Building Capacity and Communities of Practice in Digital Heritage and Archaeology

Author(s): Ethan Watrall

Year: 2019

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As digital methods have become ubiquitous and critical in archaeology and heritage, the challenge of teaching those methods has become more complex. More importantly, we’re being faced with an equally important challenge - how do we build and foster communities in which scholars are connected through a shared perspective on both the methods and the thoughtful application of those methods. It is within this context that this paper will explore an approach developed at Michigan State University that speaks to both teaching (and learning) digital methods and the development of communities of practice in which those methods are relevant. The approach itself is informed by the activities of three separate initiatives: The Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Program, the MSU Department of Anthropology Digital Heritage Fieldschool, and the National Endowment for the Humanities funded Institute for Digital Archaeology Method & Practice. Ultimately, the goal of this talk is not just to discuss the Michigan State University approach, but to suggest a suite of best practices that could be adapted and adopted in a wide variety of institutional, professional, or scholarly settings.

Cite this Record

Building Capacity and Communities of Practice in Digital Heritage and Archaeology. Ethan Watrall. Presented at The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM. 2019 ( tDAR id: 451397)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23958