<h1 id="week-six-oct-6-2025"><a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" href="#week-six-oct-6-2025"></a>Week Six: Oct. 6, 2025</h1>
<h3 id="digital-excavation-annotation-as-archaeological-practice"><a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" href="#digital-excavation-annotation-as-archaeological-practice"></a>Digital Excavation: Annotation as Archaeological Practice</h3>
Welcome to Module Two. This week, we explore a new metaphor: what if we treated the internet as an archaeological site? We adopt the mindset of an archaeologist to reframe our approach to conducting research online. The webpage is your excavation site, a landscape of information waiting to be explored. Your annotations are the artifacts you unearth—the specific pieces of data, ideas, or questions you choose to recover. Syncing and importing these excavated finds to Obsidian is like bringing artifacts back to the lab. They are raw material, potential evidence which needs to be curated. A raw highlight, like an uncontextualized potsherd, is not yet knowledge. The real work—the intellectual archaeology—begins when you process these findings. Creating literature and atomic notes is the process of curating, cataloging, interpreting, and connecting your artifacts, transforming them from isolated data points into a network of meaningful and emergent knowledge.
Key Learning Goals: By the end of this week, students will be able to:
<ul>
<li>Use Hypothes.is to perform a "digital excavation" on web-based sources.</li>
<li>Sync web annotations into their Obsidian vault.</li>
<li>Write a literature note that analyzes the purpose and structure of a website or digital project.</li>
<li>Synthesize raw annotations into a series of interconnected, atomic notes.</li>
</ul>
<hr>
<h3 id="checklist-for-week-6"><a aria-hidden="true" tabindex="-1" href="#checklist-for-week-6"></a>Checklist for Week 6:</h3>
<ol>
<li>
**[ ] The Conceptual Framework (Readings)
<ul>
<li>Bonacchi, Chiara. (2022). "Digital Public Archaeology" In The Handbook of Digital Public History, De Gruyter Oldenbourg: (75-81).</li>
<li>The "Digital Sites": 
You will be excavating two live, born-digital archaeological resources.</li>
<li>Site 1: Huggett, J. (2015). "The Apparatus of Digital Archaeology," Internet Archaeology, 44. <a href="https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue44/7/toc.html">https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue44/7/toc.html</a></li>
<li>Site 2: O-DATE (Online Database of Archaeological Projects and Technologies). <a href="https://o-date.github.io/draft/book/">https://o-date.github.io/draft/book/</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
[ ] The Main Activity: Excavating and Processing:
<ul>
<li>Step A: Excavate the Sites.
<ul>
<li>Using the Hypothes.is browser extension, "excavate" the two digital sites.</li>
<li>You must make a minimum of five meaningful annotations on each site. Annotations are not just highlights, but are notes associated with the highlighted section. For each annotation, your comment must explain how the highlighted passage relates, broadly or specifically, to your chosen final project topic.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<div><blockquote class="callout" style="border-left-color:undefined;">
<div class="callout-title warning" style="background-color: undefined1a;">A Note on "Relevance": Solving the Blank Page Problem</div>
<div class="callout-content" style="">You are asked to find material "relevant" to your project in sites that may not seem directly related. This is a key research skill. The connection can be methodological, theoretical or thematic. For example, a student researching Empress Irene might read the O-DATE article on <a href="https://o-date.github.io/draft/book/marketing-digital-archaeology.html">"Marketing Digital Archaeology."</a> They could annotate a passage about marketing archaeology for public reception and, in their comment, connect it to how the chronicler Theophanes the Confessor crafted his own biased narrative about Irene for public (though elite) reception. The link isn't the content, but the method of historical production.</div>
</blockquote></div>
<ol start="2">
<li>continued...
<ul>
<li>Step B: Import Your Findings.
<ul>
<li>In Obsidian, use the Hypothes.is plugin to sync your annotations. This will create new notes in your vault containing your raw findings.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Step C: Process Your Artifacts.
<ul>
<li>From your total pool of imported annotations, you will now create two types of processed notes:</li>
<li>Two (2) Literature Notes: Create one literature note for each website. Instead of a traditional summary, these notes should analyze the site itself. What are its objectives, goals, and arguments? Who is the intended audience? How is it structured?</li>
<li>Ten (10) Atomic Notes: Synthesize the most important ideas from your annotations into ten new atomic notes. These notes must be in your own words and woven into your existing network by meeting the standard of at least three <code>[[wikilinks]]</code> and two <code>#tags</code> per note.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>[ ] Weekly Reflection (Ungraded):
<ul>
<li>In a new journal entry, reflect on the process of excavating websites using Hypothes.is. How did actively annotating a live webpage feel different from taking notes on a static PDF? What is the crucial difference between a raw highlight and a processed atomic note? Remember to submit your entry to <code>01 Weekly Journal</code> folder.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>

Welcome

1. Course Description

2. Learning Outcomes

3. Course Schedule

4. Evaluation

5. Course Communications

6. Common Regulations

6. Contact the Professor

how the course tech is built; how the course came to be

7. Colophon

8. Reuse

Orientation and Digital Setup

Week 1

Personal Knowledge Management and Linked Thinking

Week 2

Thinking about the “Craft” of Digital History

Week 3

Crusading into the Digital Age of LLMs

Week 4

Consolidation & Check-In Week

Week 5

Digital Excavation

Week 6

Defining Data, 'Dark' Data, & Identifiers

Week 7

Fall Break

Week 8

Seeing the Past?

Week 9

Week 10

Authority and Positionality in Your Digital Research

Week 11

Publicly Crafting a Historical Argument

Week 12

Open-Access Notebook Workshop

Week 13

Exit Ticket

Week 14

1 Setting up your vault

2 Create your first note

3 Templater Plugiin

4 What Goes into a Note?

5 Properties

Hypothesis

The Simplest Online Memex Worfklow

How To Read An Academic Article

FAQ for Common Tech Issues

Where to Find help

Text Formatting

Introduction to your vault

index note

Atomic Note

Literature Note

Process Note

Weekly Journal

Topic Proposal

Weekly Work & Tasks

Consolidation Reflection

Open Access Notebook/Memex

Benchmarking Your Memex

Exit Ticket/Final Project

1 Welcome to Crafting Digital History Transcript

2 Obsidian User Interface (UI) Guide

3 Templater and Hotkeys Setup

4 How to use PDF++

5 Canvas Core Plugin Introductory Tutorial

6 Hypothes.is and Annotating the Web

7 Omnisearch Plugin for Obsidian

8 How to Use Process Notes for Digital Research Projects in Obsidian

9 Properties, Identifiers and Data Management with Obsidian Core Plugin Bases

1 Welcome to Crafting Digital History

2 Some Logistical Updates

3 Welcome to Week Two

4 What is Digital History?

5 Crusading into the Digital Age of LLMs

6 Week Four Exercise Example

7 Using Obsidian for Digital History Research and Note-Making

8 Reflection Feedback Update and Hypothes.is

9 Week Five Update

10 Consolidation Reflection Submission

11 Module Two Wrangling and Critiquing

12 Week 7 Update

13 Week 9 Welcome Back

1. Course Overview

Module 1 Contextualizing

Module 2 Wrangling & Critiquing

Module 3 Arguing & Communicating

2. Schedule

01  memex help

8. Course Files

3. Tutorials

4. Assessment

5. VideoTutorials

Crafting Digital History

News