Shortly after I built the website for the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) in the spring of 2014, I talked about the project to a workshop sponsored by the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (there's a link to that presentation here and some short blog posts about how my work fits into DINAA here and here). In that 2014 presentation, delivered while I was unemployed, I offered an incentive program that I hoped would spur interest in the EWHADP: beer to the first person who cited the database. With an uncertain future, I scaled my offer to whatever my employment situation happened to be at the time of citation:
At the SAA meetings last week, I met Jayur Mehta and bought him a beer. Mehta cited the EWHADP database in a paper about the Carson site, a Mississippian site in Coahoma County, Mississippi. If I remember correctly, the paper is currently under review, so I won't say anything else about it at this point. I'm glad he was able to make use of the database, and I look forward to reading the paper.
Jayur Mehta enjoying his $6 Disney beer. The alert reader will notice that Dr. Mehta is holding but a single plastic cup of beer in his hand, while my incentive program clearly shows that six beers will be awarded if I am employed in a non-tenure-track position, which I am. I will point out that the cost of the beer he is holding, purchased in a Disney facility, actually exceeded the cost of a six-pack of PBR purchased in a normal part of the world (here is a link to $4.99 six pack of PBR on sale at Binny's Beverage Depot, the first place that came up when I Googled "PBR six pack cost"). So I think I fulfilled my pledge.
Mehta was unaware of my offer when he cited the database in his paper, suggesting that my incentive program was not behind his decision to use the EWHADP dataset. Rather, it appears, he recognized the usefulness of the data for the project he was working on. I hope that more people use the data. It's possible that someone else already has but I'm not aware of the citation - I'm not sure how I would ever know unless I see it or someone tells me about it.
The EWHADP has been largely dormant for a while now. It's stalled midway through an effort to re-code several of the key variable related to structure size and shape. I'm hoping to get the update done at some point this summer and get a newer, larger version online. I plan to use it myself for some research that will build on the 2013 JAA paper that spawned the original dataset.
If you cite the database, please let me know. I'll create a page for those citations on the EWHADP site. I'm interested to see how people use the data, and tracking and understanding use will help me to enlarge and improve the database.
Mehta was unaware of my offer when he cited the database in his paper, suggesting that my incentive program was not behind his decision to use the EWHADP dataset. Rather, it appears, he recognized the usefulness of the data for the project he was working on. I hope that more people use the data. It's possible that someone else already has but I'm not aware of the citation - I'm not sure how I would ever know unless I see it or someone tells me about it.
The EWHADP has been largely dormant for a while now. It's stalled midway through an effort to re-code several of the key variable related to structure size and shape. I'm hoping to get the update done at some point this summer and get a newer, larger version online. I plan to use it myself for some research that will build on the 2013 JAA paper that spawned the original dataset.
If you cite the database, please let me know. I'll create a page for those citations on the EWHADP site. I'm interested to see how people use the data, and tracking and understanding use will help me to enlarge and improve the database.
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