Yesterday, I was very excited to tune into the livestream of Steve Jobs and Apple’s Music Day. Not because I’m a huge music fan (which I am), or because I really wanted to know who the musical guest was going to be (Coldplay. Nice.), but because I’m an archaeologist.

Wait, wuh?

That’s right, the introduction of a new lineup of ipods had me excited, because there was the possibility that the new iPod Touch would be the tool that would make the type of digitally engaged archaeology (and any other form of digital community engagement) that I have been championing for a a while now readily available. And Mr. Jobs didn’t disappoint.

For those of you who don’t know, for the past couple of years I have been live tweeting archaeological excavations for the MSU Campus Archaeology Program (@capmsu). These tweets take place in the field, and include photos of our discoveries, discussions about our field methods, and the ability to answer questions from the public who sit in the comfort of their homes, offices, or wherever and join us on our excavations virtually. They are also forwarded to our Facebook and Flickr accounts. This has greatly expanded the traditional scope of public archaeology: what used to require a visit to the archaeological site doesn’t anymore. People from all over the world can take part, and they can engage directly with archaeologists while they’re excavating.

However, the entire project had one major drawback: it required a smartphone and access to a network. This meant that if you’re an archaeologist who just has a regular cell phone, the process won’t work. Campus Archaeology ran into this problem when I stopped being the Campus Archaeologist. My predecessor doesn’t own a smartphone, and asking him to pony up the cash to purchase one, and lock himself into a new contract with a company he might not want to be a part of, isn’t exactly fair (particularly since we’re graduate students). Not to mention, most archaeology programs are on a budget, and getting a company phone so that you can tweet typically isn’t worked into the budget.

Enter the new iPod Touch. I have been eyeing the Touch for a while now as a possible substitute: there is no phone, and therefore no contract, but it has the ability to get wireless internet. What it didn’t have before was pretty simple: it had no camera.

But now it does.

The new iPod Touch is really, almost entirely, an iPhone without a phone. It can take photos and video, find your location, even do FaceTime, the virtual video chat. There are a number of possibilities for public engagement with these elements.

Photos: well, this is obvious if you’ve followed any of our tweets: you can take pictures of what’s going on, tweet them, share them on Facebook, upload them to Flickr, and start a conversation about what you’re finding with the public.

Video: the truth of the matter is that video is going to be one of the new elements of record keeping in archaeology. Now that it is incredibly accessible, small, and easy to do, archaeologists can record difficult excavation techniques, demonstrate techniques to the public, or do quick in the field video blogs about what has been happening in the field. Perfect for both the public side and the research side of archaeology.

FaceTime: I haven’t had a chance to fiddle with FaceTime, so I’m not entirely certain what it’s possibilities are. With that said, I’m envisioning live chats from the field with different community groups, classrooms of students, or other archaeologists called in for a consultation. More on this sometime in the future.

Location-Aware: With the increasing possibilities surrounding location-based interactive  social networking, the opportunities for public engagement using Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, and, eventually, PlaceThings will allow the iPod Touch to be used to enter in new, culturally relevant hotspots that wouldn’t exist otherwise. For example, Campus Archaeology has entered a few spots on Foursquare that were sites of buildings that don’t exist anymore (above ground, anyway). These then pop up as Tips, so that people near by can learn more about them. Of course, you have to be mindful of looting, so choose your spots carefully.

In all, their are a number of possibilities for using the Touch for public engagement, the most important being that it is much more flexible than the iPhone or any other smartphone in regards to affordability. I am certain that there are probably a number of applications for data collection and basic field notes, map drawing, etc., but I just wanted to focus on public engagement here. Of course, there is the potential drawback of needing a wireless signal, so this might not be ideal for all archaeological situations. That said, wireless will only become more available, particularly with the introduction of items like the Virgin Mobile Novatel MiFi, a portable wireless hotspot you can carry in your pocket. In all, the iPod Touch is a perfect edition to a 21st century archaeology tool-kit, and will greatly improve the ability for archaeologists to engage with the public.

