Production of an augmented reality app for the Cahokia Mounds historic site and a complementary website.
This project is to produce an augmented reality application for Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. This experience will enable visitors to see structures, people, and other features of this ancient site through the lens of their smartphone or tablet. There will be extra audio and vision opportunities loaded to the experience as well as a complementary website. The website will include curriculum for school use. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is a UNESCO World Heritage and US National Historic Landmark. This project will greatly enhance the visitor's experience and bring awareness of the site.
The goal of exhibition is to share the history of the Spiro culture from its humble beginnings to its rise as one of the premier cultural sites in all of North America. The Spiro people, and their Mississippian peers, are nearly forgotten in the pages of North American history, yet they created one of the most exceptional societies in all of the Americas. This exhibition explores the archaeological and historical data connecting the Spiro site to other communities throughout North and Central America, discusses the Spiroan community and religious activities, and highlights the enduring legacy of Native Americans today who are descended from Mississippian cultural groups. This 200-object exhibition will include a publication, symposium, and website, all of which was developed in collaboration with the Caddo Nation, the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, and scholars from over a dozen universities and museums from across the United States.
Planning for the reinterpretation of the museum’s Egyptian collection that would explore the intersection of human and natural histories in ancient Egypt.
Building on Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s (CMNH) current NEH Digital Projects for the Public Discovery Grant, this exhibition grant will allow CMNH to begin planning for its multi-phase exhibition, Egypt on the Nile. As part of the project, CMNH will: convene a team of expert scholars and scientists to refine current research themes and generate new humanities and scientific knowledge through which the public can connect their contemporary experiences with the human and natural history of ancient Egypt; form and consult a community focus group for audience input; identify anthropological and natural sciences collections for the exhibition; and evaluate CMNH exhibitions, conservation, and storage considerations and costs. To carry out these goals, the Project Director will lead committees in a series of meetings and two workshops held in Pittsburgh to produce exhibition designs and a draft script along with plans for outreach, marketing, and evaluation of the final exhibition.
Production of an immersive website exploring the history, culture, and archaeology of the Giza plateau.
The Giza Project at Harvard University plans to build the full-scale version of its forthcoming public website, Digital Giza. Using the tools of the future to study the past, this free online resource will integrate diverse primary documentation from over 100 years of international archaeological research in Egypt with a scientifically-informed 3D immersive computer model of the whole Giza Plateau, including the pyramids, temples, settlements, and surrounding cemeteries. Through various “digital archaeology experiences,” visitors to the site will engage with new forms of interpretation and story-telling based on Giza materials digitally embedded and clearly contextualized in their original spatial settings. The Giza Project’s ultimate deliverable will be a powerful new online education and research tool for the world community at all levels of expertise: an interactive website and virtual environment encouraging exploration into Egyptological, historical, and broader humanities themes.
As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants. The goal of this RAPID project is to better understand how an informal science education organization and its STEM resources can partner with community groups and their expertise to support people's ability to understand, process, and work toward dismantling systemic racism. The project will draw from exhibition and programming resources that have been developed and refined over almost two decades of engagement with the topics of STEM, race, and racism in a science museum context. Examples of STEM programming include data and data visualization, how biology and environment shape behavior and perception, and the use of technology to communicate. This project will build on previously developed relationships in three regions to design and facilitate virtual STEM-informed activities and conversations about race in each regional site. These activities and training will support participants to better understand, process, and work toward dismantling systemic racism.
This RAPID project is timely given the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased awareness of the ongoing impact of systemic racism. The project will address the following questions:
What kinds of virtual STEM-informed activities allow for community members to explore, understand, or act upon the impacts of systemic racism? What are key features of those activities, from the perspective of participants? What are promising changes that community members report as a result of these activities? How are science-based resources perceived, and how do participants perceive they are learning STEM?
What supports allow the regional project group members and museum staff to collaborate successfully, and what obstacles slow that work down?
How do local collaboratives define long-term success of their work, and how can they track their progress over time? The project team and the regional project group members bring a range of experience in community engagement, science education programming, and informal science learning research.
