In October 2020, the AAI launched a new Data Literacy Program with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities through AAI’s current NEH Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grant. The AAI’s Data Literacy Program will widen and diversify community engagement with cultural heritage data, providing much-needed scaffolding to guide professionals, students, and lifelong learners in thoughtful engagement with research data. Mellon funding over three years will support two postdoctoral researchers with expertise in public engagement and reproducible research practices, who will craft open access “data stories” backed by deeper layers of open and reproducible analytic and visualization code, as well as primary research data. This approach will open doors to multiple levels of engagement with datasets, linking high-level narrative with the behind-the-scenes analytical and interpretive steps used to select, judge, filter, analyze, and visualize research data.
Most students and museum visitors engage only with the visible tip of the iceberg of archaeological evidence. After moving through different levels of presentation, learners will be better equipped to engage in their own original research using open archaeological data. This will demonstrate how archaeological databases offer rich and largely untapped interpretive potential.
The Data Literacy Program is being developed by a team of postdoctoral researchers, L. Meghan Dennis and Paulina Przystupa.
Project-Related Communications and Publications:
- June 2020: Project announcement: AAI receives Mellon Foundation grant for data literacy program in archaeology
- October 2020: Data Literacy Team is announced
- February 2021: The AAI / Open Context team talks about their new projects in a webinar with the International History Students and Historians group (see this blog post summary with a link to the video)
- February 2021: Data Stories, Character Sheets, and… Cows?
- April 2021: Act I: The Establishment of Data Stories
- April 2021: Literacy = People