What other options do you think might be available with the iPod Touch? If you have any suggestions of where else this technology could be used by archaeologists or others, please, let me know!

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Although it happened a couple of weeks ago, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, and have been granted with that somewhat sarcastic (and totally unofficial) title of “ABD”, or “All But Dissertation”. The defense went well: my committee nailed me on what I expected to get nailed on (methodology), and didn’t surprise me with anything else. Some questions and suggestions definitely will help to push my project forward, and make it better in the long run. Of course, this will mean more work, but that’s fine. In all, I’m just happy this step is cleared. I will be posting on my research more in the fall, as this summer is going to be largely taken up by Campus Archaeology.

I am co-directing a field school with my boss Dr. Goldstein on campus through the Campus Archaeology Program. This has taken up most of my time during the month of May, and will almost entirely consume June.tbrokc I’ve never been involved with the planning of a field school before, although I’m not surprised with how much work goes into it. The most stressful has been the ordering and receiving of equipment; there are a lot of channels that we need to go through to make sure we are paying for things correctly, getting the correct equipment, and making sure it arrives on time.

I am also working on a special project for the Field School, which is part of my College Teaching Certification. It is my mentored teaching project, and it will be using a class blog as a means for teaching students to engage with the community about our research through blogging. I’m still ironing out details, but the main objective is to encourage students to interact with the community, and to gain a greater understanding about what they are doing in the field by explaining it to other people and applying it at a level beyond the actual field methods. We are also releasing this blog to the public, so that they can interact with the students and their posts. If you are interested, please visit and subscribe to the RSS feed.

The prospect of an on-campus field school is pretty exciting. It makes a field school accessible to a number of students who may find it economically impossible to attend a field school otherwise. Often, these schools require that students are able to take off 6 weeks of their summer and travel to a remote location. Many students can’t afford to give up that much time without working, and to toss 6 credits of tuition on top of it doesn’t help. The on-campus field school only requires 7 hours a day. Students can work part-time jobs, keep their apartment, live on campus, or sublet from someone. There are a number of cost-cutting options that make this a more economical choice, and therefore a really great thing for our department to be doing.

In any event, over the next month I will be out in the field. I may be able to get a post or two up in the meantime (there are a few other things that have been happening in my life of relevance), but mostly my posts will be at the Campus Archaeology Blog, discussing our findings in the field. Follow along!

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I have been using Digital Social Media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr to show real-time posts to the fans of Campus Archaeology while we are excavating in the field. These messages are all attached to an image, so making sure the image is visible on all three of these media are important. Until recently, this has required me to use multiple iPhone apps, going through a number of steps, and to use a number of web tools in order to make things look integrated for our users. This was a hassle on my end, as many of these tools were too unreliable, required too many keystrokes, or didn’t provide high quality posts on all the platforms. Additionally, it took time away from me supervising the work being done in the field.

FINALLY, I have discovered a way to simultaneously post to Twitter, a Facebook PAGE, and Flickr with only typing one post, and to make each of those posts show up looking as if they were originally posted from that social media site. It requires three tools, one iPhone app and two web-based twitter clients that do all the work behind the scenes. For me, I only have to take one picture and attach it to one tweet, and it gets posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Here are the tools.

gdzl.la: The first step, after you have signed up for a Twitter account, started a Facebook Page, and opened a Flickr account, is to visit gdzl.la. This tool is a Twitter photo client, and connects your Twitter photos to your Flickr account. Essentially, this gets rid of the need for TweetPhoto, or any of those other sites, and makes Flickr the primary storage home for these photos. This means that, if people want to, they can react and respond to these photos in Flickr, and also look at all of your other photos from Flickr.

Tweetie 2/Twitter for iPhone: gdzl.la has one drawback: at the moment it only works with Tweetie 2 (which has recently been purchased by Twitter and will soon be free and called “Twitter for iPhone”). I believe this is because Tweetie 2 is the only Twitter app that allows you to enter a custom primary image client. I could be wrong. This is extra unfortunate, because it also restricts the usage of gdzl.la to the iPhone. So, unless something changes, this iPhone app is a necessary component for this workflow to work properly (please, if there are other phones or apps this will work with, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it here).

