Peer Comment: Films, digs and death: a review of the Project Eliseg videos

In this review I evaluate the article by Tong et al. on the use of video of archaeological fieldwork during the Project Eliseg excavations. To understand the context of this study, I briefly survey how video is discussed by archaeologists in blog posts, conference presentations and scholarly articles. I then assess the aims, structure, content and technique of the videos produced by Project Eliseg. Finally, I analyse the strengths and weaknesses of their use of video using a model of public engagement.

: Relative frequencies of 'video' in the three corpora These three corpora are located along a spectrum from informal, public-facing writings on the day of archaeology blog, to short-lived but more professionally focused writing in the conference abstracts, to the enduring scholarly literature written for a specialist audience. In Figure 1 we see that the relative frequency of the word 'video' is substantially higher in the blog posts compared to conference abstracts and journal articles. Looking at words that are strongly correlated with 'video', in Table 1, we see that the blog posts are mostly concerned with practical details of field activities while the abstracts are mostly about professional film and television productions. The highly correlated words in the journal articles are difficult to interpret, probably because most of them are garbled from imperfect optical character recognition of PDF files. To work around this, a k-means clustering method on the journal articles containing the word 'video' revealed four clusters of 38 articles. Two of the clusters contain articles about the use of video for imaging and data collection. The topic of the third cluster is unclear, and the fourth cluster, with only four articles, relates to community heritage management topics. The general impression here is that discussions of video by archaeologists most frequently occur in informal, public-facing writing such as the Day of Archaeology blog, and when they occur in that corpus they are often about fieldwork. At the other end of the spectrum, in the scholarly literature video is mostly discussed as a data collection method, and rarely as a mode of public outreach. These data indicate that the scholarly report on the Project Eliseg video project is unusual and a rare type of contribution to professional archaeological literature. We can get a chronological perspective on discussions of video from the SAA abstracts and the journal articles. In Figure 2 we see that video has been mentioned since 2004, when the PDF files of abstracts first became available, and peak in 2009 when there was a session titled 'It must be true, I saw it in a video', which aimed to examine popular online video and television series to discover and evaluate the messages about archaeology that they transmit to the public. By comparison, blogging only appears in the abstracts for the first time in 2010. In 2014 video was discussed as a tool for data collection during fieldwork, as a technology for archiving field data, and as a method for communication, both to the public via websites and to the professional audience via videos shown during the conference presentations. Among the scholarly articles we see the first mentions of video in the early 1960s, with a slight upward trend towards the present  Archaeological Excavation' end-of-season video being viewed ten times more than most of the daily videos that are less than five minutes long. While the video analytics have limited interpretative potential and suggest relatively low engagement, there is an interesting relationship between view count and video duration. In Figure 6 we see a positive correlation between view count and video duration, but only up to videos around 250 seconds long (roughly four minutes).
For videos longer than four minutes, the relationship disappears, suggesting the constructive observation that this might be the optimum duration for a daily video log of an activity like excavation. These data are consistent with previous findings ) that four minutes is an ideal time for video blogs. where a question about the past is moved into the common-sense world of the immediate where it becomes immediately comprehensible. Pragmatic archaeology is archaeology that results in Internet Archaeol. 39. Tong et al. Vlog to Death: Project Eliseg's Vide... http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue39/3/comms.cfm intervention on a current issue of public importance. Because archaeological research rarely encounters a narrow neck of causality (Abbott 2004, 9), the public rarely understand archaeology as a pragmatic activity.
The their reactions to seeing how dead people were treated in the past, and invited to make comparisons with modern mortuary practices and places (e.g. active cemeteries). Drawing on connections between observations of the archaeology, which might be unfamiliar to many visitors, and personal reflections on themes relating to death, which is a universal experience, could have been a productive method for engaging the public and potentially changing their thinking about themselves or the landscape of the pillar.
Tong et al. have provided a revealing and balanced report on their use of video for Project Eliseg.
They note the 'happenstance' origins of the video project, and this shows in the inconsistent structure of the videos and their honest assessment of their uncertain success with fulfilling the goals of the video project. As they note, their video blog project is one of the first to be reported from an archaeological excavation, so the combination of their videos and their report will become essential source materials for others using this method of documenting their work and communicating with the public. They have shown that archaeologists can self-produce video blogs with relatively simple equipment and under typical field conditions. In this review I have