Outdated Outreach? Responding to Public Critiques of 21st-Century Online Community Engagement
Author(s): Kathryn L Sikes
Year: 2017
Summary
What assumptions underlie archaeologists’ interpretive strategies for the public dissemination of research results? Could we be more effective at descendant collaboration and public outreach by applying best practices drawn from related disciplines such as museum studies, oral history, and historic preservation? Perhaps it is time to rethink our choices of media, language, web platform, content, and target audience in response to descendant requests and public commentary. This paper presents two outreach strategies for Clover Bottom (Donelson, Tennessee). The first is a collaborative research effort with descendants that aims to provide a public service in helping families to trace genealogies via Ancestry.com message boards. This site is linked to a second, hosted by ESRI Story Maps, that provides a non-linear, visual, and interactive public experience of archaeological data in the context of archival research focused on family experiences over time.
Cite this Record
Outdated Outreach? Responding to Public Critiques of 21st-Century Online Community Engagement. Kathryn L Sikes. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435548)
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Keywords
General
Descendant Community
•
Genealogy
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Public Archaeology
Geographic Keywords
North America
•
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
antebellum/Reconstruction
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 722