This post was updated in 2025.
Artober is a limited-duration, thematic-inspiration, art project. It’s a lot like other thematic months, like MerMay, or creative intentions such as the 100 Days project. The main difference is that it happens during October. In the United States, this coincides with National Arts and Humanities Month in the United States, with some major American cities using it to celebrate all kinds of art.
For archaeologists participating in Artober, we have our own tag—ArchInk—and from 2022 to 2025 each October, the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) posted data-driven prompts to inspire people’s creativity. ArchInk is a variation of a different hashtag, #Inktober. However, controversies around the establishment of a trademark on “Inktober” in 2019 impacted its use by online communities. Due to that, we prefer to associate our prompts with “Artober,” which is part of a group of non-trademarked or copyrighted hashtags.
Archaeology’s (and sometimes architecture’s) #ArchInk, often attracts people interested in archaeological illustration or making art based on archaeology themes. Previously, Dr. Katherine Cook shared archaeological prompts for the month on sites like Twitter, facilitating conversation around the #ArchInk tag.
Dr. Cook kindly allowed us to collaborate and present a data-driven version of #ArchInk beginning in 2022. Then, each year from 2022 to 2025, the AAI shared those same prompts on various social media platforms. We changed platforms, or posted on multiple, to encourage different archaeological groups to engage their creativity. It also reflects changes to how archaeology-interested audiences use social media. However, multiple archaeology communities share prompts during October, so we encourage you to keep an eye out for others!
While #ArchInk originally focused on visual art, the AAI encourages people to use our prompts to create using any medium. Whether they’re songs, desserts, or tabletop role playing (TTRPG) games, we encourage you to make any and all of them. We also love seeing what people create based on our archaeological data-driven prompts. That means we encourage you to tag the Alexandria Archive Institute and/or Open Context so we can see and share your creations.
The AAI and its staff also participated in the tag. In 2022, the AAI’s first data-driven #ArchInk doubled as alpha-testing for the Digital Data Story, It’s All in the Wrist (Bones). We did that because our data-driven #ArchInk prompts are from that open educational resource. Also in 2022, postdoctoral researcher and author of this article Paulina shared haiku based on the prompts. The AAI then published It’s All in the Wrist (Bones) version 1.0 in July 2023 and continued to reshare its prompts in subsequent years.
For 2025, we’re releasing version 2.0 of It’s All in the Wrist (Bones). This new version includes updated text, more links to relevant articles, and changes to the search tutorial. For the 2025 social media campaign, we’re sharing Creative Commons licensed or public domain images. We found those on either Open Context or The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York using our daily prompts. We hope you continue to use the #ArchInk tag and our data-driven prompts to cultivate your creativity and your data literacy now and in the future.
Updates: The AAI originally published this article on 23 September 2022. In September 2025, the author edited the page. This included wording clarifications, updating language for the current year, adding updates since original publication, fixing broken links, referencing current social media landscapes, adding image credits, and other changes. See an archived version here.
Image credits: “data stories logo” by L. Meghan Dennis from the DLP / CC BY is based on an Adobe Stock image.
