Behind the Scenes Minis: Bias 3DS

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We did our Unearthed installment for the autumn of twenty twenty five all week long this week. We sure did.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: We did. What should we talk about first, Holly, So, at.

00:00:29
Speaker 1: The end of the first episode, you talked about a study about the way that bias factors into reporting on historical and specifically archaeological finds.

00:00:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:00:44
Speaker 1: My question throughout all of that, because I have not read this paper. Yeah, was there any weight or factoring given to language? So these what they were looking at was that were published in these the specific set of peer reviewed journals, which I could be mistaken. I do think those are all in English. I do not know if any of them published articles that are not in English. And I don't recall if I don't recall if like there was a language specification in the paper. But that's kind of my question what makes it into those journals? Right? So that's so, so it starts out with a bias already. Yeah, Yeah, and that is something that the paper did not really look at that much. And I'm not to be clear, I'm not dogging on the paper writers. I'm just saying the bias layers go even deeper, right right. I was curious about where they started from.

00:01:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So one of the things that had a lot of thoughts when I was reading this, and one of the things that I think is absolutely true, uh, is that it the the uh layers of what's at fact at what factors are going on here do definitely involve like they start prior to even submitting the paper to a journal, Like it involves like who is doing research, where are they doing it? Can they get funding for that research? Does that funding require them to publish? Are their factors in how that publication has to happen, or where are the places that people would like to do work safe for researchers and specifically a lot of the time safe for researchers from somewhere else. Like there's so many factors that go into like before before the paper even gets published. Yeah, and I think some of that uh. As I was looking at this paper, I was kind of sort of surprised because when I am working on these, I feel like there is a huge disparity involving the entire continent of Africa. There's a lot of research that is involving northern Africa and especially Egypt, but I don't see nearly as much stuff about the rest of the continent. Right. But then, in terms of what this paper looked at, which was comparing the publications in the journals to whether it gets mainstream news coverage, like that wasn't as pronounced because they were starting like they were comparing peer reviewed publications to news articles and not like comparing the world of archaeology to what gets published in one of these journals. Does that make sense? Yes, so, yeah, there's many layers involved with this. I as far as I know, those journals are published in English, which means that you know that somebody doing the research would need to be writing in English, able to translate, or have resources to have a paper translated by someone with archaeological knowledge.

00:04:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So one of the things that happens somewhat regularly is that I will have bookmarked a news article that sounds really interesting that is from China or Japan or.

00:04:30
Speaker 2: India or Vietnam.

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Speaker 1: And what I have is like a really brief article in the English language version of a mainstream newspaper published in one of those places, but I'm not able to figure out, like, was there a journal article about this? Where can I find that journal article? Can I find more information beyond this one like three to four paragraph news store? And sometimes I just can't, like I can't trace back the details that are in the news story to find more information from like a university that might be writing about the research as press releases or a paper or something like that. So there are multiple intersecting layers that go into all of this. We have talked about, or I have talked about before about how I started really trying to focus on research that is collaborative and community led when it comes to indigenous peoples as much as possible, and that winds up excluding some things from the show a lot of the time, because as a field, archaeology has sort of approached a lot of indigenous peoples around the world as like objects to be studied rather than human beings who are here and present with us on Earth. And so a lot of times when I see an article that seems really interesting that it's about something involving an indigenous community, my first question is, like, did you ask are the people living here today, do they want this work to be done and are they involved in it? And like that those are all questions that were just the were not part of this study. The study was just really about, like what are trends and potential biases involved in like the gap between peer review journals and news articles. Another thing that was quoted a quote that I had pulled out from the article that I did not wind up getting into in the episode itself, because I just I felt like that was getting a really long was quote skewed coverage maybe particularly charged for archaeology, a field with large public interest that generates understandings about past cultures with real or imagined descendants. When mischaracterized archaeological data can fuel harmful ideologies. And so what this part of it was about was the misuse of archaeology to like support racist narratives. We have talked about, you know, people trying to argue that Britain and Northern Europe Norse countries as a place that was historically exclusively white, which is just not true. But how archaeological findings about say vikings can be used to try to support these racist ideologies that are not grounded in any kind of fact. I also think it's possible for archaeological data to be presented in a way that's not mischaracterized at all, but is also used to harm to fuel harmful ideologies, which is like as just a made up hypothetical example, we're here in the United States going through just as we talked about in the show, just ongoing assaults on the fields of history and the idea that we should be accurately reflecting the past, including the many ways that things have gone really wrong. And I think it's totally possible to look at an archaeological site of say a colonial community, and say, oh, it looks like this colonial community had a bunch of different people from a bunch of different races and ethnicities, and based on this evidence, it seems like everybody was living a pretty egalitarian, equality based lifestyle, and then trying to use that to like undermine the fact that they're there was a lot of slavery and genocide and equality going on. But like then this hypothetical, made up thing that could have been particularly true like for this one community, Like we are living through an era of the federal government trying to create narratives using history and by extension, archaeology and I think it's it's so easy for me to imagine things that can be picked out of you know, the of history and historical documents and archaeological research and all of that that straightforwardly correctly interpreted findings can then be used to further hateful agendas. And I was like, this explanation of this has become incredibly long. Let's narrow down the focus of the discussion of this paper to be a little more, uh, a little a little more on the what the core of it was was, which was this comparison of peer reviewed articles to news coverage other random stuff that I had written down one of the news articles that I had found that I had bookmarked that I was going to put in And then I was like, I think this might be of interest only to me, which is that the Louver has stopped renting out Nintendo three DS's for their audio and video tours at the museum. Yeah, when you were at the Louver, did you get one of these? Patrick? And I did, and it was really cool. Keep in mind I went to the Louver when we were all there in Paris with my gaggling group of friends. Okay, we're not we want to talk to each other. We want to come into the car. We're not going to sit there and listen to headsets. So funny to me, So whenever, ninety percent of the time, I would say, when Patrick and I go to a museum together, we get the audio tour. And when we were in Paris, to get the audio tour at the Louver, you had to give them your ID because they were renting you a Nintendo three DS.

