About a year ago, I gave up entirely on “Inbox 0″. I found that I spent so much time trying to get my inbox to zero that I wasn’t spending my time doing things that mattered. So, I just stopped. At first, it was big relief. My new inbox zero was to make sure I didn’t have any unread messages in my inbox. I did alright at it for a while, but it didn’t last. Eventually, things started to get out of hand. I was missing important emails.

I have two primary email addresses. One is my MSU address, which gets the majority of my professional email. The other is my mac.com (me.com?) address (you can email here). This gets a lot of non-professional mail, both from human beings and from institutions. It’s my “sign up for stuff” email address. I use mail.app, so the mail from both of these addresses basically get sent to the same place. They also both get sent to my iPhone and iPad. So, having one messy inbox meant that I actually had three messy inboxes.

The problem has been my low-priority email. This is email that I want to receive, but that isn’t essential to my daily life. What’s nice about this email is I don’t have to really act on it or respond to it. I just have to read it. Low priority email are those items I receive from social media accounts, politicians, organizations, companies, journals, list serves, and so on. It’s the stuff that I want, but that isn’t critical to my daily life. It also comprises the vast majority of the mail I receive each day, and this is the problem: the high priority email gets lost. High priority mail is the stuff that comes from human beings. The things that I need to read and respond to in a timely manner, because someone is counting on me to do something with it.

The end result is that I miss and don’t respond to high priority email about things that matter because it all gets pushed out of view in my inbox. The low priority mail becomes clutter that is just in my way all day, and so I rarely end up reading it, either. The result is an inbox full of unread messages that is more paralyzing than anything else. It is no way to live.

So, I’ve instituted a new email system.

Part 1: VIPs

One of mail.app’s best new features is the VIP section, which lets you highlight certain email address’s as “VIP”. My VIPs include my wife, my parents, my advisor and committee members. I have added co-authors and editors for articles. During tax season, I added my accountant. These are the people who, if I miss an email from, I am in trouble. VIPs show up on the sidebar of mail.app, directly under my inbox, so they’re difficult to miss. I also get notifications on my phone and through Apple’s notification system if I receive an email from them, so I’m even prepared ahead of time to be looking for something from them already.

Part 2: Labels

I have also set a couple of email rules that highlight emails from certain address book groups to be specific colors. Rules are a series of if this then that commands you can set mail.app to perform, and one option is to highlight an email with a certain color. Are you a liaison for the Society for Historical Archaeology Blog? Your emails are salmon colored. Member of the HSMC staff? Green. Disqus letting me know there’s a blog comment? Yellow. Dropbox notification? Blue. TellMeLater notification? Bright Red. These are things that I also can’t miss, but aren’t specific to any one individual. Making them a color highlights them in my inbox so that they are harder to miss.

Part 3: The Email Server and More Rules

This is the part that has really changed everything. I have a very old Mac Mini that I’ve been using as a media server ever since we purchased an Apple TV and cut cable. I was listening to this episode of Mac Power Users on my way home from a research trip, and they were talking about setting up an old computer to serve as a Mail Server: basically, run mail.app on the Mini so that it can filter your email with rules before it gets to your other computers, iPhone, iPad, or what-have-you. I have done this. It is amazing.

Here are the steps:

1. Set up your old computer and add all your email accounts to mail.app. Ensure that those accounts are set up as IMAP.
2. Set up a bunch of mail rules on your server that will filter all your low priority mail to go to certain folders. For example, I have a mail rule that sends Social Media updates from various accounts to a “Social Media” folder (make sure these folders are not “on your mac” but are in the cloud).
3. Set the mail.app account on your server to check mail every minute.
4. Set your mail.app account on your primary computer to check mail at a period of time longer than every minute.
5. Let it run.

The result is that the server catches all my low-priority mail and sorts it into folders I’ve set up based on different categories before it gets to my laptop, phone, or tablet. Because everything is set up on IMAP, I can still see these folders on my main machines, they just aren’t in my inbox. I can deal with them at my leisure, while not having them clutter up my work day. Email from people, however, show up front and center.

