It's the start of February, and Doug has curated all the Blog Carnival entries for the Archaeology Grand Challenges. It's 60+ posts from all over the world, and from a lot of different perspectives - from sex and gender over personal identity challenges to funding, finances, and archaeology and games. If you like to read about archaeology, go check out these blogs - you might find something to put on your reading list!

If you're more interested in knitting, there's a project called "Centenary Stitches" focussing on the knitting done at home for WWI soldiers. The project has also resulted in an exhibition currently being shown at the National Archives in Kew, Surrey (ending March 19).

Doug is running a blogging archaeology carnival again - asking about the Grand Challenges of Archaeology, and I promised him an article. So here you go: these are the Grand Challenges to my archaeology.

First, and biggest, challenge for me? Logistics. Since I'm a freelancer, I have limits to how much money and how much time I can spend on a project. Whether that is a reconstruction project, an experiment, or an article, my ressources are limited. When I am really lucky, I get paid to do some research on a specific topic (or at least paid for a reconstruction project so I can cover part of the research time from that payment), but usually, it's on my own time and bank account.

There is, technically, the possibility to apply for grants, but since I've had few positive experiences with grants yet, and it is usually much easier to get them when you have a network based on a Uni, museum, or similar institution, I haven't spent a lot of time on applications recently. It boils down to time again, here - sometimes I have to struggle to keep up with all the absolutely necessary things like sending out orders, keeping the shop pages updated and conforming to the legal shenanigans the EU likes to toss at us, blogging and then doing the work on current projects. With that, I might not have the time or the energy left for much more.

This is just me, however - it's not directly related to archaeological textiles. One of the Great Challenges there, generally, is that there is so little data available. Textiles are very perishable, and conserving, analysing and publishing them is quite expensive (as it takes a really, really long time to microclean an archaeological textile, and analyse it, and thus it is a pricey thing), which means that by far not all textiles that are preserved are actually analysed and published. With finds that are not frequent in the first place, this does seriously cut down on our possibilities - and skews our understanding of how textiles looked, because the things that do get published are obviously the spectacular pieces.

A second Great Challenge? Terminology. This is a veritable quagmire. We have pictures, we have medieval terms, we have (very few) surviving textiles and garments... but we have no possibility, usually, to firmly link one clothing term to a type found or shown in the pictures. In addition, costuming history has traditionally taken specific old terms and uses them to address certain types of clothes or textiles, though this might be misleading, or even wrong. There's a German term, "Sendelbinde", that has been used with the meaning of "hood" or "chaperon", but the term is not medieval - it originates in early costume history, in the 19th century, and was first used to mean a hat band. If you're looking at stitches in sewing, there's so much variation in modern terms (and so much inaccuracy) even within a single language. It gets even worse when you try to translate things. At least this problem can be solved easily, even if it looks a little awkward, by inserting a schematic drawing in the article or paper, showing which stitch is meant by what term. The other problem is harder; for me, I'm solving it by trying to use modern, general terms for specific types of garments.

These are, for me, the biggest issues - a third one is the fact that it is not easy to find all the (small) publications about clothes, garment fragments, or textile finds, as they are typically written in the language of the country they were found in, and often published in small, hard-to-find journals or books with a small print run. But if we could conquer the problem of money and the problem of terminology, so much of textile or garment research would be made easier.

Monday! Spring! My nose itches! There are links for you!

First of all, Doug's Blogging Archaeology Carnival has ended, and here is the final post.

Secondly, the Canadian Conservation Institute has Notes and Publications downloadable on their server. The Notes are all free (some of them are a bit older, but should still prove helpful), and the Technical Bulletins are available as a free pdf version once they are 5 years or older.

Thirdly and finally, in case you are looking for something small to knit for an unusual recipient, there's always penguin sweaters.

"Next month is the SAA session on blogging so this will be the final question for #blogarch. Learning from my mistakes this will be an actual question this time.