00:11:20
Speaker 2: And because of the.

00:11:22
Speaker 1: Location awareness abilities of the three DS, it knew where you were in the museum and it could pull up contextually relevant stuff for youah. And there were also places that had like a three D counterpart to the object that you were looking at. So like, let's say you're looking at one of the statues that has lost various pieces of it in the millennia since it was made. The three DS could have on the screen like a three D overlay view of what all the pieces were.

00:11:52
Speaker 2: It was really really cool.

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Speaker 1: And so when I saw this article, I was like, oh, we're going to talk about that, and I was like, I don't think that's relevant to like ninety percent of the people who would be listening to this, especially since there was no indication of what is replacing it at the louver, Like, what is They've stopped issuing them as part of this, but they have not said, like, what is the next thing that will be available as some kind of audio or video tour.

00:12:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes me wonder if they're going to go with an app. Yeah.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: So many places now have apps or just QR codes on the wall that you can look at with your phone. Yeah, which is also really cool and I think helps to make museums.

00:12:38
Speaker 2: In some ways more accessible.

00:12:39
Speaker 1: I would say the typical person coming to a museum who's an adult probably has a phone and hopefully earbuds with them and can be a little easier, especially if you already have accessibility settings on your device that help you with things that might be a little easier than like the the units that you carry around with plug in ear phones. Uh.

00:13:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't.

00:13:02
Speaker 1: I don't love being in public with headphones on.

00:13:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: It makes me super uneasy. Yeah, because I'm like, if there's an emergency and I don't hear it, Yeah, listen. My whole life is situational awareness, So I'm like, I don't want to. I'm very Uh, It's infrequent that I will listen to headphones. Even on a flight, I'll subtile it and sit there and be on my.

00:13:29
Speaker 2: Reading. Yeah.

00:13:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know what that's about. I don't know what part of me is like, you're going to miss something important? If if it's kind of the same part of my anxiety that doesn't like taking like prescription grade pain reavers because I'm like, I will not be prepared in an emergency.

00:13:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

00:13:55
Speaker 1: Another note that I had jotted down about this is not of an earthed, was two things about the Song of Wade. One one of the researchers involved with this was named James Wade, not related to the Song of Wade. But boy did it make various reading about this confusing to me because there would be references to Song of Wade and Wade the character, and then James Wade the researcher, and every once in a while I was like, wait a minute, who are you talking about? Here? Are we talking about a poem or a living person. Also, as someone who has for my entire life had bad handwriting, boy do I empathize with the idea that some some scribe working with a document that was in both Latin and Middle English might have just made some unclear writing choices that people later were like, what does this say? Although theoretically if that person had bad handwriting, they wouldn't be a scribe.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: Well, they might have just been tired.

