Week 10 Digital Public Archaeology

Goals for this week

This week is about finding the compelling story, the enchanting story, the heart-centered work of archaeology.

Listen

Right-click and save-as this link to download the audio file

Read

  • Tringham, Ruth. 2020. Closely Observed Layers: Storytelling and the Heart in Kisha Supernant, Jane Eva Baxter, Natasha Lyons, Sonya Atalay (eds). Archaeologies of the Heart, Springer, Cham, 2020. 239-252 link
  • Beale, Gareth; Robertson, Lizzie; Smith, Nicole 2025. “What Next for Archaeological Representation?: Towards a creative practice of digital archaeology”. Epoiesen. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22215/epoiesen/2025.1

and then read at least one of:

  • Collar, A. and S. Eve. 2021. Fire for Zeus: using Virtual Reality to explore meaning and experience at Mount Kasios. World Archaeology 52.3: 521-538. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1920458 (alternative link).
  • Fitzpatrick, Alex. 2019. No Margins, No Word Counts, No Masters! Experimenting With ‘Zines for Archaeological Outreach 2019 #PATC link
  • González-Tennant, Edward. 2010. Virtual Archaeology and Digital Storytelling: A Report from Rosewood, Florida. The African Diaspora Archaeology Network, September 2010 Newsletter. link
  • Vrettakis, Ektor et al. 2019. Narralive – Creating and experiencing mobile digital storytelling in cultural heritage Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage 15.e00114 link

…or you can search out the work of Colleen Morgan and colleagues at the University of York, who are leaders in the field. Or browse Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology.

Do not get hung up on the particularities of any specific technology discussed; I want you to focuss on the why rather than the how, and to consider impact, meaning, and affect.

Do

Some other options you can play with, if time/energy/interest permits:

It’s getting towards the end of term and I don’t want to clobber you.

  • Storymapping is a useful way for communicating archaeological materials to a wider public. A storymap can be a website that mixes storytelling with mapping. It’s related to ‘scrollytelling’, which similarly mixes datavisualization and annotation with long-form journalism. See for instance how effectively this piece on early women archaeologists uses a story-map framework to highlight an often-overlooked aspect of the history of archaeology. That piece uses software from the GIS company Esri (which might, actually, be available to you via the Library). You can make your own version using the free KnightLab StoryMap.js framework. So if you’re looking to push yourself this week, why not give that a try and use it to tell me the story of say one of these early Canadian archaeologists?
  • Or you could build a 3d hologram projector
  • Or maybe play and write a solo journaling RPG game
  • Or maybe we can communicate something about the past through data sonification?

Record and Reflect

Your github repository is where you will deposit all of the artefacts you make for this course, including your reflections. Depositing everything you make gives me a vision of your process and learning, so I encourage you to be expansive. Make sure to ‘invite user shawngraham’ to your repository so that I may view it.

  1. As you’ve done for every week, make another notes.md entry and put it in your github repository for week 7.
  2. In your reflective journal, drawing on your annotations of what you’ve read, your notes from what you’ve listened to, and the work you’ve done (both the successes and the not-quite-successes), discuss some ways in which a creative mindset might change what archaeology (or history for that matter) could be for you as a scholar. Imagine doing an MA in Public History based on this work. Begin the reflection by quoting (w/ citation) one sentence from the readings that resonates with you and why. You might select something that is personally meaningful, or leaves you confused, or makes you happy, or intrigues you to know more… etc. Put your journal in your repo.

Log Your Work

You can log the link to your repository in this form