The project will develop this new knowledge for the informal science education field and other local stakeholders through qualitative and participatory research and virtual STEM-informed activities that are responsive to the changing needs of community members. The project will begin in August 2020 as the ability to understand the research questions requires immediate collection of data. Because of the essential nature of this type of research for the informal STEM learning field, the team plans to analyze data and start initial dissemination by the fall of 2020 with additional data collection, analysis, and dissemination continuing as the project progresses.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
This study uses the online discourse surrounding an Austrian publicly-funded study about “Islamic kindergartens” as a case study to approach communication about the social sciences in the online public sphere. Results from a discourse analysis of 937 user comments in online forums of two Austrian daily newspapers show that the social sciences are often referred to as a “special case”. While some use this argument to neglect its societal relevance, others use it to highlight its role as societal problem solver. Moreover, users discuss characteristics of “true” social scientists and scrutinise
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Brigitte HuberIrmgard WetzsteinIngrid Aichberger
This paper presents the first study ever conducted on the profile of visitors to the Museum of Human Evolution of Burgos (Spain), which exhibits the finds of the Atapuerca archaeo-paleontological sites. The research was guided by the principles of public communication of science and the methodology of the studies on museum visitors. The analysis reveals a positive perception; the Museum is associated with the sites and they are valued as cultural heritage. Complaints are very limited but useful to produce a set of recommendations to further improve the exhibition. In addition, the findings are
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TEAM MEMBERS:
María Eugenia ConfortiMaría Gabriela ChaparroPamela DegeleJuan Carlos Díez Fernández-Lomana
This paper describes community engagement activities with indigenous heritage and archaeology research in the Caribbean. The practice of local community engagement with the archaeological research process and results can contribute to retelling the indigenous history of the Caribbean in a more nuanced manner, and to dispel the documentary biases that originated and were perpetuated from colonial times. From the conception of the ERC-Synergy NEXUS 1492 research project, a key aim has been to engage local communities and partners in the research process and collaboratively explore how the
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tibisay Sankatsing NavaCorrine Hofman
We review how the Wellcome Collection exhibition ‘Teeth’ enacts meanings from an educational anthropology and Science and Technology Studies perspective. The exhibition tells the history of dental science. It starts with accounts of the painful procedures and social inequalities of early oral healthcare. As it moves towards the present day it shows improved scientific knowledge, tools and public health promotion, and closes with current sophisticated technologies and practices. However it underrepresents contemporary social inequalities. We conclude that science communication exhibition
Science permeates nearly every facet of human life and civilization. However, in an age of media oversaturation, it has been increasingly easier for pseudoscientific information to be disseminated among the masses, especially by those with a political agenda. In his book, ‘Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science’, author Dave Levitan creates a guidebook for spotting and debunking unscientific ideas in the political sphere, a vital tool in the Information Age.
If Truth Be Told is a collection of essays on the politics of public ethnography and focuses on seasoned anthropologists' reflexive and critical engagement with public responses to their monographs. Fassin's primary purpose is to provide an ethnography of publicization. The book illuminates how public responses reflect and are affected by hegemonic sociopolitical realities and sociocultural practices and impact on the life and work of anthropologists. Of special interest is to what effect contributors take up different roles such as the role of expert to advocate for a more nuanced, non
This project will produce a four-part mini-series on African American Language (AAL) designed for television broadcast as well as for formal and informal public educational distribution. This mini-series addresses the social, cultural, and educational issues related to the most prominent, the most controversial, and the most misunderstood dialect in the history of American English--African American Language. Dialect prejudice, linguistic profiling, and language-based discrimination continue to be "so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination. And the door is still wide open" (Lippi-Green 2012:73). By presenting the history, development, diversity, and symbolic role of language in the lives of African Americans, this documentary series helps to counteract the persistent misinformation and misinterpretation circulated about the language of African Americans. The series builds on the popular public reception to the one-hour documentary, Talking Black in America: The Story of African American Language, and includes the following episodes: 1) the historical and contemporary development of African American Language; 2) the diversity of language use among African Americans based on region, age, status, education, and style; 3) the use of language in expressive performance, including preaching, comedy, music, hip hop, spoken word, and other expressive genres; and 4) the role of language differences in educational achievement. A website accompanying the series will include a variety of educational resources, including streaming, discursive chapters with integrated vignettes from the episodes, additional commentary and background, activities, and discussion questions for each episode, with further online materials for education. The documentary and accompanying activities constitute an important milestone in the effort to educate the public about language diversity in American society.
No dialect in the history of American English has been more prominent, more controversial, and more misunderstood than African American Language, and dialect prejudice, linguistic profiling, and language discrimination still intensely affect speakers of this variety. By presenting the history, development, diversity, and symbolic role of language in the lives of African Americans, this documentary series will help to counteract the persistent misinformation circulated about African American Language. This series and the accompanying online materials offer an important milestone in the effort to educate the public about language diversity that can help to reduce linguistic discrimination in American society.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which supports innovative research, approaches, and resources for use in a variety of learning settings.