Somerset Lost Islands, Hidden Landscapes Conference
Engage 2011: The Public Engagement Blog Carnival
Engage 2011 has now finished, and I’ll post more about Day 2 later, but one thing we thought would be a nice idea would be to attempt to continue the discussion online through a blog carnival. Each week for the next three weeks I’ll pose a question and then if you wish to respond, you have on week to do so. At the end of that week, I’ll post a summary of the responses.
To respond to a question, simply write a post on your own blog, or a short tweet, or a comment on this blog if you don’t have your own. Please don’t e-mail reponses though as I’d like the responses to be online where they may be read in full. To let me know you’ve responded, simply leave a link to your response as a comment on this blog post.
For the first week I’m going to pose the question (which is drawn from something asked at the last plenary session of Engage 2011), but I’m looking to you to suggest questions for the next two weeks (again, comment here or tweet me @m_law).
You don’t have to have attended the Engage conference to take part in the blog carnival.
This week’s question is: How do you place value on your engagement work?
How do you ensure you’re being inclusive? Is it better to work with some groups than others? Are there, for example, ‘soft targets’ who are more ready and willing to work with universities and is it a bad thing if you limit your engagement to these groups? If you were asked to prove that you’re paying more than lip service to engagement, how would you do so?
Let me know your thoughts by the evening of Thursday, December 8th. If you’re suggesting a new topic for next week please let me know by that date as well.
Engage 2011: Plenary Session.
This morning I have been at the start of Engage 2011, the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s conference in Bristol.
Sophie Duncan, deputy director of the NCCPE, opened the day with a show of hands from the different sectors represented at the conference, showing a good balance of Higher Education researchers and other professionals. One delegate, Rob Greenwood, travelled all the way from Memorial University in Newfoundland to learn about public engagement in Britain.
Prof. Mary Bownes of Edinburgh University explained the rationale behind the Edinburgh Beltane Beacon for Public Engagement was that to make a difference in global issues, it is essential to work across disciplines and with other agencies. As a result of partipating in Edinburgh Beltane, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Herriot-Watt University now award prizes for Public Engagement and Edinburgh University has Public Engagement written into job descriptions for academics.
Prof. Mary Stuart of University of Lincoln explained how the University, founded in 2001, was designed to be a civic university which has engagement with the city as its focus, and which trains students to be producers, not consumers.
Dr Steven Hill of the RCUK Strategy Unit spoke about the importance of research for building the economy, making people healthier, and enhancing people’s lives culturally. He described impact as the difference research makes to the world. He also noted that the Beacons for Public Engagement project has emphasised the diversity and creativity in Higher Education.
I’ll be back at the conference tomorrow and will blog more. You can also follow on Twitter with the hashtag #engage_2011.
This year’s TAG looks very interesting , with sessions that cover a number of things I’m interested in. I’m helping organise two sessions, one on coastal and island environmental archaeology, and one on public engagement. Abstracts are below. If you are interested in submitting a paper, please e-mail me or one of my fellow session organisers an abstract of up to 200 words by October 31st .
Negotiating Coasts and Islands: Landscape and Environmental Perspectives
Organisers Matt Law (Cardiff University), Jacqui Mulville (Cardiff University) and David Smith (University of Birmingham)
Emails LawMJ@cardiff.ac.uk, MulvilleJA@cardiff.ac.uk, D.N.Smith@bham.ac.uk
2011 marks thirty years since the publication of Brothwell and Dimbleby’s ‘Environmental Aspects of Coasts and Islands’, whose contributions presented several scientific frameworks for interpreting coastal and island sites and the biological assemblages they yield. Much has changed in thirty years, not least the refinement of isotopic analyses, the availability of larger palaeoecological datasets allowing more nuanced interpretation, and an increasing desire by workers in both camps to bridge the divide between cultural and environmental archaeology. In the UK, there has been a particularly rich range of coastal and island sites investigated thanks to numerous research, volunteer, and developer-led projects. Coasts may be either central or marginal to past societies, and are ecotones that offer diverse natural resources as well as opportunities to spread goods, livestock, people and ideas. This session welcomes papers which explore recent methodological and theoretical developments in the study and interpretation of past human – environment interactions in coastal and island settings.
