15th February 2015, 01:58 PM
The Unexpected Outcomes of Engaging Academics
Alison Atkin
Archaeology conferences present delegates with an overwhelming amount of information within a limited period of time. Aimed at individuals with higher education experience, presentations are often filled with complex detailed specialist information following standard guidelines. As a consequence interesting topics can become impenetrable to those outside the immediate area of research. This limits both the impact of the presentation and is potentially isolating to individuals in attendance.
This paper will present an example of a conference presentation that utilised outreach tactics in order to engage with the wider academic community, which resulted in unexpected further outreach outcomes. At the 16th Annual Conference of the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology I presented a poster titled ‘The Attritional Mortality Myth: a catastrophic error with demography’. The poster incorporated numerous design aspects typically reserved for public engagement (interactivity, conversational language, illustrations, social media prompts, etc).
This poster generated a significant amount of discussion amongst conference delegates and was ultimately awarded the Bill White Prize for best poster. Since the conference, it has been viewed online over 20,000 times and discussion – about both the poster and the research presented – has continued on social media, blogs, and via e-mail. In presenting post-graduate level research in an accessible, engaging, and ‘un-academic’ manner, this poster opened the door to the ivory tower allowing a free-flow of information and ideas in both directions. This paper aims to demonstrate that for the betterment of our discipline we need to be both engaging… and engaged, beyond our subdisciplinary silos within archaeology.
[video=youtube;1n2AVi8FEnM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n2AVi8FEnM[/video]
Alison Atkin
Archaeology conferences present delegates with an overwhelming amount of information within a limited period of time. Aimed at individuals with higher education experience, presentations are often filled with complex detailed specialist information following standard guidelines. As a consequence interesting topics can become impenetrable to those outside the immediate area of research. This limits both the impact of the presentation and is potentially isolating to individuals in attendance.
This paper will present an example of a conference presentation that utilised outreach tactics in order to engage with the wider academic community, which resulted in unexpected further outreach outcomes. At the 16th Annual Conference of the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology I presented a poster titled ‘The Attritional Mortality Myth: a catastrophic error with demography’. The poster incorporated numerous design aspects typically reserved for public engagement (interactivity, conversational language, illustrations, social media prompts, etc).
This poster generated a significant amount of discussion amongst conference delegates and was ultimately awarded the Bill White Prize for best poster. Since the conference, it has been viewed online over 20,000 times and discussion – about both the poster and the research presented – has continued on social media, blogs, and via e-mail. In presenting post-graduate level research in an accessible, engaging, and ‘un-academic’ manner, this poster opened the door to the ivory tower allowing a free-flow of information and ideas in both directions. This paper aims to demonstrate that for the betterment of our discipline we need to be both engaging… and engaged, beyond our subdisciplinary silos within archaeology.
[video=youtube;1n2AVi8FEnM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n2AVi8FEnM[/video]