Archaeology AskHistorians: Public-driven Inquiry and Outreach in the Digital Age

Summary

With over 640,000 subscribers and 1.6 million unique monthly views, AskHistorians is the Internet’s largest public history education forum. AskHistorians’ simple Q&A format connects people with questions about the past to those with expert-level knowledge in the topic at hand, be it armored snails or erotic Moche pottery. Users of the popular, if controversial, social media site reddit post questions to the AskHistorians forum, and receive responses from a diverse panel of volunteers selected solely on demonstrated proficiency, not on outside credentials. AskHistorians is also an experiment in the public as a driver of historical education and research: users ask the questions, they vote on questions to increase visibility, and any user may answer, provided it meets the rigorous standards of scholarly quality. AskHistorians allows anyone with Internet access to set the course for the research and discussion of the past. This poster discusses the public experience, understanding, and misunderstanding of archaeology as represented in 6 years of AskHistorians, as well as the role of internet forums and social media in public archaeology. We examine how publicly directed engagement can inform our approaches, particularly in online context. Lastly, we evaluate social media strategies to connect with an alienated, misinformed public.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22688