Hello, January 2022! It’s hard to believe, and yet here we are. Of course more important than the new year, is that we’ve had another three months of cultivating the Data Literacy Program (DLP) here at the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI).
For the last quarter of 2021, we planned on accomplishing the goals of uploading of the public version of the first and second data stories for general use, the completion of a third data story, drafting of an academic publication on digital data reuse in practice, and an annual assessment of the program.
But, well. We didn’t really do any of that.
And that was totally fine with us. Why? Well, for lack of a better term, the dynamic data literacy duo (aka myself and Meghan) decided we were going to blow up the program.
We decided to take apart our original idea and reformat those ideas into different shapes
Not literally of course.
But, both of us wanted to do more than write 10-16 more tutorials. So we reflected on our first two data stories. Considered what we wanted for the program’s future. Expanded on the principles for the program that we established earlier in the year. And explored how we could improve archaeological data literacy by leveraging a diversity of literacies.
There are lots of kinds of literacy we can draw from to create stories.
You may have noticed this change already if you read our blog on how we define data stories. More generally though, our plans aim to diversify how we teach those literacies through data stories. We’ve used tutorials as a format already and now we will explore other options.
Specifically, we are grouping our data stories into a set of series. Each one approaches data literacy differently to reflect the myriad ways people learn. We’re still developing what each of these series will be called, though we did tease a creative and a dialogue series when we were defining data story, but our next data story will probably be the first in our Aggregative series.
This will be our “Public Archaeology Book Club” data story. This entry in the aggregative series will be a guide for readers of adult nonfiction that includes a reading list, guiding questions, and a small dataset that can be used by librarians, educators, or any community to explore archaeological topics in recently published books.
Specifically, the reading list draws from either open-access or popularly published works. We’re still weaving the narrative that connects all of these books to turn this into a cohesive story and working through it is a lot of fun!
In summary, while we didn’t accomplish any of the goals we set out for this quarter, the dynamic data literacy duo are excited about the future of this program. It’s been great to collaborate with educators on our tutorials. However, we’re interested in improving archaeological data literacy overall. So, that means we should utilize the fact that people become literate and excited about archaeology in a variety of ways.
