The end of the second quarter of 2023 means we’re more than 50% done with the year. Oh… and that it’s a great time to catch y’all up on the work done by the Data Literacy Program (DLP)! With so much going on in the first quarter, we kept up the pace, getting even more ready to share.
We sailed into the second quarter with strong winds and had a few stops we wanted to make. These were to: submit a workshop to the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) Conference, share the first theme of Of Mycenaean Men for testing, begin collecting and processing responses to The Anatomy of a Technical Report, and begin working on the text supplements for the remaining Aggregative Series Data Stories. And the sweet smell of success is that we completed these!
We hinted at some interactive options earlier, in Cow-culating Your Data.
Our first stop was to submit a workshop for the FPAN’s Public Archaeology conference. We submitted our idea and they accepted it! So folks heading to Pensacola, Florida in the fall, come join us. We’re presenting a workshop that introduces and highlights our Interactive Series Data Stories, so it should be a good time.
At the conference, we’ll demonstrate the value of asynchronous interactive experiences to teach archaeological principles. And that’s just part one. In part two, we’ll run a live-action-role-playing (LARP) session. So LARPing archies, prepare yourself! And non-LARPING archies, consider incorporating interactive options into your public archaeology practice. (We probably won’t be playing Fields of Faunal Remains but you never know!)
Of Mycenaean Men is open for feedback until 27 July!
Springboarding from this, we assembled all the parts for Of Mycenaean Men: Public Archaeology Book Club. The DLP decided on the design for the individual book entries and combined those with our “How-to Guide” for the book club guide. We then put the last touches on our adaptation to Cow-culating Your Data with Spreadsheets, which works with the book club data. And finished The Open Context Keyword Search Tutorial.
These are two optional supplements to Of Mycenaean Men to help folks who want to explore the books in a more technical way. They can also help anyone search the suggested terms on Open Context. We hope to get the next two themes for Of Mycenaean Men out soon so that folks can see what other works we recommend as part of the full Data Story!
Beyond getting to share Of Mycenaean Men, we brought The Anatomy of a Technical Report to the next stage. As we mentioned in Act 9, we want to make sure we’re creating Data Stories that teach the skills needed in government, community, and cultural resource management archaeology. So after the data skills camp survey, we made one to understand what makes a good technical report.
We’re super excited to process those responses and use them to guide the Data Story. As another component of Anatomy, we will also host a panel (both live and recorded) of working professionals discussing technical reports as well. We hope to share more of this new Data Story soon and to continue working with professional archaeologists to make it a useful resource.
We have some fully operational Data Stories coming your way!
Lastly, we wanted to solidify the text for the other Data Stories in the Aggregative Series. These are Tome Reader: The AAI Reads Comics Book Club, which will focus on comics, and A Pun Goes Here: The AAI Reads Fiction Book Club, which will explore archaeology in fiction. Both have similar structures to Of Mycenaean Men but focus on different books. We also have both of these almost ready to share. However, instead of video blurbs, we’ll be providing slightly different summaries…
For A Pun Goes Here, the DLP duo are recording sultry soundbites for each book. We’re still deciding how to share these with you, so if folks have recommendations, don’t hesitate to reach out. For Tome Reader, we’ll be doing four-panel comics illustrated by the wonderful ama, who’ll be bringing Meghan and Paulina onto the page. For both, we’ve got our discussion guides almost finished, we’re just finalizing the best summaries we can.
With so much done it’s hard to believe there were even more things that we worked on! But there were, and they’ve set us up for a really strong third quarter behind the scenes. So stay tuned to see what we’re sharing next.