Part 4: Acting on Email

One of the primary tenants of inbox zero is to act immediately on emails when you receive them. This new setup has allowed me to do this more efficiently. The server allows me to automate actions on emails I already know are of low priority. I don’t have to make an immediate decision about them because my server is doing it for me. This allows me to focus on emails that I have to make decision about immediately. I can either respond immediately, or move the emails into my todo list in OmniFocus to deal with later. For those items that are sitting in my archive folders, I have scheduled time every Sunday morning to plow through them and decide what’s necessary to act on, and what I can toss.

Part 5: Archiving and Deleting

Because I’m able to filter all my low-priority email, I can easily delete them when I’m finished, since there is no reason for me to hold on to a advertisement from a shirt company: the deal will be over in a week. For everything else, I have a rule set up that archives my read mail after 365 days. You could set this to a week or a month, but I find myself searching for old mail relatively often, so leaving it in my inbox doesn’t bother me much. The point is, I can automate archiving and deleting, making it one less thing I have to think about: it just happens.

I’ve been running this system for a couple weeks, and the results are wonderful. I never open up my inbox and feel overwhelmed: it’s amazing how little email I actually receive, which makes it very easy to tackle. I don’t miss emails from humans anymore. Cleaning out my low priority mail is a breeze: I can get through them all in under a half hour, and delete them when I’m done. It has even allowed me to actually look at them, since they aren’t in my way anymore.

How do you deal with your low and high priority mail? What system works for you? Let me know!

ps – special thanks to my good friend Jeremy for helping me to iron out some of the details. Follow him.

The entire concept is a lot of fun. The idea is to give a glimpse into what digital humanities is and what it looks like on a day-to-day basis by the people who actual do the work. It inspired the incredible project Day of Archaeology, which I have participated in for the past few years. It is always interesting for me to see what people’s days are like, how they do their work, and how they define their jobs. Day of DH is a good opportunity to take peak into other people’s lives.

Since I’m primarily writing, my Day of DH will be focused on just that: how I use digital tools to get my writing done. I’ve messed with my workflow a lot over the past few weeks, so it will be good for me to write some of it out for you, anyway. Hope you enjoy!!

These next two weeks I will be spending primarily in St. Mary’s City, trying to make a final push in the lab towards completing the analysis I need to do on the dissertation. This means long days in the lab, quick stops for dinner, and then back to the lab at night to look over more artifacts, scan more slides of photographs, and whatever else needs to be done. All that sitting around in a dark lonely basement, however, does require some of this time to be spent moving, so today I went on a jog along the wonderful trail that weaves through the forest in St. Mary’s, and along the St. Mary’s River.

I’ve never been a big fan of running, in large part because I always find it boring. I spend most of my run thinking about how little I want to be running. This summer, however, I took up trail running, which is much more exciting then running along a road. First, no cars. Second, pretty things to see. Third, the path changes, you have to dodge roots, the terrain changes. It is challenging for different reasons: running on the road was challenging because I hated it. Running on a trail is challenging because it’s difficult and things change.

Today, I finally added a new component to the process that I’ve been wanting to start doing for a while: running with my camera. I strapped my camera bag (a Mountainsmith Day TLS converted into a camera bag thanks to the Kit Cube) to my back, and was able to carry my Canon EOS Rebel T3 safely and securely along with me on the trail. The support provided by the bag, both around the waist and with th shoulder strap, kept it from flopping around. I stopped a couple times along the route to take some shots, my favorites of which you see here. I specifically tried to go at sunset, in hopes of catching one of the magical displays nature puts on each evening at St. Mary’s. Unfortunately, it was a bit cloudy. But, the river never ceases to amaze, and I was able to find a few interesting objects along the river bank.

See my run at Runkeeper
See my photos at Flickr

A few years ago, while I was still the Campus Archaeologist with the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, Chris Stawski and I were messing around with a FlipVideo camera on a tiny project located behind the MSU library. We had always wanted to get more into using video for our public engagement, but the time and energy it took to edit videos wasn’t as effective as our other forms of social media outreach, so it never really took off.

