The Data Literacy Program (DLP) section of the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) had a smooth, though very busy, end to 2024. We reused and reposted existing materials to coincide with our annual inspiration month prompts, published another Data Story, and wrote the story of our Data Stories.
Just after we set our goals for the quarter, Drs. Karina Croucher and Hannah Cobb of the Teaching and Learning in Archaeology and Heritage Roundtables invited us to contribute to a super cool project – an edited volume about innovative ways to teach archaeology. To meet that project’s deadline, we spent a good chunk of Q4 writing about Data Stories. Besides being a great chance to reflect on all the ways that Data Stories teach archaeology, working on that chapter inspired us to develop a brand new Data Story!
You may remember that our Data Stories are organized into series. One of these is our Publication Series where we “teach specific data literacy skills through the use of pre-written articles“. Because we were already writing such a “pre-written article,” we thought it was a great chance to develop a Data Story to go with it. We’ll release this new Data Story as a pre-print soon, to align with when our chapter goes out for peer review and editing.
This Publication Series Data Story will consist of a reading guide that pairs with a variety of existing articles (not just ours!) about data literacy and teaching, as well as a text-based game (like FAIR Finds) that guides you through the process of making a teaching-with-narrative product. We hope this Data Story helps folks learn about the value of teaching using Data Stories and inspires folks to make their own!
The publication-of-record version of FAIR Finds includes an all new references and glossary document to support educators and players.
Speaking of FAIR Finds, one of our goals for Q4 was to publish another Data Story and FAIR Finds was it! We completed the publication-of-record version of that Data Story and shared it in November. We’re so glad to see more Data Stories get to the publication stage and look forward to sharing those lined up for publication in 2025.
Besides FAIR Finds, we also got A Pun Goes Here close to publication. The reviewers for A Pun Goes Here had great suggestions to improve that Data Story. A number of those suggestions also turned into unique materials, so we decided to delay final publication of A Pun Goes Here for January 2025 so folks will see all those materials as a cluster of posts! You may have already seen one of these in the article published last week, Finding fun archaeology-related fiction.
Besides working on Data Stories and writing the story of our Data Stories, we also worked on the syllabus for the Archaeological Data Literacy Practicum. With it almost finished, we’ll be developing the actual teaching materials for it in the near future. You can learn more about the practicum in our short piece in The SAA Archaeological Record, which came out in November 2024.
We’re so excited this quarter to work on more Data Stories and consider the next stage of the Data Literacy Program. So, keep checking the AAI News for updates.
Image Credits: “FAIR Finds Header” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the Data Literacy Program (DLP) licensed CC BY-SA includes an adaptation of “FAIRFinds_FirstPage” and “fairfindssplash2” by L. Meghan Dennis from the Data Literacy Program (DLP) licensed CC BY-SA adapted (cropped, recolored, resized, reoriented) from an Adobe Stock image and some pieces with provenance forthcoming.