UPDATE: gdzl.la himself made a comment about this topic down below, so keep on reading!

At any rate, with Tweetie 2 and gdzl.la, every photo I take from the field and post to Twitter automatically gets posted to Flickr, with the Twitter message serving as the photo title.

tweetpo.st: I just found tweetpo.st. It is another web based client that reposts your Twitter posts to your Facebook Profile. However, this goes many steps beyond what a lot of clients are capable of doing. For starters, it can link a Twitter account to a Facebook Page, something I have had a lot of trouble finding. Secondly, instead of simply rebroadcasting the tweet, along with the url in the text, tweetpo.st recognizes the url link, finds an image from it, and posts it as if you had “attached” a link to a regular Facebook Status. For those of you concerned about quality posts on Facebook, or who want a Facebook page that is full of images and videos instead of status messages with URLs in them, this is an exciting and hard to find feature. Additionally, tweetpo.st is making an effort to replace “@” Twitter messages with their equivalent “@” Facebook name. I’m not sure how this works, exactly, but the potential is pretty exciting. Another nice feature is that you can have as many pairs of Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts paired up, in case you are running a number of accounts.

So, here is how it works when these are all put together:

1. take a picture with Twitter for iPhone/Tweetie 2.
2. type your tweet.
3. Send.
4. gdzl.la sends the photo to flickr.
5. tweetpo.st send the photo and message to your Facebook Page.

This is going to save me a number of keystrokes, lots of time while I’m in the field, and will make the experience for our Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter communities better on all fronts.

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I went to the Great Lakes #ThatCamp with the intention of talking about using digital social media as a means of real-time community engagement, and hoping that I would get ideas from others about how they were using sites like Twitter or Facebook to engage communities in exciting ways, particularly in regard to real-time engagement. I was surprised by the outcomes. It seemed that most of the people at #ThatCamp were using these media to push content they had already created elsewhere: Twitter and Facebook were places to advertise upcoming events or blog posts. Although this a fine way to use it, it doesn’t capitalize on the unique features of digital social media, features that I think can play a strong role in community engagement.

Digital Social Media, particularly Twitter, provides a unique opportunity for scholars to break down a divide that has existed for a long time between the academia and the community. A number of scholars already do community engaged research, where they integrate the community in the entire process of their research. I recently attended a talk by Alan Leshner, the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he made some important points about the importance for community engagement with science. In particular, he stressed the necessity of engagement so that the public understands not only what the results of our research is, but how those results are reached. This means that we as scholars and researchers need to be explicit with the public about how we do our research, how we collect data, and how we determine its usefulness. We must be transparent about how we produce knowledge. You must only follow a little bit of the “debate” about global climate change to understand how this disconnect can have dramatic effects in this realm.

Additionally, one of the parts I was able to take away from #ThatCamp was the interest that the public demonstrated in the process of doing research, not just the final product. This call was coming from people who worked in museums, one of the traditional spaces reserved for community engagement with scholarly research. This and the talk by Dr. Leshner suggest that scholars have an ethical obligation to provide more transparency and engagement regarding their research, and that the public has an interest in learning about how this research is done.

Digital Social Media, particularly social networking sites such as Twitter, provides a wonderful opportunity for these obligations to be met. First, provide the opportunity for a large community to be reached immediately. Researchers can communicate with people all over the world, as long as they have a cell phone or computer. In essence, this relationship can develop a new, digital community, that has a deep loyalty to a program or project. Second, the interaction is two-way, meaning that not only can researchers broadcast information, but consumers can ask questions about it and receive answers to their queries. Third, the posting can happen in real-time, meaning that scholars and the community can go about the process of doing research together, although remotely.