Nonetheless, last year I still had the video on my computer, and had recently received a copy of Camtasia courtesy of Mid-Michigan rockstar and TechSmith Chief Evangelist Betsy Weber. I pulled out this footage to start messing around with the new software. One thing led to another, and the following “instructional” video emerged. I spent most of the rest of the day laughing at myself. It’s been up on Vimeo for a while now, and I send it out on Twitter occassionally, but I haven’t been too loud about.

Last week, the nice folks at FocusDesign left a comment on the video, asking if they could use it on their site. I of course said yes. FocusDesign makes the screens that we used at Campus Archaeology, and that I’m shaking in the video. These screens are without a doubt the best tools I’ve used for sifting dirt. They’re made out PVC, meaning they are light weight and sturdy. This particular model, the SoloScreen, acts as a shaker and a stand-up screen, meaning it can be used effectively for any phase of archaeology. Since they’re sturdy, you can toss them in a truck. Since they’re light weight, you can lug them through the woods. They are really masterful pieces of equipment. While they do come at a cost, the lifespan you get out of them is well worth it. We started with two at Campus Archaeology (see photos of them in use on Flickr), and I think they have gradually added more screens in subsequent seasons, cycling out the wooden ones we crafted out of leftover loft wood from the MSU Dormitories (see those being crafted here). At this point, they’ve been in use since 2008, with only the standard issues of the mesh breaking, although I think that only happened once in the two and a half years I worked there. They are definitely one of the things I miss the most about doing field work at MSU.

Since 2008, Focus Design has branched out significantly. They now have assorted types of screens, including wet screens, multi purpose screens, shaker only screens, screens with back pack straps, and the one I have my eye on, the Hand Screen. By far and away, my least favorite type of archaeology screens are hand shaker screens that I always end up with on survey. They’re heavy, particularly when filled with dirt, are difficult to hold, are always falling apart, and regularly provide splinters or cuts from screws or mesh. FocusDesign’s screen would avoid all that, and have a longer shelf-life to boot. I’ll be saving my money.

At any rate, the video was largely me having fun with some new toys. Hopefully, it gives you all a bit of chuckle.

UPDATE: Special thanks to FocusDesign for sending me a Hand Screen! If I ever get out from behind this desk and back into the field, I will be sure to write up another review (and perhaps another funky video).

The session turned into a giant almost overnight, and I am very excited about the lineup. I tried to find people who I thought were doing innovative things with Web 2.0 as it relates to working with communities, and I tried to get a wide spectrum on the various tools that are out there, ranging from Twitter to Foursquare to microfunding to blogging. I also have a wide variety of organizations represented, such as the National Parks Service, the Florida Public Archaeology Network, the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, Colonial Williamsburg, and Historic St. Mary’s City, as well as individuals. Topics will range from program development, to education, to public intellectualism, to public activism. In all, I’m hoping to cover a wide area.

As should be no surprise for a session such as this, we will be live-tweeting using the conference hashtag #SHA2013 as well as a tag for our session specifically, #webarch (a nod to Carol McDavid’s original public archaeology website, webarchaeology.com). We’ll also be following all these guidelines that I wrote up at the SHA Blog. Please join us, either at the conference or at your home. Because it is a large session, it is divided into two parts, beginning in the morning from 10:30-12:30, with a break for lunch, and then closing out from 1:30 to 4:30. Following Dr. McDavid’s remarks, we will open the floor for a larger discussion until 5 pm or when people can’t take it any longer. I hope to see you all there!!

Below is the abstract, and list of the papers and their authors. You can follow links for their abstracts.

