MicroPasts and research-led public archaeology
Author(s): Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert; Daniel Pett; Andrew Bevan; Chiara Bonacchi
Year: 2015
Summary
A core aim of public archeology is to study and strengthen the public value of archaeological research. In pursuing this goal, the MicroPasts project sees archaeological research, public engagement with archaeology and the study of the cultural, social and economic implications of citizen participation as overlapping and mutually reinforcing areas, that can generate high quality new resources (data, enhanced interpretations, skills, funding, etc.) and processes (e.g. methodological innovations, learning, etc.). Digital technologies can act to super-charge these opportunities for effective community and crowd-fuelled research.
MicroPasts supports both online and offline collaborations between academics and other members of the public in order to: produce open research data together via crowd-sourcing; discuss how this data can be used for future research projects; and crowd-fund community archaeology agendas. This paper will introduce the MicroPasts project and consider the strengths and weaknesses of the public archaeology model behind it. Thereafter, it will discuss the value of digital participation in the project for both academics and communities. It will present: (a) the results of the analysis of socio-demographic, attitudinal and behavioural data relating to volunteer participation; and (b) a summary of the archaeological analysis allowed by the open data created via crowd-sourcing.
SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.
Cite this Record
MicroPasts and research-led public archaeology. Chiara Bonacchi, Andrew Bevan, Daniel Pett, Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396260)
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