The How and Why of Archaeology Outreach: Case Studies and Reflexive Approaches to Public Engagement
Organisers Lizzie Wright (University of Sheffield), Matt Law (Cardiff University), Jacqui Mulville (Cardiff University) and Hannah Russ (University of Sheffield)
Emails E.Wright@sheffield.ac.uk, LawMJ@cardiff.ac.uk, MulvilleJA@cardiff.ac.uk,H.Russ@sheffield.ac.uk
Outreach projects are a way that archaeologists can connect with and inspire the public. Done well, they can generate mutual benefits for archaeologists and the wider community, promoting the sharing of knowledge and skills, while increasing archaeology’s relevance and impact in society. Activities are often run by volunteers who put a lot of hard work into designing and implementing them.
However, despite the success of many of these projects, archaeology is struggling to convince the public of its worth. With the rise of university tuition fees in 2012, some university departments are concerned about how this will affect their intake. University departments and archaeology firms have started introducing outreach officers in an attempt to reach local people, and it is becoming increasingly important to have outreach experience on your CV when looking for a job. It is important to share experiences and assess the success of our projects in order to tackle the issues with public engagement.
This session aims to bring together people involved in outreach projects of any kind, and hopefully inspire more people to get involved with projects in the future, as well as to question how involvement in such activities have affected the way professionals engage with the archaeological record. The organisers invite papers on projects that have taken place, or on theoretical issues surrounding the idea of ‘outreach’. Papers which take a reflexive view of the impact of wider engagement on archaeological practice and interpretation are especially welcome.
Travels with my snail
I spent Sunday evening at the Miniature Music Festival at Gwdihŵ in Cardiff. When I came home to Bristol, and parked my car in a garage, I noticed a Cepaea hortensis was attached to the rear bumper. Evidently it had crawled up there in Cardiff and survived the motorway home. The next day, the snail was still there. I drove to Durham that day, and the snail remained attached for the entirety of the journey, almost 290 miles.
Cepaea hortensis on my car
I parked my car in the visitor car park of Van Mildert College, close to some bushes. In the morning, the snail had gone – there was a little trail and some excrement left behind, but the trail ended abruptly where evidently the snail had dropped off.
I was impressed at how firmly the snail was stuck to my car. It isn’t hard to see how Hygromia cinctella, a species introduced to Britain in the 1950s, has become so widespread in such a short time in the era of mass (human) transport. If my snail had been carrying fertilised eggs there would soon be a new population. As it is, if it survives to mate next year, it will be adding something new to the genetic diversity of Cepaea hortensis in the North East.
I’m wondering why it stayed attached the first night. Was the snail aware that it wasn’t in a very good environment in my garage, or is the length of its dormancy related to something else?
Public engagement at the Green Man Festival
Last weekend I had the great fortune to be part of a team which ran an archaeology-related educational stall in Einstein’s Garden, the science exploration area of the Green Man Festival near Crickhowell in Wales. Our overarching theme was the relationship between humans and animals in the past, and we ran a number of different activities at different times. One way we explored this was by displaying casts of the skulls of different dogs – an animal humans have changed an awful lot through selective breeding , as well as a cat, which really isn’t that different to a wild cat.
A variety of dog skulls
Dr Jacqui Mulville and artists Paul Evans reprised their Future Animals project, which invited children to imagine how people might change animals in the future.
Some of the future animals
We also demonstrated how people maximised their use of the animals they killed through costume, and showing people how to make coin purses out of empty milk cartons (which is making the most of our resources today).
I wrote a brief guide to the local archaeology, which we displayed at the stall, and authored an augmented reality layer for Layar, which I was unable to test due to poor phone signal. we also displayed some finds. Finally, a quick activity used to draw people in was the Washing Line of Time, where we invited people to pin some key dates on a washing line divided into different periods.
The Washing Line of Time
The weekend was a lot of fun, and we saw over a thousand people at the stall. That Einstein’s Garden exists is a wonderful thing, and I was very happy to have been invited. It was also a pretty steep learning curve. One of our activities was to excavate finds from a sand pit, which very quickly became a creche as parents headed off to see band, buy food etc. We withdrew the activity, and did not allow unaccompanied under-8s at the stall after that. We hope to go back next year, our heads are already buzzing with new ideas.
Over on Then Dig
My first post for Then Dig, part of Alun Salt’s ‘Distance’ theme, is now online. It’s about materials cast ashore by the ocean and their importance to island societies, using examples from the Outer Hebrides. The ‘Distance’ theme has produced some really strong, and diverse, blog posts. I’d recommend getting stuck in to all of them.
