Of Mycenaean Men: The Public Archaeology Book Club

This exercise is best suited to those with an interest in defining data, understanding archaeological data, or discussing the impacts of archaeological data on modern society. Users should have some familiarity with group discussion or book clubs, but previous experience with data or archaeology is not required.

This page provides access to the resource in two ways. The first is through a series of digital documents that represent the complete Digital Data Story. These include the:

1. Teaching Guide
2. Book Club Guide
3. Adult Nonfiction Book List
4. Adult Nonfiction Discussion Guide
5. Open Context Keyword Search Tutorial
6. Spreadsheet Tutorial

A single-PDF for the combined Digital Data Story materials is available here. These materials are also available through the Digital Data Stories code repository on Codeberg. The R markdown files on Codeberg provide the text and primary images from the electronic documents, minus additional formatting, and with only a general placement of decorative images. The R markdown files may be altered and forked from the repository for custom use with the original or different book data sets. To more accurately recreate the dynamic documents for the adult nonfiction book list and discussion guide in R markdown, users should download the book data table alongside the code and images so that the code pulls the correct materials. This code represents our commitment to open science, data literacy, and transparency in our process.

These materials, either through the single-PDF publication of record, dynamic digital documents, or the code, are designed to be used synergistically. However, any piece of this Digital Data Story may be used separately or re-ordered according to the requirements of the user or according to specific educational goals. Of Mycenaean Men and its resources are free to use with the text licensed CC BY and other licenses as noted for specific images within the Digital Data Story. In addition, this Digital Data Story references Cow-culating Your Data with Spreadsheets and R (CC BY) and includes an adaptation of Part One of that Digital Data Story as Part Five of Of Mycenaean Men.

Thank you so much for using our educational resources! Although this Digital Data Story is published, if you or your participants have the time, please consider contributing an open peer review for our ongoing review process. Such updates will be noted below and first available through the digital documents and Codeberg repository prior to PDF updating.

To attribute this Digital Data Story or any of its parts, please use our suggested citation:

Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis, 2025, “Of Mycenaean Men: The Public Archaeology Book Club”, Data Stories Program, Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context, Published Online, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7QV3JP7.

Preprint page published: June 2025

Page updates: July and August 2026 – The Data Literacy Program (DLP) requested open peer reviews for this resource in 2025 and received no targeted reviews. Instead, we revised this Digital Data Story based on suggestions to the other book club resources and it is now considered published. Major updates included the addition of section pages in the book club guides, edits to the text documents, and updated or additional images. There are other minor edits captured by the Codeberg histories and by comparison with Version 2.0, which is archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15678929. There was also minor textual revisions to this page.

Image credit: “Of Mycenaean Men header” by Paulina Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY-SA includes the “AAI reads logo” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP adapted (cropped, recolored, resized) from “Digital Data Stories Logo” by L. Meghan Dennis from the DLP licensed CC BY-SA, which is adapted from an Adobe Stock image.