We had a busy summer here at the Data Literacy Program (DLP). Between sharing our Fall 2022 Table of Contents, publishing updates to the Alexandria Archives’ News, and prepping our It’s All in the Wrist (Bones) Data Story, we’ve done a lot during the third quarter of 2022. But … was that everything we did?
No, of course not! We’re happy to say we accomplished most of our goals for this quarter. So, gooooooo program! Which is also a thing we did, though it was not a major goal of ours. (As in, we programmed something. Code stuff.)
Well, what were our major goals? One of them was to test Of Mycenaean Men: Public Archaeology Book Club. While we’re not quite at the testing phase, Meghan and Paulina started filming our book blurb videos for it!

Here are Paulina (on the left) and Meghan (on the right) in a draft video for our Of Myceneaen Men video summaries.
In addition, all the other parts of the Data Story are in final edits and proofing! This means we’ve got search terms, discussion questions, and a search tutorial ready to go. We’re excited to get the survey out to testers during Quarter 4. So if all our book club talk has piqued your interest, put a bookmark in and get ready to read with us!
Another goal was to prepare It’s All in the Wrist (Bones) for evaluation. We did this by getting all the materials for it ready for a sensitivity reader, including fun gifs and draft tweets. We used their comments to improve the work and launched the data story on October 1st. Which was pretty cool.
We also worked on our search tutorials and adaptations. Currently, two are available as part of the testing phase for All in the Wrist (Bones). So if you need some guidance on how to search Open Context take a look! Those, and an adaptation to Cow-culating Your Data, are part of our next couple Data Stories.
We’ve also shared our Fall 2022 Table of Contents and started a new article series for the Alexandria Archive’s news. This Series on Series, like AAI Reads!, is a set of articles we’ll be posting that explains how each Data Story fits within a particular series that cultivates data literacy in a particular way.
We also had some fun teaching and learning with the ARF Field School and Meghan attended a really cool training on Data Hazards that we’ll be incorporating into our work in the future. It was great to get to interact in person a bit more and to see how other people are approaching things like data and ethics.
Fall is a nice time to reflect on all the cool things we’ve done and consider where we’d like to go in the new year! Next quarter is a busy one for us, as we are in the middle of testing one data story, and have two others in preparation for release in the next couple of months. We’re in the fourth quarter, so it’s crunch time! But we’re ready, so it should be satisfying end, with many cool projects to share and evaluate.