As I’ve worked on building my corpus of scholars for the Directory of Oneota Scholars, I’ve realized that I need more than just one page to house information on scholars. I will create a drop down menu with four page options: Academics/Professionals, Graduate Students, Emeritus, and Deceased. The Academics/Professionals page will have individual scholars employed in university settings and those working for CRM firms and in museums. The Graduate Students page will have graduate students currently pursuing Master’s degrees and PhDs. The ‘Emeritus’ page will include individuals who were once employed in an academic setting but have since retired and the ‘Deceased’ page will include individuals who are deceased, but their work remains important in Oneota archaeology.
I am still working on building the corpus of scholars and determining criteria of inclusion for the directory, i.e. why certain individuals are included and others are not. The goal is to include individuals that are currently active in Oneota research, and those emeritus or deceased individuals whose work pioneered Oneota research. I started building the corpus by finding conference presentations and publications having to do with Oneota research and adding the author’s names to the an Airtable file. I am now searching every individual scholar’s name on Google in attempt to locate their current affiliation and research interests. Undergraduate students will often present with other well-known scholars at conferences, but don’t continue to pursue Oneota research topics in graduate school. If I can find no record of these individuals as graduate students researching Oneota topics or as scholars in the field, I will not include them in the directory. Additionally, any individuals that cannot be tracked down through a Google search will not be included in the directory (i.e. no record of the individuals at all). Individuals with only one publication or conference presentation will not be included if it can be determined that their research interests have changed.
The criteria are still a work in progress and I am not physically deleting any scholars from the Airtable file, instead I am labeling individuals as ‘active’ vs. ‘inactive’. If you have any suggestions for how to decide which scholars should be included, please comment below!
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