Excavating Archaeological Texts: Applying Digital Humanities to the Study of Archaeological Thought and Banal Nationalism

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

To date, the evolution of archaeological knowledge production and theory has been discussed and analyzed using qualitative methods by reading vast amounts of archaeological texts in search of specific discourses or framings of the past. In this paper, we present text mining methodologies from digital humanities that can be applied to large corpora of archaeological texts to trace and evaluate changing knowledge practices. Such a big data approach is imperative. Due to the rapid increase of archaeological publications, qualitative research into the intellectual history of archaeology has become complicated and highly selective. The big data methods presented in this study were tested on a large corpus (4,811 texts totaling over 51 million words) of different types of archaeological texts from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The different text mining tools were successful in identifying theoretical trends. Our tools were also successful in charting the decrease in quality due to changed organizational circumstances (developer-led archaeology). Furthermore, we could also map changing banal nationalist framings of the past.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)289-302
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Field Archaeology
Volume46
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank the Utrecht University Applied Data Science group for the generous funding that made this project possible. The engineers of the Utrecht University Digital Humanities Lab are also recognized for their assistance with the Text Matcher tool. We also wish to thank our informants who made time for us during the winter of 2019?2020 for providing important input regarding the day-to-day working of contract archaeology in Flanders. A previous version of this paper was presented during the research afternoons of the Department of Archaeology of Ghent University and during the yearly lecture of the Alumni Gentse Archeologen (AGAR). We wish to thank the participants of these workshops for their input and often critical remarks. Jean Bourgeois and Jonas van Looveren provided important feedback on previous versions of this paper. Koen van Daele of the Flemish Agency for Immovable Heritage provided access to the digital archive of the Flemish Government. Alexis Wielemans of the same agency is greatly thanked for his assistance during the digitization of the older archaeological texts. His rich institutional memory helped us in developing a large corpus.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

  • Belgium
  • archaeological theory
  • history of archaeology
  • nationalism
  • text mining

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