Fragments of a Brief: A New Media Portal for Archaeologists

Over the past few weeks, I’ve continued to think about how archaeologists use new media to document their sites, processes, and interpretations.  My projects have used blogs, Twitter (and other social media), podcasts, video, photographs, and text to communicate our work to a diverse audience of stakeholders. Almost all of the tools we use are “off the shelf” and required very little development to make them suitable for our needs as archaeologists.

One of the side-effects using off the shelf, remote hosted products – like YouTube or Twitter – is that projects do not have a single place for all of their online content to appear.  While it is easy enough to embed video and podcasts in a blog, the basic format of the blog – with its chronological organization and rather linear set of relationships – make it less than optimal showing parallel streams of media collection. For example, it is difficult to juxtapose a video with a textual description of the same building or feature.  I’ll admit that it is possible to do this, but the linear arrangement of a blog tends to privilege the most recent entry rather than allowing parallel themes to develop in a single space.

I have had the good fortune of chatting with a more tech-savvy colleague of mine about how he might imagine a new media portal for archaeologists that would allow them to display video, social media content, text, images, podcasts, et c. all in a single space.  Taking a cue from many of the newest iPad applications, we discussed a single page design which would aggregate content from a wide range of sources. The page would update automatically as new content appeared in various off-the-shelf sites (YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, et c.).  The page allow the visitor to explore single types of media – say video – as well as across media through the use of tags and date-stamps.  The result would be a one-stop destination for an audience.  For the content creator, this site would be low to no maintenance as it automatically aggregated material pushed to the usual sources through an RSS or similar feed.

One could eventually imagine this kind of site providing an outlet for raw archaeological data as well as a new and social media content. With the right support, sites like these (which would involve, I think, relatively little technical development and relatively little server space) could be made available to projects seeking to a quick way to create an online presence or to aggregate an existing range of content.  For projects with a CRM focus required to provide outreach, this would provide a simple location for a range of content. For more academic projects, an aggregating web site could provide a useful teaching tool for students around the world as well as an opportunity to communicate the experience of archaeological work in near real time.

In some ways, the site could become a poor-man’s Omeka. Instead of focusing on the database and (digital) object creation aspects, the site would emphasize the curation of already existing new and social media (and perhaps some day syndicated online data) content.  At some point, the site could become a space for near-real-time data presentation.