Where does your community live? The TrowelBlazers experience.

Summary

The TrowelBlazers project is a community-sourced digital archive of short biographies and images of women whose significant contributions to the fields of archaeology, geology, and paleontology have often been overlooked. Originating in a conversation on Twitter between four early-career researchers, the project began life as a tumblr blog designed to share inspirational images and stories of women researchers in the past. Different social media accounts allow us to interact with a number of communities, including students, academics, professional archaeologists, archivists, and museum staff, as well as members of the general public and professional organizations. We have had coverage in mainstream media, hosted a wikipedia editathon, coauthored a chapter in an ebook, and written several guest posts on blogs of like-minded collaborating organisations, such as institutional archives. By not only focusing on individual women but also identifying the networks in which they worked, we have been able to develop a uniquely connected approach with multiple partners in real-world engagement with advocacy groups and the wider public. This paper explores how understanding how multiple audiences engage with different social media, online, and real-life aspects of the TrowelBlazers project is key to maintaining interest, creating new content, and building awareness of women’s contributions.

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.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Not Just Blogging Archaeology - Media and Social Media's Influence on Archaeology

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