We finished the first quarter of 2023 on March 31st! That means it’s time to update y’all on the work done by the Data Literacy Program (DLP). After a flurry of fun finishing 2022, we tidied up a bit after being blown around. During that time, our regular readers have seen a flurry of AAI News articles updating y’all on our work. However, there’s more to see under the surface.
For the beginning of 2023, we had some rough waters to navigate to find the shoals of our quarterly goals. But we knew what they were. They were to: get feedback about our Creative Series Data Stories, present at the Society for California Archaeology meetings, set our 2023 production calendar, and design a reproducible Professional Development Workshop.
The Alexandria Archive Institute and Open context attended the 2023 Society for California Archaeology Annual Meetings!
And we made progress on all of these, though in slightly different ways than we intended. Because we want to create workshops and resources that current and incoming archaeology professionals will use, we bumped a number of Data Story ideas up in the timeline and reorganized our priorities.
This meant that a couple of things are still safely kept in the hold (like the Creative Series surveys). But we had tailwinds on developing a professional development workshop! While it’s not reproducible–yet–we’ve decided to design a data skills camp to run over the summer.
We decided to develop this to focus on the skills archaeology jobs in government, community, and cultural resource management need. This sector is seeing a huge demand for employees right now. So, to make sure what we teach the skills employers want, we’re collecting feedback about what those are. We shared our ideas in-person at the SCAs and we’ll also send the survey to anyone interested sharing their thoughts, so please, reach out.
As a note, our skills workshop will focus on archaeological data skills, to fit the greater mission of AAI/OC. There are other great programs out there such as the California Tribal Unilateral Apprenticeship Program and the Palomar College Archaeology Program that provide training in the other skills that archaeology requires.
Paulina bright and early stands by the “Let’s Make a Data Story!” poster at the Society for California Meetings
We also crossed the SCA meeting off our to do list! Paulina represented the DLP in person and collaborated with Meghan to design an awesome poster. Printed on canvas with Sarah’s help, our dynamic poster invited people to stop and chat about it. For those of y’all that missed it, we’ll share a digital version soon.
Squeezing in right before the storm, we got a chance to discuss and solidify our 2023 production calendar! To maximize the efforts of both Postdocs, the team set a Data Stories timeline. This charted a clear course for the rest of the year, hopefully streamlining Data Story sharing. And that feels great!
We also had the chance to pick up some cargo that went overboard in previous quarters, like finishing our Of Mycenaean Men book videos. Beyond that, X marks the spot for the other Data Stories we’ll return for in the next few months. With a well drawn map, we hope that this coming quarter will be smooth and swift sailing to release more Data Stories into the wild.
