Jody Michael Gordon (Wentworth Institute of Technology)
Archaeologists have frequently looked to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to help them organize, manipulate, and theorize datasets. This relationship has seemed natural because both STEM disciplines and archaeology produce statistics, measurements, and objects—in short, data—that can be quantitatively analyzed. Within higher educational institutions, undergraduate elective courses focused on archaeological topics thus serve as excellent complements to the courses taken by STEM majors.
For nearly 10 years, the present author has created classes for STEM majors focused on the digital curation of historical and archaeological materials. The classes’ learning outcomes have been productive, as students have increased their knowledge of how past societies function and have applied digital skills they use in their majors to answer archaeological questions. Yet, despite these courses’ efficacy, accessing institutional tech support remains a constant challenge. If such courses that integrate STEM and archaeology are pedagogically successful, why are many higher educational institutions and their libraries unable to support these innovative teaching practices?
This paper’s goal is to explore how open repositories for archaeological data might provide sustainable academic support for faculty who want to bring digital approaches to their classrooms. First, I review how the corporatization of higher education has encouraged institutions to prioritize in-demand STEM majors that offer high return-on-investment for a discerning student consumer. Levine and Van Pelt have recently described this context as a “global, digital, knowledge economy,” (Levine, A. and S. Van Pelt. 2021, 4 October. “The Future of Higher Ed Is Occurring at the Margins.”Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/10/04/higher-education-should-prepare-five-new-realities-opinion) which has resulted in the decreased support of humanistic disciplines in general, and the deincentivation of innovative pedagogy among archaeology instructors in particular. Furthermore, these changes have transformed college libraries from collection repositories to “learning commons” where social interaction, as opposed to research, dominates.
In order to investigate the pedagogical potential of open data, I then examine how archaeology instructors can work within such altered research and teaching ecosystems to develop curricula that both enhance archaeology’s didactic values and provide a wide range of learners with complementary digital skills. For example, open-source data curation and visualization programs (such as, Omeka, Neatline, Scalar, Recogito, QGis, or Timeline JS) can be rapidly taught. Within this ecosystem, open data repositories (such as, Open Context) can also play a new role not only by democratizing access to archaeological data, but also by developing outreach programs that collaborate with professors on curricula oriented towards data reuse and the cultivation of digital skills. Finally, archaeologists can expand their use of open data by working with on-campus teaching and learning centers whose raison d'être is to enhance transferable skills through in-demand technologies, such as, 3D modeling, virtual and augmented reality, data visualization, social connectivity, and spatial analysis.
Higher education in the US has undergone massive structural changes over the last decade that have transformed how humanities disciplines are valued and taught. Since turning back the clock is not an option, archaeology instructors must be both creative in developing curricula and socially aware in terms of how structural changes continue to affect archaeology’s educational value. Teaching with open data seems to present a potential avenue for constructive pedagogy within this context because it provides free learning materials that can be used with a range of software and hardware to provide students with not only social scientific knowledge, but also transferable and marketable technical skills.