As social science disciplines increasingly move towards reliance on digital datasets for recording, research, accessibility, and archiving, it is now incumbent upon developing scholars to be familiar with the ways in which digital data can used, and how they are impacting research practices. During the 2020 Spring semester, a course was taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Department of Anthropology on digital archaeology and data reuse. This GitHub repo contains the syllabus for this course, which you should feel free to use, modify, or pick and choose. In the Class Activities section in this README you will find links to other repos that contain class activities that you can also use. Please note that this course was designed for undergraduate and graduate archaeology students with NO experience in these digital tools, so the activities are pretty basic.

This course provided students with a space to develop their digital literacy in archaeological contexts. We used a combination of lecture, discussions, and computer work to engage students in ways to create, manage, combine, and reuse archaeological data, while also confronting emerging issues in the field related to the increased use of digital technologies: data accuracy, data ethics, ownership, open data, public engagement, ‘big data.’ There were no expectations of a coding or data analysis background - this course was about exploration and experimentation. Students were not expected to emerge from this course with a complete knowledge of how to perform complex analyses on digital datasets – rather, this course instilled an underlying framework for how to think about archaeology and the data that archaeologists produce. It fostered an understanding of the principles that are beginning to guide archaeological research in the 21st century.

This course was funded by the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (EIN: 9102146202). AAI has received an Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities which provides funding for the AAI’s activities for ten years, until December of 2028. A key aim of the program is to develop data literacy among students and other practitioners of archaeology. To this end, a portion of the AAI’s annual budget is earmarked for developing a Data Literacy Program, which will include a variety of approaches, such as workshops, full courses, and fellowships. This course was a part of this program, working to develop principles of archaeological data literacy and reuse.

Following the completion of this course, students will:

• Be able to access and collect data from open sources.
• Know the basics of data management and curation.
• Have knowledge of the methods for utilizing, visualizing, and performing analyses on digital data.
• Be able to knowledgeably assess published digital archaeological datasets.
• Know the different techniques for capturing 3D data and disseminating those data.
• Be familiar with the broad discussions in archaeology surrounding the use of digital technologies and be able to engage productively in them.

You can access the exercises used for this class in their designated GitHub repos.

• Introduction to GitHub, Markdown, and Jupyter Notebooks.
• Accessing open access data, cleaning data.
• Extracting data from PDFs.
• Using APIs, Open Context.
• Using APIs, PAS.
• Basic archaeological stats using R.
• Data visualization.
• Webmapping and public-facing geospatial data.

I recommend visiting the Open Digital Archaeology Textbook, a wonderful resource and introductory text for digital archaeology.