In the past decade, the opportunities for archaeologists to use web-based technologies for public engagement has expanded dramatically. In 2002, when Carol McDavid completed her assessment of web-based public engagement, the availability and access of web-based tools was still limited, both for the public and archaeologists. While accessibility and number of tools have increased, many of the questions McDavid asks are still important to consider. How accessible are new web-based technologies to the public? How do we use these tools to build meaningful relationships to promote awareness, education, and stewardship towards cultural resources? What is the relationship between the digital engagement and face-to-face engagement, and what benefits and drawbacks are presented from digital engagement? How do we build, implement, and sustain digital cultural heritage projects that will effectively engage the public? This session will explore how archaeologists are using current web-based technology to address these questions and engage with communities.

Morning Session: Charles Wilson Quoron Room, 10:30-12:30

Guerrilla Foursquare: The appropriation of commercial location-based social networking for archaeological engagement and education
J. Andrew Dufton (@jadufton), Stuart Eve (@stueve)

Not All Archaeology is Equal: Public Archaeology and the Internet
Lorna J Richardson (@lornarichardson)

Reflections on Community Engagement & Digital Approaches: The Effects & Impacts of Different Tools
Lynne Goldstein (@lynnegoldstein) MSU Campus Archaeology Program (@capmsu)

RT This: The Collaborative Public Archaeology Brand in Social Media
Sarah Miller (@semiller), Amber Grafft-Weiss (ajgweiss), FPAN Northeast (@FPANNortheast)

Slavery to Freedom on the Web: A Community Engagement Experiment for Online Exhibits
Terry P. Brock (@brockter) Walk Together Exhibit (@walktogethr)

Afternoon Session: Charles Wilson Quoron Room, 1:30-4:30

Social contract archaeology: a business case for the future
Brendon Wilkins , Lisa Westcott Wilkins

Strategic Planning for the Web: Goals, Objectives and Tactics for Communicating Heritage
Jeffery K Guin (@jkguin)

Archaeology in Real-time:  The Use of Social Media as Part of the Excavation of Anderson’s Blacksmith Shop and Public Armoury
Lisa E. Fischer, Meredith M. Poole Armoury Site

Day of Archaeology: Large-scale Collaborative Digital Archaeology
Matt Law (@m_law), Andrew Dufton (@jadufton), Stu Eve (@stueve), Tom Goskar (@tomgoskar), Pat Hadley, Jess Ogden (@jessogden), Daniel Pett, Lorna Richardson

Making Historical Archaeology Visible: Experiences in Digital (and Analog) Community Outreach in Arkansas
Jamie Brandon (@jcbrandon)

Sankofa in Cyberspace: Developing New and Social Media at the African Burial Ground National Monument
Cyrus Forman (@AFBurialGrndNPS)

“BOOM BABY!”: engaging the public through social media in response to “American Digger”
Tonia Deetz Rock, Misti Wright Furr, Kurt Thomas Hunt, Katie Jacobson, Kristina C Wyckoff

Discussant
Carol McDavid

Open Forum
Terry Brock and Carol McDavid

So, please head over to the Walk Together Blog: http://www.stmaryscity.org/walktogether/index.php/the-research-blog/

There you can read about why we chose the title “All of Us Would Walk Together”: Welcome to “All of us Would Walk Together,” a Digital Exhibit

Learn about How Slave Advertisements are important to our research: What can you learn from a runaway slave?

See our first item for our Genealogical Section with a list of enslaved laborers from 1867: The List of Names: Who was Who at St. Mary’s Manor?

And how I will be able to use a plantation here in Williamsburg, Virginia to help with our research in St. Mary’s, Maryland: Looking for Comparisons: Shirley Plantation Duplex Quarters in Virginia

In order to not miss a post, you can sign up for emails or subscribe to the RSS feed by visiting the blog. You can also follow us on Twitter @walktogethr,

The Mamas & The Papas – California Dreamin’
Jill Barber – Be My Man
Jim Croce – Roller Derby Queen
Coldplay – Yellow
The Naked And Famous – Punching In A Dream
Sun Kil Moon – Among the Leaves
Bobby Womack – Please Forgive My Heart
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Red House
Jonathan Coulton – The Stache
Yo La Tengo – Autumn Sweater
Gregory Porter – Be Good (Lion’s Song)
David Gray – Foundling
Miles Davis – Autumn Leaves

