Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Part One

A number of years ago, I found some contract work with a small online liberal arts college in the United States. When I say small, I mean: there were 3 of us. So we each got to wear different hats on a rapidly shifting basis. Sometimes I taught, sometimes I tried to fix the learning management system. Sometimes I was writing code to sort out our online registration system. It was… an education. The nice thing about being such a small team was that if one of us had a bright idea, there was no one to say ‘I dunno, should you really be trying that?’ And so it was that I obtained a parcel of ‘land’ in the online persistent social world of ‘Second Life.’

There was a lot of buzz around Second Life in those days: many thought it would be the future of online education. Many universities were pouring serious money into virtual campuses, imposing architecture, classes inside virtual lecture rooms. In a space where it was possible to do anything, be anyone - my own avatar looked a bit like Frankenstein’s Monster - the big money was just trying to replicate the spaces we were already familiar with.

I didn’t want that. I wanted a virtual excavation. I wanted to be able to offer our students a taste of how archaeologists construct knowledge from physical remains. So I built a Mithraeum, a ruined temple to the god Mithras, patterned after the Mithraeum discovered in London (back in the 50s, I think that was). Then I covered it with different ‘layers’ and put some code into each one: if a student’s avatar touched the layer, it would fly up into the sky, each one in turn slightly lower than the last so that the stratigraphy would be visible.

Then, I started salting the excavation with artefacts. At first, these were just cubes and spheres; then I figured out that I could link these cubes and spheres to websites, and have the information display inside Second Life.

And then I discovered Open Context, an archaeological data publisher. So I linked to actual archaeological materials, and dispersed them around the site in cunning arrangements. What I didn’t realize, was that I was putting a serious load on the server for Open Context, and that Open Context was largely a two person show. About four or five days later I received an email that read, ‘Who is this? You’re screwing up my server!’

And that is how I met Sarah and Eric Kansa, whom you will hear from in a moment. Open Context is one of the pioneers for getting actual archaeological information onto the web in a form that permits re-use and re-examination. And for someone like me, who at the time did not have access to the field, it was a godsend. Open data enabled me to participate in the archaeological world.

I can’t emphasize enough how revolutionary this is.

This week, you’ll read about a variety of projects that not only push materials onto the web, but also celebrate, promote, and depend on the knowledge of communities, using the web to crowdsource those materials. The exercises this week explore this push / pull dynamic, from participating in some crowdsourcing to building your own research compendium and sharing it.