Social Media as a Tool for Research and Outreach in Bioarchaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social media has provided bioarchaeology a tool for collaboration with colleagues around the globe; interaction with legislators, the press, and the general public; a means to quickly disseminate research; an educational tool for reaching a younger audience; and, a means to employ the latest Web 2.0 technologies. The BioAnthropology News Network (BAN) was established to capitalized on these possibilities. BAN fosters cross-disciplinary interaction using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Bioarchaeology utilizes the sciences and humanities to explore life in the past, emphasizing an integrative anthropological approach to understanding our place in the natural world -- not surprisingly, it has benefited the most from the BAN platform, with 8X the number of posts of other areas of anthropology. It draws ~23,000 viewers combined, fostering collegial interaction in the discussion of even contentious topics, providing teaching tools for professors and students, networking scholars across 100 countries on all seven continents. We have developed a video series provides depth to topics making the news, have compiled a massive database of bioarchaeology publications for research use, offer a weekly suite of educational modules, and are working on introducing 3D components to permit in-depth exploration of research in a virtual reality environment.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25829