This week will see me on the road twice: once Sunday coming back from St. Mary’s, and again tonight, heading back to St. Mary’s for a meeting and presentation. The trip is about three hours along Route 17 through the various peninsulas in eastern Virginia. I travel through a number of historic areas, in particular the historic town of Port Royal, where the photo above is from. Many of the historic buildings there are falling into ruin, while others are being restored. It’s a pleasant drive, and is always made better by good tunes. Some highlights include songs by two friends, Matt Burke and Mike Vasas, and their respective bands. Also, my favorite live performance by James Taylor of Country Road. Stick through it for the end, which always gives me chills. You can find the playlist on Spotify. Any suggestions for things I should be listening to? Throw me a comment, or add it to this playlist on Spotify.

The Coasters – Down In Mexico
Paul Simon – Kodachrome
Mumford & Sons – Holland Road
Otis Redding – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
The Heavy – Short Change Hero
Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show – The Cover Of “Rolling Stone”
Wild Child – Pillow Talk
The Matt Burke Band – The Weekend War
Ray Charles – Lonely Avenue
People Get Ready – Windy Cindy
James Taylor – Country Road
Mike Vasas & The Beasts Of Burden – Cross The Border

This weekend, Ashleigh and I spent the three days in Bushwood, Maryland, celebrating my cousin’s wedding. Bushwood is a small rural town located in St. Mary’s County’s seventh district. Which, if you’re from Southern Maryland, you know has a rich and unique culture. While my Aunt Lucy and Uncle Donald aren’t originally from the area, they moved there in the 1970s. The home they purchased is unique: it was built in the early 20th century, and is both a residence and the post office. Across the street, on their property, sits a grist mill, that was constructed circa 1910 by the man who lived in the post office, Richard Ellis. My aunt and uncle have restored the mill, and added a covered porch to the back. It was here that my cousin was married, and where, on Sunday, we carried out one of the longest of Maryland traditions: oyster shucking.

Since the wedding was a big occasion, Lucy and Donald ordered three bushels of oysters…which is a lot of oysters. One of my favorite activities is to shuck oysters with my two uncles, Donald and Mark, and it is a regular occurrence during the fall months. Mark and I tackled some of these oysters raw, while Donald got things set up to steam them.

The set up is pretty simple: you need a pot, a mesh container to set in it, and a flame. The only concern this day was wind, but we managed to keep the flame lit for the entire evening.  Cooking oysters is not too tricky, either: oysters are placed in the mesh container, dipped into the boiling water, and they sit for around ten minutes. When a few of them start to pop open, the mesh container is pulled out, oysters are dumped on the table, and you begin shucking!

My Uncle Mark, a woodturner from Baltimore, Maryland, cracks into one of the raw oysters while Donald gets things set up. Cracking an oyster is a delicate and potentially dangerous endeavor. The oyster knife is wedged into and worked around the seams of the oyster. For some that is near the joint, while others prefer tackling the oyster from the edges. All agree on one thing: point the knife away from your hand. The oyster is a bumpy and frustrating beast, and the knife can easily slip. Once you see little bubbles around the edges, you can start to pry the shell apart, revealing the delicious center.

The mill has been used for quite a while as a space for oyster eating, and a nice midden of shells has built up around the deck’s perimeter. The mill itself was built in a complex of other buildings: Ellis intentionally crafted the grist mill and the saw mill near his post office in order to create an economic and social center for the town. Farmers could come gather and send mail, get their corn milled, and lumber sawn. The grist mill still contains a number of the old tools, and while the parts are not currently operational, the mill stone, conveyor, and line shafting are all still in tact, making it a fantastic historical example of what a mill would have looked like during the period. Lucy and Donald have gone to great care to maintain as much historical integrity as they could.