The last question is where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go? I leave it up to you to choose between reflecting on you and your blog personally or all of archaeology blogging/bloggers or both. Tells us your goals for blogging. Or if you have none why that is? Tell us the direction that you hope blogging takes in archaeology."

It's the final installment of the BlogArch Carnival... and yes, of course I'll participate again - won't miss this! So... Where do I want to go with blogging? Hm.

There's dreams and wishes when I think about my blog, and then there's my realistic brain which tells me things about the dreams and wishes. If I dream wildly, I would love my blog to be as well-read as the Yarn Harlot's, or Scalzi's blog, and feature actual scientific-ish content with lots of pictures and new insights and information about clothes and techniques. My realistic brain, when it catches me dreaming thusly, tells me that I would need to devote much more time to the blog in that case. And if I had so many comments, it would suck all my time to read them. (Also, many comments come with much spam.)

I would like to blog more about actual archaeological stuff, and do more reseach-esque posts on the blog, but I know this is more like a dream than an actual goal I can realistically achieve. Writing a proper post about some piece of garment (or some other research subject) takes an astonishing amount of time, and that won't fit in with my schedule most days. Ironically, it's especially when I am doing more research than usual that I have even less time to spend on the blog...
I've thought about this from time to time, but after a while of almost beating myself up about it I realised that most of the blogs that do research-type articles don't update that often. I know myself, though - if I would switch to posting occasionally aiming for longer pieces, that's when I would start posting not at all. (So these short uninspired blog posts that come up from time to time are the price I make you pay for keeping blogging. Sorry.)

My hope for this blog is that I can keep going with enough variation and enough interesting posts that I can gain more readers than I lose. I'm well aware that blogs are not something you read forever - interests change as do priorities and styles of writing, and if you blog about a certain topic you are bound to repeat yourself sooner or later. There's quite a list of blogs these days that I used to read, but stopped after a while - because the blog's focus changed, because my interest in the topic waned, because I felt that I got no new input, or because I was annoyed by the much too infrequent updates. Some blogs fell silent, and I missed them a lot for a while.

In retrospective, most of the blogs that fell silent after a while or that I stopped reading because it felt like repetition of the same, the same were those relatively restrictive in their topics. Which seems to make sense to me - the more variety you have, the less you need to repeat. (Thank you, Captain Obvious.)

With the mix of topics I have, I'm still far from the big-player territory like IT stuff, so my blog will probably never become a huge blog with gazillions of readers; but if enough people read something like a Call for Papers or a heads-up to a free access week or something like that to make a difference for a few of you, I'm quite happy.

Otherwise, I'm not planning to go anywhere with this blog. I plan to stay right here, writing something every weekday, keeping my favourite second language polished and making the occasional weird mistake with it, posting too few pics and bombarding you with links that you might find helpful, or amusing, or none of both.

As for blogging in archaeology in general - I'd love to have more textile archaeology blogs around. (If you know of any, please let me know!) I also love to hear about current developments in excavations, or finds of dress accessories. Getting more people to know about the actual work in the dirt, not just the spectacular finds, would surely be a good thing for all of us archies.

February is always a short month, feeling even shorter due to all kinds of parties going on at our acquaintances - it's a popular birthday month. This year's February, though, feels like the shortest one ever to me, and I can't believe it is almost over already.

Before that is finally the case, I want to at least mention the Blogging Carnival with its February topic: Blogging archaeology. That's it - no proper question this month, which makes it somehow harder for me to tackle. The open February topic is intended to let everyone who would like to write a piece about blogging do so, with the option of getting it published. (With deadlines for those who wanted to submit. Needless to say, they are all past already.)

Writing about blogging archaeology without a proper question is hard for me, as I feel I don't have so much to say on the topic... so I more or less decided after the topic came out that I won't participate properly this month. I don't use the blog to write articles, due to time restrictions and lots of other, non-public-process writing going on (at the moment, three papers and a book are in the pipeline). It might be interesting, though, to write an article in the blog one day - if I can figure out a process to do that. (I should probably check out the reader numbers before and after, though, so I can see how many I scared off!)

