We’re highlighting the Interactive Series in this post.
For this Digital Data Stories (DDS) Series on Series entry, we’re exploring our Interactive Series. Play is an integral part of human creativity, and interacting with others during play is an important way that we learn. Beyond that, places, materials, buildings, people, and belongings start to have meaning to us through interaction. With that in mind, we wanted to capture this through Data Stories– playful pedagogy through interactive works based on real archaeological data.
The Data Stories within the Interactive Series consist of play-based interactives written by the Alexandria Archive Institute’s (AAI) Data Literacy Program (DLP) team. These open educational resources might include digital interactive fiction, solo-play games utilizing dice and random number generators, multiplayer games that involve role-play, and other ways to play and engage with archaeological data.
Those who want to know more about the cross-overs between archaeology and popular video games can check out the archaeogaming wiki, the work of L. Meghan Dennis, and articles over at Advances in Archaeological Practice to find out more.
Data Stories in the Interactive Series cultivate data literacy by concentrating on learning to read, work with, analyze, argue, and communicate with data through interaction. While we paired some interactives with specific open data sets, many can be adapted for different temporal or topical content. Our “How-To” guides, included with various Interactive Series Data Stories, provide guidance for how to do this.
We’ll be explaining how to use Twine in one of our “How-To” guides.
Interactive Series Data Stories teach the components of archaeological data literacy and encourage experiential learning through imagination and curiosity. In addition, we designed these Data Stories to impart best practices and encourage ethical scholarship from the start. These Data Stories are interactive experiences on multiple platforms to allow for (re)play online, in-person, or potentially hybrid. Through this participants interact with each other or with the material itself to explore archaeological data. By doing so they become co-creators of archaeological knowledge. by constructing their own data-driven narratives.
This kind of interactive engagement is integral to ethical practice in archaeology because it encourages an exploration of the consequences of specific choices regarding archaeological data and knowledge. Through these Data Stories we acknowledge that archaeological data – and the people who create it – are part of a subjective experience. We hope that by probing that subjectivity, we can more accurately understand how many perspectives there are in observing the archaeological record and creating archaeological data.
Here are two examples of our Interactive Series Data Stories.
This perspective helps archaeological learners at any stage understand how the archaeologist participates in the creation of data. This work extends theoretical lenses including feminist practice, decolonizing practice, and reproducible research practices. These diverse approaches to archaeology all disclose how and why archaeologists make analytic decisions. Interacting with these choices places the archaeologist within the construction of the scientific narrative.
We hope these Data Stories remind all archaeological learners to consider the consequences of archaeological practice alongside the questions we ask. With that, we hope you enjoy our Interactive Series Data Stories, however you choose your adventure!
