016) research in Current Anthropology we have chosen to discuss a topic which intersects our disciplinary interests of natural and social science. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a body of knowledge that is site specific and is developed through generation of cultural transmission (Drew 2006). This knowledge concerns relationships between Indigenous persons, other organisms, and the living environment. Various disciplines have incorporated TEK in their research programs, and here we focus on its presence in anthropology. In this collaborative blog, we explore this issue from archaeological and sociocultural perspectives. These intersections concern the historical and ecological perspectives, management practices, and cautions of TEK.

Hi all! I wanted to briefly describe my writing for this semester. As I mentioned in class, I often have several things on the go, each at different stages. For instance, I am about to (this week!) resubmit a paper to the Canadian Journal of Archaeology with my PhD student Kayla, recent PhD Eloi, and our recently departed colleague Shanti Morell-Hart (now at Brown) on McMaster and Latin American archaeology. I have two other papers currently in peer review that may arrive back on my desk in the coming weeks months that may disrupt the plans below. But my major writing projects this semester is one “monkey on my back” article that I need to finish, and several conference papers.

The first is a paper on Andean asethetics, in particular exploring the imagery on “Terminal Late Formative” ceramics, textiles and stone monoliths.

I presented this work to a group of archaeologists and art historians at Columbia University last year. The paper explores the role of ancient imagery over the course of ~150 years, as the site of Tiwanaku is being transformed into a critical Andean urban assemblage. Here is my current introduction:

“Researchers working in the Lake Titicaca basin are making significant headway in understanding the timing and processes in the emergence of Tiwanaku. The ancient Andean center, located in the southern Lake Titicaca basin of Bolivia, urbanized rapidly in the late 6th century and early 7th century AD. Archaeological work over the past century has demonstrated that Tiwanaku was characterized by impressive craft production, with feasting events involving chicha or corn beer and other mind altering substances and interaction with other-than-humans such as stone monoliths. Despite the significant research over the past century, researchers have struggled to fit the site and polity into conventional political economy models of early states. While the polity clearly influenced a broad region of Andean South America, we have yet to find clear military or economic control over Middle Horizon landscapes.

Images, however, played a particularly important role at the urban center and Tiwanaku aesthetics reached across significant distances. In this paper, I argue that the visual economies of the earlier periods of the site , a time known as the “Terminal Late Formative” (Marsh et al. 2019), are critical for understanding the new worlds associated with the Middle Horizon. I pay particular attention to ceramics known as Qeya, but also to early southern Titicaca basin monoliths and textiles from the broader region. While archaeologists have been researching Formative Period societies across the region for several decades (see for instance x, y, z) , very little has been published on the earliest visual economy associated with the site, which was a time of significant political change and expanding social networks. The researchers who have engaged this imagery have done so to identify the origins of the later iconographic systems of urban Tiwanaku and regional patterns, not to understand the early dynamics at the site itself. I argue that visuals were far from mere “by-products” of broader social and political processes, but instead were essential actants in Tiwanaku social projects. These aesthetic systems co-emerge with new monumental complexes and emplacement of a wide variety of stone sculptural beings. I ask a different set of questions than those exploring the birth-place of particular iconographical styles. What kind of role did these image rich objects play in emergent networks? Were these objects associated with founding families and broader work parties involved in early building projects? Finally, were the New Worlds that emerged at Tiwanaku associated with new ways of seeing?”

The paper was well received at Columbia, but the audience highlighted a few critical things for me to grapple with:

• the need to tighten up my key argument/stakes (an issue that I was already concerned about – there is a lot going in in this paper!)
• Defining terms. I am juggling a few different issues here (aesthetics, images, art) all of which have considerable baggage in general, but even more so in the context of the ancient Andes.
• Interpretation: I have an argument around the use of hallucinogenics. My current explanation/understanding is far too vague.

So, I am reworking the paper, with helpful feedback from my writing group, with the hope to submit this Cambridge Archaeological Journal this summer. Instead of presenting my timeline, below is my writing log from week to week (a screen-grab from the writing program Scrivener) from last year when I was working on it more intensely.

The other writing projects are several conference papers. I have a paper I’m giving at the Society for American Archaeology meetings. Both engage my recent work at Tiwanaku. The first is a paper in honour of Ann Stahl , who was an important mentor to me. My paper is titled “Improvisation, Intellectual Crosscurrents, and Creativity at an Emergent Andean Center”, and really engages some of the threads from the paper discussed above. The other presentation (“Visualizing the Origins of Monumentality: the Case of Tiwanaku, Bolivia”) is a collaboration with my partner Kathryn Killackey, and discusses our recent work at visualization at Tiwanaku.

For the conference papers I tend to chip away. I have lots of little pieces of “tiny text” written as notes in my note-taking app of choice Obsidian. I continue working to create reading notes, to convert them to more permanent in Obsidian. In the coming weeks I’ll start playing with my notes to construct a mind map to see how the various pieces might fit together. (Below is an early mind map for a paper currently in press)

Clearly lots to do! See you next week.

On the IDP

One approach to consider is developing what is sometimes called a individual development plan in industry. Deliberate plans with step-by-step processes. One way you can set something like this up is a free-writing mode: but here perhaps setting up a 30-45 minute chunk of time. Put down what you need to/have to get done in the next 3-4 months (or even up to a year), then fill in the details later. (This can change, of course. It is only to give you a bird’s eye view of what is on your plate). This will also help you develop your writing-schedule for the next few months.

On the Schedule

Why a schedule? Because your life is full of urgent things and it is easy to put writing on the back-burner for that perfect chunk of time without non-urgent things. By laying out schedules and accountability for writing and by protecting our appointed writing time you can really get things done. One important reminder here is that most folks (ahem, including myself), underestimate how long a task will take. If you think it will take you one week to draft a conference abstract, try to give yourself two and a half weeks. Here a log will help.

On Logging your Writing

Why log your writing? Some scholars of writing have suggested that by keeping a log to track the amount of time you spend writing, the number of words you write, your mood on a given day, etc., can all help bring conscious attention to your writing practice. “What gets measured, gets managed” (Drucker, 1954), or by tracking a practice you pay more attention to it. But also a log will help you keep track of how long writing tasks really take!

Ok, hoping to share my writing plans in the next post!