In October 2025, the Data Literacy Program ran the Archaeological Data Literacy Practicum (ADLP). Over five weeks scholars learned to read, work with, analyze, argue and communicate with data that they co-created through the activities of the Practicum. Here we recount a few highlights and share links to the syllabus, videos, and other materials to help you run your own version or incorporate its activities into your own course!
The ADLP was a great chance to teach archaeological data literacy using a mixed media approach. While you can read the details for each week in the syllabus, archived here, an important feature was that the practicum alternated synchronous weeks with asynchronous weeks to demonstrate data literacy through the content and structure of the course.
For our synchronous weeks one, three, and five, scholars attended an interactive lecture where they listened, took notes, asked questions, and shared experiences through chat and discussion. You can get archived copies of those slides here on Zenodo. During the final meeting, scholars participated in a workshopping session so they could evaluate their ideas before submission of their final projects. This session also prepared them for the optional mini-conference held after the end of the Practicum. Workshopping was a great chance for scholars to share ideas, receive feedback, and practice giving constructive feedback. They also learned and explored different kinds of critique such as the Critical Response Process®, peer review, and Epoiesen-style responses.
Between these meetings were the asynchronous, self-paced weeks two and four. During these, scholars worked through homework assignments that created the data they used in their final projects and watched videos to explain different concepts. Watching videos produced by the DLP allowed scholars to explore data issues around mapping and the development of research questions. These videos, Finding Reliable and Usable Maps Online, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), What do you mean “I don’t have a question” ?, and Introduction to archaeological interpretation and understanding your audience are available on YouTube and archived on Zenodo. Asynchronous materials like those helped scholars get a quick introduction to important data-related topics and posting them helps others that might want to learn or teach the data skills of the Practicum themselves.
Beyond the skills built over the five weeks, we added a mini-conference as a chance for scholars to present their projects to a wider community after the conclusion of the formal Practicum. Between the end of the practicum and the mini-conference, scholars received feedback from the instructor and modified their projects based on that feedback. In addition, they had time to prepare a presentation about those projects, which is a little different than making the thing itself. The mini-conference was a lot of fun and had great response from the community-members who came to support our scholars!
Overall the October 2025 ADLP was a success and we got great feedback to improve the event for the future. We’re proud of all the work our scholars did and are grateful to the attendees of the Mini-Conference who came out to support them. We hope to continue this work in the future so if you or someone in your community is interested, please sign up to stay in touch and learn more or reach out about organizing your own version!