This last point is the most important, because it means that researchers have a vehicle to discuss the process of their research with the community. The Campus Archaeology Program, for example, sends tweets from the field during excavations. We discuss what we’re doing, why we make the decisions we do, how our research is constrained, and how we draw the conclusions that we do. This does two things: first, it educates the community about how our research is done, and second, it engages them in the actual process of doing the research. They get to discover artifacts and features at the same time that we do, and learn about how those discoveries contribute to forming knowledge about past human behavior.

The same could be said for all other disciplines. Most of us work in spaces that are unfriendly to the public, such as laboratories or archives. We tend to be anti-social beings, who assume that most people won’t be interested in our research until it is in a museum or on a bookshelf, a final product ready to be consumed. What we need to begin realizing is that this isn’t the only exciting part about what we do. It’s the actual process of discovery that is the most powerful. The added bonus is that by making this process public, we are able to also educate about how knowledge is formed, how science and scholarship is done, and how results are determined.

What are your thoughts? Are you using digital social media in these engaging ways? What other benefits do you see from this type of engagement? Drawbacks?

image created using @capmsu’s followers at TwitterMosaic.

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One of the sessions at Great Lakes ThatCamp was on Digital Archaeology. What was great about this session was the mix of archaeologists and people from other disciplines, particularly those who work in museums, who often have to take what we find and figure out how to present it to the public in interesting ways. The unfortunate part about this is that they are completely dependent on what material we give them: they essentially receive data that we have collected for our own research purposes, not for public presentation.

What was interesting about this session was that we were told that what the public is most interested in is less the object, and more the process of doing archaeology. Where did they excavate? How do they excavate? Who is excavating? What goes into doing an excavation? How are these objects found? These are experiences that are the most difficult to replicate, because the nature of archaeological methods are destructive: by removing artifacts from the ground we remove them from their historical context, thereby destroying it. We can’t do it again. The same goes for the process of removal: once an artifact is out of the ground, it can’t be removed again. So repeating the process archaeological methods is near impossible.

Archaeologists have countered the destructive nature of our methods by becoming methodical and obsessive record  keepers. Each archaeologist keeps a field journal. Things are painstakingly measured and mapped. Soil colors and samples are taken. Artifacts are bagged and tagged according to what depth they were removed. Everything is photographed. This way, when we analyze the data, we are able to recreate as much of the archaeological context as we can.

Archaeologists also record about how they are excavating things. Writing down what process things are being excavated is important because that effects the type or the quality of data that is removed from the ground. For example, many sites excavate with screens of a 1/4 inch. This needs to be recorded because it will explain why certain artifacts weren’t found: they would have fallen through the screen. This is important for archaeologists to note because it can effect the analysis. However, this type of record keeping is not done for the public: it’s done for the archaeologist.

If we want to be able to present the process of archaeological excavations after the excavations are complete, we need to start collecting information that will aid in this presentation. This might mean sitting down with the museum you are working with ahead of time to work out what information might be best. It might mean purchasing small video cameras to be used in the field, so that excavation methods can be recorded. Interviews with people on the team should be recorded, so that the methods can be explained. Blogging with the public in mind is another way to provide public-oriented field notes. At Campus Archaeology (@capmsu), we have been using Twitter and Facebook to tweet live from the field, a process which also provides a backlog of what is happening when. What this does, however, is change the way archaeologists need to think about the excavations: they need to approach it with both the analysis and the public in mind.

The most exciting part about archaeology is the moment of discovery. There is no better feeling than finding something that hasn’t been touched in hundreds of years. By keeping a record of the process of discovery while in the field, each visitor to a museum will be able to take part in that moment, and hopefully share a little bit in the power that comes with it. Hopefully, we will be able to do more to ensure that this moment is preserved and shared.

What are your thoughts? Can you think of other elements of excavations that can be captured? Other means to record them?