00:14:58
Speaker 1: Maybe, or they may have a aready given notice and they're kind of coasting on a short time or day, Like, what are they gonna do? Fire me? I'm just gonna whip through this as quick as I can. Let's throw in some mythological creatures and really check it up. Yeah, yeah, I guess. The last thing that I wanted to talk about is from the very beginning of the two parter where I had to read something the President put on Truth Social, which I ask you ahead of time, and I say, you would rather not. I'm pretty game for most stuff, but I was a girl.

00:15:44
Speaker 2: I can't do it. Yeah.

00:15:47
Speaker 1: So what I wanted to talk specifically about, one of the portions that was in all capital letters of this truth Social post was about how the United States cannot be woke because woke is broke, and so I just want to talk about the word woke for a minute. The first time I remember seeing anyone use the word woke. I do not remember exactly which incident this was because there have been so many, but it was probably ten ish years ago and was one of the many incidents we have had in the United States in which police killed an unarmed black person and there was horrifying video of what had happened. And on Twitter, because this was back in the earlier era of Twitter, someone tweeted they were a black person, you could tell from the tone.

00:16:58
Speaker 2: That they were, were tweeting two.

00:17:01
Speaker 1: Other black people, and said, if you are just waking up, stay woke. And so the idea was, if you are seeing this and you're really absorbing what is happening for the first time, and you're horrified, stay stay present with this, stay aware of what's happening. And so this is a term that has been used, uh primarily among Black Americans for a really long time, with those kinds of ideas being awake and aware to what is going on around you, right, it's like situational awareness at the meta level. Yeah, and to like the world that we are living in and to like the realities of that world and and and the harm that it causes, specifically to black people. And so the fact that people have taken that term and turned it into political correctness version two point zero to criticize anybody who tries to use like progressive language, or to try to be inclusive in terms of how they talk about things like sex and gender, to be racially progressive, to be anti racist, to be any of that. The fact that it's become this weird insult about a lot of the same things that people used to yell at us about being two PC over Yeah, it just makes me really angry. Yeah, And I will say this, some of the problem comes from the appropriation of language like that by well intentioned white people, sure who then adopted into their vernacular probably misuse it a lot.

00:18:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that.

00:18:58
Speaker 1: Makes it easier for people with nefarious intent to then twist the meaning, which is why I think it's super important for people to be careful about trying to be cool. And I'm putting that in quotes. That's definitely in scare quotes. But like appropriation of language, there's a reason that we're so nitpicky about it, and that's an example of why.

00:19:24
Speaker 2: Right.

00:19:25
Speaker 1: There's also at this point an increasing body of research on things like social media and linguistics, how we use different language, and how things are being covered in media and talked about in media. That is remarking on a like a big disparity between what progressives are actually saying and what conservatives are saying they're saying, and it's like what conservatives are saying progressives are saying saying is driving the bus rather than what is actually being said. So yeah, I did not like having to read that true social post on the show. But I also felt like it was an important part of context for the letter to the Smithsonian, which read on a just straightforward surface level. But I can see people being like, this sounds reasonable, though they're saying it's collaborative and forward.

00:20:31
Speaker 2: Looking, like I don't know.

00:20:33
Speaker 1: But also I go back to the thing that like the Smithsonian should not be getting that letter right right from the White House period.

00:20:40
Speaker 2: End of discussion. Yeah.

00:20:43
Speaker 1: Also, anytime I have gotten a letter or an email instructing me of something and telling me that this instruction is collaborative, I'm like, that's that's not what collaboration means. Accurate collaboration is not you tell me to do something and then I do it. Yeah, anyway, would you like to end on a note that is my ding dongeri.

00:21:10
Speaker 2: I would love that.

00:21:12
Speaker 1: I love any and every time that Unearthed features the Antikitterer mechanism because I love it to begin with, as you know, that's extremely my jam, but also because now I can just you know, in my head it's like Pavlov's dog. The bell rings and I just hear the incredibly incredibly appealing MAT's Michelson saying a dictata, and I'm like, okay, I'm good for at least the next ten minutes my dopamine needs are handled. Great, Oh, yay, yay. I will make sure every single time. Well, since since this five year project of dives to the Antikit Thrier shipwreck as over, I'm not sure what the next finds related to that. Surely someone else is in line put their next shot at it. Yeah, I will make sure to always include that I think I just heard a siren. Everything's fine at my house if anyone is alarmed. Whatever's coming up on your weekend, man, boy do I hope it is just as amazing as possible. If you like to go outside and sit in the warm grass, and there's warm grass you can go sit in, I hope you get to do that and then check yourself for takes afterward. If if you're more of an inside kid and you want to spend some time playing video games or watching TV. Boy do I hope you have the best video game and TV watching time. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.