New Outreach and Communications for Classics: Persons, Places, and Things

As mediators between the past and the present, maps are a means for understanding antiquity in new ways. Yet what can you even do with linked data for over 35,000 ancient places, locations, and names? Pleiades.stoa.org has a few answers. The gazetteer, which began as a means of digitizing the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000), grows daily and provides extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world. It is also expanding into Ancient Near Eastern, Byzantine, Celtic, and Early Medieval geography.

Outreach, it seems to me, is a simple numbers game. If we want to have maximum impact, we have to reach the maximum number of people and let them know who we are and what we’re doing.

To that end, I suggest the SCS redirect its efforts away from labor-intensive projects that cannot scale, such as visiting individual high schools, and toward the largest possible venues, audiences, networks, and distributors. What does that mean in practical terms?

This paper summarizes a program of book groups that have now run in New Hampshire for eight years (premises, design, logistics, and sessions) and assesses recent innovations, particularly the development of all-female reading groups (2016) and an NEH funded collaboration with New Hampshire Humanities and Dartmouth College to develop a curriculum combining ancient and modern war stories and to train facilitators for the programs (2016).

In recent decades, outreach and service learning have become buzzwords in higher education. For many fields, these terms connote issues both of relevance (how is our field applicable “real world” problems?) and of access to educational opportunities (how can we reach out to non-traditional groups of students?). This paper will address these questions as they apply to classics.

The purpose of this talk is to argue for a “service” model of outreach, and discuss two underused avenues for public service among professional classicists: podcasting, and digital project reviews. Classical outreach programs are proliferating.