Photo used with permission from the MSU Campus Archaeology Program

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This weekend, Michigan State played host to the Great Lakes THATCamp (@GLTHATCamp), an “un-conference” in humanities and technology. This was my first experience at a THATCamp or un-conference, and it was definitely a successful format that took some getting used to. Once I did, however, things went smoothly (Visit the original THATCamp page here). The process is as follows: to attend, you have to bring an idea, which is submitted a month or two ahead of time. 75 people are accepted, and they post their ideas to a blog to get things started. Other attendees comment on the posts, and get the discussion started. The first hour of the actual conference is dedicated all the attendees talking about possible sessions, scheduling them in rooms, and appointing facilitators. This was all put on a Google Spreadsheet, so that everyone could see it and add to it throughout the weekend.

Sessions were similarly informal: the topic was stated, people usually started by saying something like, “I’m here because of this and that reason”, and then conversation started. Questions were posed, problems solved, new ideas brought to the table and collaborations formed. While this was happening, I’d say about 75% of the attendees were on Twitter, posting links, quoting things that were said, and asking additional questions. People followed from “outside” the Camp, making suggestions, adding content, or asking questions. It was incredibly dynamic, both online and in the sessions, and made me truly value the possibilities of how different media could be used at a un- or non-un conference.

From the perspective of an archaeologist, it was an interesting experience. The overlap with humanists certainly lies in areas such as public history, public engagement, museums, and cultural heritage. Archaeologists have been using technology for a long time, so that overlap is fairly evident. These sessions did encourage me to think harder about applications of digital technology beyond data analysis, and into public engagement, in both similar and new ways. Certainly, my personal work and my work at Campus Archaeology (@capmsu) will benefit greatly. Also, there were sessions on technology and teaching, which is helpful for anyone who has to stand in front of a classroom. What the conference did so well was foster ideas. I will be putting up posts as I get time that are influenced by the things discussed in these sessions, as opposed to trying to talk about them all here. Stay tuned!

I’d like to congratulate the organizers, particularly Ethan Watrall (@captain_primate), for their hard work. It was a wonderful success. Anything that generates ideas and pushes people to think and interact in new ways is always a good thing, and should always be repeated.

There are ThatCamp’s being held across the country, so I would strongly encourage you all to look one up. The hash tag is #ThatCamp, for you Twitterers out there.

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Okay, before I begin, I didn’t attend Ignite 3.0. I did make it to 2.0, so I know what it’s about: I support it whole heartedly. It is part of this larger movement, I’ll call it the #LoveLansing movement, that we have been engaging in the past couple of years. This group of people who love tweetups, happy hour, and breakfast. Who champion community, smart ideas, and supporting local business. Ignite is made up of this community, and today, Ignite got some bad press.

We all read John Schneider’s blog post about Ignite Lansing 3.0. We all agree that John Schneider didn’t get it, and he didn’t get it in a very nice way. We also know that what happens at Ignite (and after Ignite) is incredibly important, and good, for a number of reasons (see above link and comments…thanks @aribadler for a great post). But this is a big moment for our community of #LoveLansing-ers. It’s big because the noise we’ve been making is starting to be heard. John Schneider came to see what the commotion was about, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, he didn’t get it. We can poo-poo him as some old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t get it and won’t get it. Or, we can ask ourselves a much more important, reflexive, and  constructive question:

Why didn’t he get it?

What is it about our community that John Schneider missed? What wasn’t made clear to him? And even more importantly, how do we make it clear next time? These are important questions because, in Lansing, John Schneider is someone you want on your side, because people in Lansing have been reading his column every morning for a long, long time. They trust him and his opinion, and this movement should want their trust as well, because it’s trying to revive a city. And a city is hard to revive when the majority of people in and around the city think our bright idea is a 5-minute presentation, and miss the fact that the bright idea was the whole event itself: the process of a community doing, creating, and sharing something together.

So, we have two choices: blow off John Schneider and dismiss him as a boomer who “just doesn’t understand”, or call him up. Personally invite him to the next one. Give him an inside pass so he can watch (and report on) the whole process from start to finish. Tell him when the next TweetUp is, or breakfast club. Why not ask him to be part of the planning committee for the next Ignite? Engage with him and the community he represents. Learn from him what sort of message will ignite their fire, and bring their ideas to Lansing, so that we can all be a part of this movement together.

