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Keep it Creative: The Creative Series and data literacy

February 2, 2023 by Paulina Przystupa

On the right is blue text on a white background listing: The Tutorial Series  The Creative Series (which is in a light blue rounded box);; The Dialogues Series; The Aggregative Series; The Solo Series; The Interactive Series; The Publication Series with each series on its own row; to the left is a grey box with text primarily in black. The text reads “Reading data involves understanding what data is, and what aspects of the world it represents. Working with data involves acquiring, cleaning, and managing it. Analyzing data involves filtering, sorting, aggregating, comparing, and performing other such analytic operations on it. Arguing with data involves using data to support a larger narrative intended to communicate a message to a particular audience. Bhargava, Rahul, et al. “Data murals: Using the arts to build data literacy.” The Journal of Community Informatics 12.3 (2016). Throughout this document, data stories are aligned to show how they can be used to reinforce Reading, Working, Analyzing, and Arguing with data.” Reading is in dark blue matching a circular book spine icon to the left of the text that is in white lines on the blue background; Working is in light blue matching a tabbed planner-style circular icon in white lines on the same light blue; Analyzing is in lavender corresponding to a circular computer icon in white lines on the same lavender; and Arguing is in pink corresponding to a circular text books icon in white lines

This is the series we’re highlighting in this post

For this Digital Data Stories (DDS) Series on Series entry, we’re exploring our Creative Series. Creative endeavors rarely enter into discussions of archaeological data literacy. And yet, the complex skills required to create art make them perfect for the palimpsest of narrative that is archaeology. Due to this, we thought leveraging creativity would be a great kind of Data Story.

While archaeologists study art and artistic skills in the past, we rarely apply this to our pedagogy. Sometimes, we even use art to communicate our conclusions and then forget to acknowledge it as an important way to engage with, or generate, data! On occassion, we’ll even draw artifacts, or hire archaeological illustrators, for some tasks. And then consider other skills, like photography or graphic design, tasks anyone can do.

To acknowledge that illustration, photography, and many other creative media are important to archaeology, Creative Series Data Stories provide non-traditional, intellectually rigorous, exercises in working with open archaeological data. These engage users in classroom and non-classroom settings through artistic expression and introspection.

In the Creative Series, we teach data literacy skills through experiential learning connected with available open data. One way we did this was by selecting one archaeological data set and generating words associated with it. We ordered these into a prompt calendar to get folks to explore themes from the data set and encourage them to think creatively about the words. 

A book that looks like a neural network with law data social visual physical cultural media digital and health written on it

Just a few of the kinds of literacy people need now

We chose data-driven prompts, in that the themes we picked come from a data set, to focus creative energy towards exercising literacy skills in an atypical but important way. Art is a craft and anything along that spectrum requires dedication to create. So, something like a consistent prompt list encourages people to cultivate that craft. To combine that with specific content, such as archaeological data, allows participants to focus–in the short term–on a specific kind of creative project. 

These Data Stories focus on reading, working, analyzing, arguing, and communicating with data through a creative lens. They do this by leveraging existing literacies in creative crafts to re-examining how we read, work with, analyze, argue, and communicate with archaeological data, seeing creative modes, such as haiku, as another way to communicate the narrative of archaeology. This approach engages a different kind of learner and acknowledges how creativity is an important part of humanizing the past.

On a dark blue banner in white reads "A Digital Data Story" followed by in light blue coloring reads "It’s All in the Wrist (Bones): Archaeological Data as Artistic Inspiration" under the dark blue bar is a thin light blue bar. Below that is a large pound (#) sign in light blue. This relates to the smaller pound (#) sign below that reads "This Data Story contains no images of human remains." Between the two tags centered is a piece of animal bone tinted blue digitally. Below that is a 0 to 10 bar measure indicating hte piece is 10cm in length

All in the Wrist is our first Creative Series Data Story. We hope you enjoy it!

In addition, Creative Series Data Stories draw from existing practices that inspire people to create and engage with material. We also incorporate best practices by pointing to additional resources. These include the search tutorial and our tips on safely sharing content, to make sure people share their work ethically and in ways that protect their creative rights.

Furthermore, we wrote these Data Stories so that anyone can adapt them! They’re ready to reuse for different archaeological data sets, in various educational settings, and engage diverse archaeological audiences. We can all work to improve our archaeological data literacy by letting our minds play and enjoy making something archaeology inspired. We hope you feel the same and are excited to incorporate such practices into your own pedagogy!

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Category News| Open Educational Resources| Projects Tags archaeology| data literacy| datastories| open data| public engagement| teaching

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