2014 Blogging Archaeology eBook

entire semester, most of them quickly dropped blogging as a routineactivity because they were not seeing immediate returns in audienceengagement. I empathize with being disheartened at the lack of interesta post generates, since blogging, especially at the beginning before youbuild an audience, can feel like tilting at windmills. While we circled backto the topic later in the semester to discuss the results of the semesterlongproject, there was little enthusiasm for adding yet another voice tothe anthropological blogosphere, and students seemed to feel that theirother projects, which had more tangible and demonstrable outcomes,were more worthy of their time and efforts. One student, TristanHarrenstein, created a website c after the course was over, specifically toshowcase some of the projects he produced during the semester.Print Media. [Reading list ci ] This unit was a bit of a mixed bag,covering everything from research posters to news articles, but itgenerated a good discussion about audiences. I have seen increasingmedia presence at research conferences over the past decade ofdoing anthropology professionally, which means that the line betweenpresentations for one’s colleagues and presentations for the public isstarting to blur. In particular, we focused on Elizabeth Bird’s AnthropologyNews piece on engagement with news media cii and discussed theproblems that can occur when journalists report on anthropologicalfinds. An especially interesting idea to come out of this conversation withstudents was a suggestion for teaching anthropologists how to writemore journalistic and PR-friendly pieces. I would like to organize aworkshop to help students do this, either at my home institution or at aprofessional conference. As several of the students in this class wereaffiliated with FPAN, some already had experience writing short materialsfor the general public. But every student could benefit from this, as beingable to encapsulate research in an attention-getting way for the generalpublic would help them write everything from blog posts to grantproposals. In future iterations of this class, I plan to have students read adozen or so news stories and attempt to write one themselves based ontheir own research.Audio. [Reading list ciii ] Although the tape recorder is a staple ofethnography and linguistic anthropology, there are few recurringoutreach programs that use audio to communicate anthropologicalBlogging Archaeology Page 39