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This semester, I’ve been enrolled in a course on college teaching, as well as doing the Graduate Engagement Certificate out of the Office of Engagement. Both experiences have me thinking hard about what type of teacher I hope to be, and also what kinds of courses I’d like to teach. This idea, although requiring a lot resources, time, and energy, would be the ultimate course for me. Let me know what you think.

The topic: Local Cultural History and Heritage. I want to teach a class that would incorporate things I enjoy, think are valuable, and want to convey: archaeology, history, digital humanities, community engagement, and developing an appreciation for community spaces and heritage. I’m going to pretend that this course is offered at MSU, for simplicity’s sake. The course will be on the small end, maybe 15-25. It will survey the literature on cultural heritage, public archaeology, public history, etc. It will work within the confines of a larger digital humanities type of project: the establishment of an interactive and historical city map. This map would provide detailed GIS information about the history of spaces within the City, probably divided by city block.

Such a course would require partnerships across the University and community. University wide, we would partner with a course on Geographic Information Systems: my students would research and create content, while the GIS students would work within the framework of the interactive map to manipulate this data so that it fits within the framework. They would work in groups: something like 2 from my course, 2 from the GIS course.

The research would be done on block-by-block units. Each student group would research a different block, and create the content for those areas: my students working on gathering historical data, GIS students inputting it, both providing interpretation. Admittedly, I read about a professor who was doing this, I think in Richmond, VA. What I want to do, however, takes this towards community engagement, not just for analytical research.

These groups would not stop at four students. The community would also be incorporated into the project. Residents of the neighborhood would be asked work with us, visiting archives, studying their past, providing interviews about the neighborhoods. They would work beside us at each step, learning the power of the past, while we would learn about cultural heritage development, as well as something about the community in which they live.

The final product would take many, many years. Most likely an entire career. I would work neighborhood to neighborhood, so that completed projects could happen more rapidly (So, for example, take Old Town and finish that, then move on to Groesbeck, or something). This way, these neighborhoods could utilize the information for school groups, or whatever.

This class would also have a companion piece: a summer field school. The data collected by students would result in a fantastic overview of these neighborhoods, and potentially identify a number of potential archaeological sites. A field school would allow another opportunity to work with the community, as students and residents worked together to excavate the site, reemphasizing the power of discovery through very tangible means.

Please let me know your thoughts. I am curious if any of you have heard of similar ideas, have any suggestions about how it could be made better, or think it’s just an unobtainable dream…

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phunk/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Unless you have the resources of Williamsburg or Historic St. Mary’s City, recreating the historical landscape above ground is a near impossibility. Once excavations are complete, the units are filled in, and the space goes back to being what it once was, or it is converted into a new building, road, highway, or park. The historical significance is often lost, although occasionally remembered through a historical marker or informational panel. There is very little left to remind visitors to the new space of what once was there, and even less to encourage people to visit the site because of its historical significance.

The advent of location-based websites, however, may provide an opportunity for this to change. Over the past month, Foursquare (follow me on foursquare) has become all the rage, while Yelp (Me on Yelp) has been steadily increasing its effectiveness and popularity. Sites such as these allow users to create spaces on the landscape that can then be viewed by others who are in the area. On Yelp, you can provide a review and rating of a business or restaurant, while on Foursquare you gain points and badges for exploring and discovering your local town and city. Why not make sure that archaeological sites are also visible on this virtual landscape?

Consider the typical usage of a site such as Yelp. Over the holiday, on our way back from a trip to Philadelphia, I used Yelp to search for wineries that were along our route. Using my iPhone, I was able to locate wineries, read reviews, and decide which would be the best for us to visit. The same could be done for archaeological sites or other places of historical interest. What if each state historical marker was referenced on websites such as these? Instead of just driving past them and saying, “huh, something old was there”, you could pull up Yelp on your phone and say, “hey, that was the site of a tavern that George Washington had a drink at! Someone on Yelp says it was really interesting, we should turnaround and check it out!”

