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Author Notes:

John Sigmier, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA USA, E-mail: jsigmier@sas.upenn.edu

We would like to first thank the Penn Engineering instructors who invited us to submit projects: Chris Murphy, Swapneel Sheth, and Benedict Brown. We thank the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, especially Stewart Varner, and the Penn Libraries, especially Sasha Renninger and Laurie Allen, for all their support. The Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, the Penn Museum, the Louis J. Kolb Society, and the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World graduate program made this research possible. We would also like to thank all the engineering and other programming students we have worked with: Ethan Abramson, Ashutosh Agrawal, Christopher Besser, Sacha Best, Ziyu Chen, Rachel Cohen, Feifei Duan, Anvith Ekkati, Alexander Fiuk, Yashus Gowda, Benjamin Greenberg, Xin Guo, Man Hu, Yinting Huang, Andrej Ilić, Yujie Li, Matthew Liang, Karin Lin, Weixi Ma, Nico Marzaro, Long Nguyen, Anton Relin, Colin Roberts, Talia Statsky-Frank, James Taggart, Brian Ting, Kevin Trinh, Tristrum Tuttle, and Owain West. Finally, we should thank our graduate student colleagues in ancient history for their patient participation in this process: Bryn E. Ford, Jordan Rogers, and Gavin Blasdel.

Subjects:

Keywords:

  • digital humanities
  • pedagogy
  • mobile data collection
  • digital project management
  • archaelogical training

Collaborative Approaches to Archaeology Programming and the Increase of Digital Literacy Among Archaeology Students

Tools:

Journal Title:

Open Archaeology

Volume:

Volume 5

Publisher:

, Pages 137-154

Type of Work:

Article | Final Publisher PDF

Abstract:

Digital methods provide archaeologists with ever-increasing opportunities to collect more data about the past in new formats. These larger evidentiary datasets, in turn, help us to address questions about the human past with increasing precision. To take full advantage of these opportunities, archaeologists must develop digital literacy skills and learn how to lead digital projects. Here, we describe seven digitally-based projects we have undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania in order to create new tools for archaeological data collection and sharing, as well as to test collaborative models for the digital humanities programming process. In these projects, archaeology students work directly with engineering students. Through this interface, the students from both areas gain valuable transdisciplinary experience while experimenting with new ways to accomplish programming goals and to collect archaeological data. The learning potential for these students was a key motivation for our initiative. Our projects have already led to several websites and digital applications that are available as open source downloads. We present our impressions of this collaborative process with the goal of encouraging other archaeologists to form similar digital humanities partnerships.

Copyright information:

© 2019 Peter J Cobb, et al., published by De Gruyter.

This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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