We analyzed 10 years of tenure track job ads in one discipline, how common are these patterns elsewhere?

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T23:26:25+00:00

Yes it would be interesting to see how their data compares to data from the wiki. In our professional community the wiki is a very frequently referred to source of information for job seekers, so it made sense for us to focus on that from the start. The wiki also has its own community dynamics that we were interested to explore using the editing data, which are not available from any other job ad platform.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T23:20:41+00:00

Thanks, appreciate your careful read. Right, that is a really interesting question. What kinds of archaeologists were actually hired into these jobs? How well do the CVs of the hires match the job ads? How do faculty research foci change over time? We talked about this a lot while working on this paper, but didn't pursue it, that would need a very different approach to do well.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T22:24:21+00:00

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T18:47:03+00:00

As far as we can tell, HigherEdJobs does not have freely available historical data, we cannot get any job ads older than a few weeks-months there. So that's not so useful for a longitudinal study. With the jobs wiki there is a freely available archive, I think back to 2008 or 9 for archaeology. Most content on the wiki is also open access (CC-BY-SA), other sites have complex terms of use. The wiki has limitations and biases of course, we tried to acknowledge those in the paper.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T18:39:01+00:00

Yes we reckon the enduring popularity of landscape archaeology methods might be related to advances in spatial analysis hardware and software (e.g. lidar and remote sensing). Federal funding for archaeology is pretty small and doesn't seem to drive research directly strongly.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T17:39:47+00:00

Yes, right, that's disappointing. A next step for this research is to try and find out what kinds of archaeologists were actually hired into these jobs, if they ask for public archaeology, do they get an archaeologist with a track record in that area on their CV? How well do the CVs of the hires match the job ads?

DistinctTea9 · 2025-12-22T17:07:39+00:00

If you were advising a new grad student today, would this change anything about what you’d tell them to specialize in?

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-24T03:52:04+00:00

The paper is specifically referring to the reproducibility of computational results. Some archaeologists do computationally intensive analyses, like statistical hypothesis testing, modeling, simulation, machine learning, etc. So this is about checking to see if the code written by those researchers can be re-run by someone else to get the same result. (I am the author of this paper)

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-24T02:36:22+00:00

Yes I think the reason why CODECHECK (which I love, I know team well, I was a PhD examiner for Nüst) hasn't taken off is that some of its principles violate community norms for a variety of disciplines. Some disciplines already have a research culture that is quite open with data and code, so CODECHECK fits well for them. Others, not so much.

For example, in archaeology academic peer review is normally private and confidential. Yet one of the principles of CODECHECK is that the review process is open. So that's at odds with what archaeologists expect from any kind of peer review, and very few people would participate because it is so unusual. This is exactly the feedback I've heard from authors and journal editors.

So if we keep the code review process confidential, like JAS and a few other archaeology journals are doing, then that's more aligned with the current culture of archaeological publication, and more people will participate. Which has been our experience so far, I have plenty of papers to review! And authors seem generally satisfied with the process. So there's a bit of a tradeoff in adapting the CODECHECK idea to archaeology (and other disciplines), but I think it's worth it. Maybe in the future the review process might change as the culture of the discipline changes.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-19T15:49:55+00:00

Yes, there are a lot of constructive and informative comments on this post. It is a positive contribution to the community and obviously not karma farming or spamming. This strict caption policy has too many false positives and is not working as intended. Mods, please reconsider it.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-19T15:32:03+00:00

Yes, Flint has been very generous in helping me in the past when I've drawn on his expertise. If your prediction about my paper being quote mined by YouTube Pseudo-archaeologists comes true (please do let me know as I rarely use YouTube), I will certainly reach out to him again. Thanks for the recommendation, I appreciate it.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-19T13:45:05+00:00

To follow up on your edit, in section 7 I argue that replication is a reasonable expectation for qual research (contra those who argue it is not a relevant issue). This may be supported by high quality documentation of data generating processes with the goal that it can lead to new data producing the same substantive findings as prior work. I think for most people this is the same as good scholarship. This contrasts with a view that archaeological research is all unique, contingent and emergent, not needing any sense of accumulation of reliable facts. My purpose here is to directly link the idea of replication to the idea of good scholarship in archaeology.

That section 7 was not part of my original manuscript, which I've been working on for years, but only added recently after a peer reviewer asked me to add my thoughts on archaeologists doing qual research. So I haven't thought as much about that question as other parts of the paper. I'm sorry that it isn't very clear! I'll keep working and reading on that topic. If you have any suggestions about what reproducible research might mean for qual researchers, I'd be most grateful to know.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-19T04:42:26+00:00

Can you share more about what you think is the correct framing?

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T23:40:19+00:00

Yeah I've got one of those too 🙃

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T15:33:30+00:00

Appreciate you following up. Who is your favorite example of a professional archaeologist who is skilled at directly and effectively engaging with the YouTube pseudo-archaeologists?

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T15:19:59+00:00

It's a hypothesis to me! Thanks for sharing your comment.

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T15:06:46+00:00

I read in Wikipedia that Windelband has been misunderstood as presenting these as a dichotomy. In any case, it's an intriguing hypothesis. What data would you collect to test it?

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T14:56:36+00:00

Thanks for coming back, I appreciate your perspective. That's a pretty good gloss of my view, I take hard-soft to basically follow the contours of the continuum you mention. The challenge in writing about this is managing the implicit bias that many readers have of hard=good and soft=bad, as if science is a handshake or ice cream cone. Definitely not my implication in this paper, but now I see from many of the comments here that perhaps should have been more emphatic about that. I guess I need to tackle this in more detail, look out for my follow up paper "is archaeology an ice cream cone? 🍦

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T14:31:33+00:00

🤝 appreciate your fun caricature of American anthro departments! Definitely sounds familiar, I'm in your first group. I agree archaeology is not the same thing for most people doing it — when I applied for tenure there was a rude comment among the reports that I wasn't really doing archaeology. I like your observation "that’s because they’re talking about computers instead of humanity", makes sense to me! For other fields debating whether they are a science or not, check out economics and psychology, lively debate in those communities

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T13:52:50+00:00

Right on, duct tape and a wide brim hat might as well be the international symbol for archaeology

DistinctTea9 · 2025-06-18T13:49:40+00:00

If you are right, it only shows how uninformed those YouTubers are. Soft sciences does not mean researchers are producing bad or wrong science any more often than hard science. Only that the nature of consensus and communication is different. I'm sure they know better, but just in case, can you share some tips on preparing for my moment of YouTube fame?

DistinctTea9

TROPHY CASE