The deck addition, however, was not original to the building. It is likely that this was where the saw mill was located. However, the addition of the back has allowed one component of the mill to remain: it is now, once again, a social center for the residents of Bushwood. The Bushwood Mill is host to concerts, movie nights, oyster shucking, and hosted the celebration of the post office’s 100th operational year. The wedding only further indicated that the Mill has fantastic potential as a social area.

The oyster has been part of Chesapeake cuisine for thousands of years. As an archaeologist, I am well aware of this fact: oysters appear in larger quantities than just about any other artifact. What can often be lost, however, when we excavate these shells is that the act of eating is more than just part of fueling our body. It is also a social endeavor, that incorporates family, friends, and community. An added layer is the importance of having a space to regularly congregate, to eat, drink, and laugh. This weekend, at the historic grist mill, we were able to carry on an ancient Chesapeake tradition in a historic, special place in a town called Bushwood.

All images are taken by the author, and protected by a Creative Commons License. You can see more photos at Flickr.

Today, Historic St. Mary’s City sent out the press release regarding the launch of the digital exhibit that I’ve been working on all summer…I then promptly sent emails, tweets, facebook posts, and telegrams to every person who I’ve ever interacted with. The website is officially live, and has been a labor of love for the past five months. In all, I’ve learned a lot from the process, both about building exhibits online, but also about my dissertation itself. I’ll write more about this topic at a later date.

The website is about the transition from slavery to freedom on a 19th-century Southern Maryland plantation. I’ve done my best to make it completely social: visitors can comment on every single page, interact with us on twitter, and follow a blog that discusses the still ongoing research and preservation efforts regarding the 19th century. I have a lot of plans for this blog: we’ll be chronicling the rehabilitation of the still standing duplex quarter, I’d like to do guest posts, I’ll highlight my research, and I’d also like to write some companion feature pieces that will compliment the exhibit on topics relating to African American history in Southern Maryland. I’m sure that other opportunities will present itself as things move along and time passes.

But for now, it’s important for me to use this opportunity to do two things: first, encourage you to visit the exhibit, subscribe to the blog, and follow us on Twitter. You can get updates on Facebook, too, by liking the Historic St. Mary’s City Page, and then telling all your friends to do the same thing. Second, I have a lot of people to thank:

First, our financial supporters: the digital project would not have been possible without the support of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Ford Foundation, and the SRI Foundation. I’d like to personall thank the research staff at Historic St. Mary’s, including Dr. Henry Miller, Dr. Tim Riordan, Ruth Mitchell, Silas Hurry, and Don Winter. I’ve known these folks for years, and I thoroughly appreciated their help in the whole process. I’d also like to thank Nancy Sheffler, who runs the IT at Historic St. Mary’s City, and was willing to put up with some frantic emails from me during this process. I’d like to thank my committee for allowing me to pursue my somewhat unconventional course into digital public archaeology. I’d also like to thank Dr. Lynne Goldstein for her never-ending support of my ideas, and Dr. Ethan Watrall for widening my view as it relates to digital cultural heritage. I’d like to thank the folks at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Digital History Center, particularly Lisa Fischer, for many conversations about digital cultural heritage and museums and the web, as well as Carol McDavid for her support in discussing the ins-and-outs of archaeology on the web. I’d like to thank Tiffany Beker for helping me with some code, and Nicole Moore for her extensive notes on the project. Of course, I’d like to thank my parents and my wife, Ashleigh, for their continuing support. I’d also like to thank Dr. Regina Faden, the director of Historic St. Mary’s City, for giving me the opportunity and finding the support to run with this idea that has been percolating for a few years. I couldn’t have asked for more support and encouragement in getting this thing done, and for the future plans at the site.

Lastly, I’d like to thank the community members, particularly Meredeth Wilson and Kelsey Bush, who commented on the website and for working with us on this project, and for the future collaborations that we will, hopefully, achieve together. In particular, special thanks to Emma Hall, who lived in the duplex quarter for almost thirty years: her words inspired the title and theme of the exhibit, and I hope that we will continue to do her proud.