For this month, however, I'll more or less pass - it would be nice to have a long piece about how important archaeology is for me, how I enjoy talking archaeological textiles, how I would like to spend much more time researching them... but this month? I don't have the time or energy left for it. There's work to be done. Work that is for a large part a reconstruction attempt, based on archaeological sources, of medieval garments. (I shall finally finish my button-making today - not yet finished because other things snuck in beforehand and I did them first.)

I'm still in the clutches of the current most urgent projects, wrapping up some prelim research and trying to figure out the necessary particulars (and, in some cases, waiting for responses). This is an interesting stage in any project, where everything starts to come together and take shape, and you learn new things and totally go like "wow, that is so amazing".

While I am working on (and totally looking forward to the weekend), you might be amused by this blog post giving you a strategy guide for your life seen as a game. 

Also, the blogging archaeology carnival digest is ready for you over at Doug's place. It's long, interesting, and with a large number of other blogs you might want to check out!

Dear Doug, thank you so much for your January question. This was a welcome excuse to go waste a lot of time finally catch up on my blog statistics again. Though I confess that I am a slight bit confused by them...

To keep those of you not checking into Doug's summary up to date, January’s questions are:

What are your best (or if you want your worst) post(s) and why? Compare and contrast your different bests/worsts.
I leave it up to you to define what best is. We bloggers have all sorts of different stats available to us.

(Doug then gives a list of suggestions on what could be defining best and worst.)

So naturally, the first thing I did was look at stats. As all bloggers, I have the blogger stats available to me, plus I have an extra statcounter installed. Both are somewhat... lacking, to my taste, in giving a good and complete overview - the blogger one tells me that some of my early posts (from back in 2010 and 2009) have never received a single visit, which I find hard to believe. This one here, for example - which is admittedly not one of my most brilliant posts ever. However, at least the most patient husband of them all usually reads my blog every day, so it should have at least one view, right?

According to blogger stats, most of my relatively current posts get hits somewhere between the high twenties and low sixties, with outliers (often linky posts that get handed on by others) that are solidly in the one- to twohundred hit range. This is probably not counting any rss feeds, though I am not sure how many of you get this via feed.

The most viewed post of all time (9485 views) is actually a link post - this one here, linking on to instructions for unwinding a small skein of yarn. Follow-up with 6586 hits is my own post about how to untangle a skein of yarn, which has been popping up as the most viewed one consistently since I wrote it back in November 2009. I still like it, too - it's long and tries to be a little humorous as well. So that's probably what I would consider one of my best posts, in terms of effort spent to views gained, and possibly also helpfulness (at least I hope so).

Much lower in the hitcount lists are other posts that were a more than average effort to write, like the Skjoldehamn neck flap one (2775 hits). Pictures from this, however, have been turning up across the 'net (and not always with acknowledgement).
On a more positive note for me, posts about the Textile Forum (and there's many of them) are consistently getting higher hit counts than my normal posts, too - and since that conference project is one very close to my heart, this makes me very happy. They are not always what I'd consider a splendid piece of writing, though.

And some of my favourite posts in the blog are the ones about fair prices for crafts - all tagged under "fair prices for crafts campaign". They did get a good share of love (and hits), ranging somewhere between almost 500 and 1340 hits for the posts in the main series (the one also linked to on the sidebar).

That's about what I would consider the best posts of my blog. I won't go into the worst ones, though - with trying hard to post weekdaily all year around, there are bound to be plenty of non-brilliant posts just telling you that I ran out of ideas, or giving a random link and two lines of uninspired writing. I am sorry for those, and I feel a little bad about it every time I post such a one, but really - it can't be helped, and putting on pressure to be totes brill all the time... just won't work.

If you will tell me about your favourite post (or your least favourite one!) on this blog in the comments, though, I'd greatly appreciate that!