It was a quiet summer here in the Data Literacy Program section of the Alexandria Archive Institute’s (AAI’s) News page. Although we shared a lot of our Sourcing Series segments early in the summer, we took a short break after that. But, behind the scenes, we’ve got a lot of Data Stories work simmering.
We set multiple goals for the third quarter that built on the work started during the first half of the year. These included participating in the Networking Archaeological Data and Communities (NADAC) in-person workshop, publishing another Data Story, giving another data literacy and data visualization talk for the Archaeological Research Facility (ARF) at the University of California – Berkeley’s field school, and continuing work with the Archaeological Data Literacy Practicum.
Because NADAC is another great project of AAI you can hear about it the AAI News. So, we’ll wait until they share their recap of the summer workshop rather than speak for them. All we want to say is that it was a wonderful time and we were excited to share space with those amazing scholars! Oh, and that something we prepared for the NADAC in-person workshop might become a Data Story Short, but we make no promises!
Our second goal was to publish another Data Story, and we did. People interested in incorporating some solo and slow practice to their archaeology can check out The Road Most Traveled: An Archaeological Survey Guide. We’re so grateful for our peer reviewers from the end of 2023 who took the time to review our two Solo Series Data Stories. It’s now available, so for anyone who saw our presentation at TAG you can now get a fully published version!
Here’s Version 1.0 in comparison to Version 2.0, the publication-of-record. Can you spot all the updates we made to the first page?
We also had an amazing time exploring data literacy and visualization with the students of the ARF field school. It was great to meet and work alongside a bunch of archaeology students coming back from the field. You might remember that we gave a similar presentation back in 2022. While similar, we adjusted the old workshop to work with the needs of the students of the 2024 field school. Specifically, we wanted them to explore the idea of, and to work with, legacy data. Thankfully for them, rather than using legacy data from a long time ago, they were working with born-digital spreadsheets made by the ARF field school a couple of years ago.
However, just because those data were created recently doesn’t mean they were perfect. As part of the talk, we had the students read and work through parts of Gabbing about Gabii and consider the issues brought up in that Data Story in relation to the data created by the 2022 field school participants and what they wanted to do for the materials they recovered in 2024.
The students seemed to have a fun time getting to work with other students’ data as well as think about themselves as data creators. The talk wrapped up with a longer Q and A about getting jobs in archaeology, partly in response to Paulina’s own archaeology story.
The DLP’s Paulina also gave a guest lecture this quarter exploring the relationship between archaeological data literacy and historical maps. Photo by Katie Brewer from personal collection used with permission.
The one goal for the third quarter that we did not accomplish was finalizing the syllabus for the Archaeological Data Literacy Practicum (ADLP). Thankfully, after reviewing the materials we plan to use for it, we realized that we’d already done a lot of work for the ADLP! There’s a lot to finesse, but we’ve got a solid outline for the program. And we’ll be having an article advertising that work coming out in November with The SAA Archaeological Record!
We’re hoping in the next quarter to shift focus and get more work done on the Archaeological Data Literacy Practicum so we can run a pilot in 2025. Regardless, we’re excited to share even more Data Stories in the next few months (we’ve got at least two almost ready for publication), so keep checking the AAI News for updates.