[Blogging Archaeology] Then Dig, now live
One of the outcomes of Colleen Morgan‘s recent SAA session and related blog carnival was that it might be a good idea to develop a group blog. Well, Colleen and Alun Salt have been quietly working hard over the past month or so, and Then Dig, hosted by UC Berkeley, went live on June 1st. The site covers the range of possible blog posts, but also features a monthly themed strand of posts. This month the theme, curated by Alun Salt, is ‘Distance’, and currently features an interesting opening post on methodological differences in osteoarchaeology between the UK and USA by Katy Myers, which reminded me of happy days studying osteoarchaeology with several American students at UCL. I’ve contributed to this theme as well, my post is due to be published on June 14th. Next month’s theme, curated by Terry Brock (who if I remember correctly was one of the original proponents of the group blog during the blog carnival), is on the subject of ‘Tools’, and Terry has posted an open call for posts here. I’m due to be curating a month of posts on archaeology and green issues later in the summer. Watch this space for more info.
A Day of Archaeology 2011
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a project which aims to highlight the diverse range of activities archaeologists may find themselves involved in. In the words of the Portable Antiquities Scheme blog, A Day of Archaeology 2011 is
a social media based project that will allow archaeologists working all over the world to document what they do on one day, July 29th 2011. This date coincides with the “Festival of British Archaeology“, which runs from 16th – 31stJuly 2011 and is one of the hundreds of events being held to celebrate archaeology in the UK and beyond.
Archaeologists taking part in the project will document their day through photography, video, facebook activity, twitter commentary and written blog posts. These will then be collated in realtime on the project’s dedicated website – www.dayofarchaeology.com, which will then provide a glimpse into a day in the life of people working in archaeology, from archaeological excavations to laboratories, universities, community archaeology groups, education services, museums and offices. This project is open to everyone working or volunteering in any aspect of archaeology from anywhere in the world – and even those who have defected! Currently, over 150 people and organisations have signed up. You could be next, so give archaeology a voice!
This innovative idea, follows on from the very successful “Day of Digital Humanities” and was dreamt up by Matthew Law and Lorna Richardson, two PhD researchers at Cardiff and UCL respectively. The project will be fully archived by the Scheme and if deemed successful, will be repeated next year.
If you would like to get involved, email the project team at dayofarchaeology@gmail.com and you will receive further details and account details for the website nearer the date. If you have no experience of using blog software, there’s information on how to use the systems provided on the site. If you have experience in graphic design, perhaps you could consider entering the design a logo competition, rules and more information can be found on the project’s website.
The project is supported by:
- The Portable Antiquities Scheme (providing server space for free)
- Council for British Archaeology
- L-P Archaeology
- Wessex Archaeology
- UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities, The Institute of Archaeology and CASPAR
The hashtag for this project is #dayofarch and can be used on tweets, blog posts and flickr photos to aggregate externally. Please consider using this tag if you refer to this project.
Contact: Day of Archaeology Team dayofarchaeology@gmail.com
Blogging Archaeology – Publishing a Blog Carnival
Logo by Colleen Morgan
The final question in Middle Savagery’s blogging archaeology carnival relates to publication:
How could we best capture the interplay, the multimedia experience of blogging as a more formalized publication? What would be the best outcome for this collection of insights from archaeological bloggers?
This is tricky, and I’m sure there will be a lot of varied responses from my fellow bloggers . I think a couple of things would be desirable. Firstly, I think the blog posts should be presented verbatim rather than summarised, with the addition of Colleen’s summaries as an introduction, rather like the introduction to a set of conference proceedings. If we’re talking about formalising the record of a blog discussion, it’d be nice to have a feel for the participants’ own style of writing (and thus a sense of what blogs are like). Perhaps each author’s contributions could be compiled into a single essay.
Secondly, I think the comments should be published as well – subject to the individual commenter’s permission. As last week’s question reveals, comments are part of the package.
Thirdly, I think the publication needs to come quickly. So much can change on the internet in such a short time that it’s quite undesirable to be still be waiting for the book of this in 2014. The last time I was involved in an internet-related session at a conference, the papers were published in SAA Archaeological Record for precisely that reason, which – given that this is an SAA session – seems appropriate.
I’m not really sold on peer review in this case. When I started responding to this carnival I had no idea formal publication was a possible outcome (which actually leaves me feeling a little vulnerable) and, although I do put quite a bit of consideration into what I’m going to write, blogging is a much more off-the-cuff and informal exercise than academic writing. Much of what has been written is opinion rather than research, and (perhaps I’m not being imaginative enough) I don’t see that peer review is appropriate for this kind of writing. Of course there should be a careful editorial eye passed over this, but I think the key with this collection is to embrace the informality.
