Listicles and Literacy – The Aggregative Series to promote data literacy

For this Digital Data Stories (DDS) Series on Series entry, we’re introducing our Aggregative Series. While you may have misread that as our aggressive series, this series aggregates existing resources that teach archaeological data literacy. Currently, these will act as both recommendations for existing work from our staff  and a Data Story, guiding groups through these resources in an engaging way.

Data Stories in the Aggregative series provide curated selections of archaeology and heritage-related content outside of regular academic resources. Our initial Data Stories in this series focus on fiction and non-fiction books. We organized these into three book clubs: one for non-fiction readers, one for fiction readers, and one for readers of comics. Although we hope that all readers want to read everything we suggest, each of these leverages different literacies.

We designed these resources to familiarize people with the breadth and depth of archaeological influence on society and culture.  We hope to expand these to include Data Stories that focus on music, art, and virtual experiences. Such work highlights how people can practice data literacy in may ways. 

These recommended materials are presented as resource guides focused on DLP identified themes. For example, Of Mycenaean Men has three thematic questions: 

1. What are data? 
2. What is archaeology?
3. What is the impact of archaeological data on modern human society?

These help relate the books back to archaeological data literacy. However, you can adapt each Data Story for use in a variety of settings, with resources from different lists combined to suit individual needs. For example, while there are four books in each theme for Of Mycenaean Men, one can use just one book from theme or only read the books from one theme. Or mix-and-match them according to what you or your community is interested in!

Beyond the resource guides, we have included keyword search guides and an adaptation of one of our Tutorial Series Data Stories to add a more technical approach to these works. For our book clubs, we  created a book data set that audiences can engage with if they want to know more about the books. 

Beyond technical skills, Data Stories within the Aggregative Series cultivate archaeological data literacy by practicing reading, working with, arguing, and communicating with data. All the Data Stories in this series provide great places to read and work with data. Specifically, understanding data from a narrative, rather than a table or other structured source, is its own skill. In addition, the search tutorial helps people  practice how to find real, usable, archaeological data. 

These are great Data Stories for cultivating the arguing and communicating aspects of data literacy. We hope that audiences to engage deeply with the material guided by our recommended search terms and discussion questions. Talking about these with others, or writing out responses, are great ways to practice your arguing and communicating literacy skills.  

We hope you enjoy the works in our Aggregative Series! We’ll be sharing these Data Stories soon, so for those of you with a love of lists, keep your eyes open and ready – we should be releasing our alpha test of Of Mycenaean Men soon.