For my work with the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, this would incredibly valuable. Harvard has already worked out a deal with Foursquare, and UNC Charlotte is using it in fascinating ways, and will be using it to make exploring campus more exciting for their students. Why not throw some historical sites on there? Campus Archaeology could easily create check-in spots for the areas which we have excavated, and possibly even do a scavenger hunt where a new site is added every week. This might drive interest, encourage the community and visitors to visit spaces of historical interest, and, most importantly, view their campus landscape from a historical perspective. Archaeology museums such as Williamsburg or St. Mary’s could also benefit from these tools. Become the mayor of the Shoe Shop, or write a review of the St. Mary’s Printing Press!

Of course, there is always concerns about looting, which is why I would suggest only putting sites up that are well protected (such as those at MSU), or those which have already been sufficiently excavated. In the end, the public must be trusted to treat their own sites with respect: the more visible they are, the more likely they are to become something to treasure, not to destroy.

What do you think? Any suggestions of other websites that might be good for this type of thing? I continue to be more and more convinced that digital social media is a fantastic way for archaeologists to share what knowledge they have, and using these websites seems like a fantastic (and free) way to make the historical landscape visible to the public.

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Working at Campus Archaeology, I began maintaining a blog that was initially intended to update the public about our whereabouts, be it in the field or when we were giving guest lectures. What it has become, however, is a running log about our research findings, interpretations, and methodology. I have found this to be incredibly useful for a variety of reasons, and I wanted to outline some of the benefits here in hopes that other researchers might begin to do the same.

Public Engagement: One of the major elements of Campus Archaeology has been engaging the public in what we do. The blog has been a great way for us to share results and interpretations about MSU’s past on a regular basis, not just waiting for a newspaper article or journal publication to educate people about their school’s past. This also provides a chance to go beyond educating about results, and venture into discussions about how research is done: what is stratigraphy? How do you read it? What can it teach us? How do we link the historical and archaeological record? Things like this are easy to explain and easy to show through a blog post.

Getting It Out: Every researcher knows the feeling: you’ve got some idea that you just need to share, because it’s too good to wait for a conference paper or that article that won’t come out in four years. Write a blog post about it. Or a series of posts, even. This will help you work out your process, and may even help you gain some early criticism or comments before you face the firing squad that is peer review. Also? You get it down before anyone else does.

Share Results: Since Campus Archaeology has a group of people who follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and we broadcast our archaeology live from the field, we owe it to our followers to share our results quickly, or else they will lose interest. Posting to a blog allows for us to do this. They may not be exact results, but it at least allows us to answer that burning question every person has for an archaeologist, “So, what did you find?”

A Research Log: A blog also offers a researcher an opportunity to record things that have already happened. Each semester we get new interns at Campus Archaeology, and we make sure that they go back and read all the posts on the Campus Arch blog, so that they are caught up on what research has already been done. This also gives them an idea as to how to write posts themselves on their Intern Blog, which we require them to maintain. It has also been helpful for me, when I am working on archaeology reports, to have a written record of not only data, but ideas, concepts, and preliminary conclusions.

Share Those Nifty-but-not-Publishable Things: We all have them. Those fun tidbits that happen during your research that are just big enough to be interesting, but don’t warrant their own article. Maybe you could eek a conference paper out of them, but really it’s just a fun piece of history or a snazzy artifact that you happened upon, and that you want to share. A blog post is the perfect place to do this. Odds are good, if you like it, other people will, too. And no, it doesn’t warrant its own article, but damn it, it’s cool. So write about it anyway. Who knows, maybe it is more important to someone else, and you get cited.

I hope to continue to use this blog in a similar capacity when I get rolling on my dissertation research, and then again with subsequent work. Are there any other ways you think a research blog could be beneficial? Any drawbacks?

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