A Tale of Two Conferences: CAA UK and SAA 2011, as experienced on Twitter

Posted on by Shawn

Two conferences at the same time, opposite sides of the world (give or take), and you can’t get to either? There’s an app for that, and it’s called Twitter.

Nicolas Laracuente has been curating tweets relating to the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting in Sacramento via Storify – you can see his reporting on the conference here.

Inspired by Nicolas’ work, Jessica Ogden performed the same service at the Computer Applications in Archaeology UK edition conference, here.

Some of the things going on in the UK in terms of digital archaeology are very exciting indeed. What with my own interest and work in agent based modeling, I’m perhaps a bit biased. But I was also excited to see (‘read about’) some interesting work being done in terms of using game engines for archaeological visualization and outreach. I’m working on a project at the moment using the Web.Alive product (it’s built on Unreal) to render archaeological knowledge in an immersive environment. I’ve applied for funding to see if I can procedurally generate immersive worlds from archaeological repositories such as OpenContext.org. Stay tuned!

3 thoughts on “A Tale of Two Conferences: CAA UK and SAA 2011, as experienced on Twitter”

  1. I agree that Storify is a great tool to curate and share the social media feed from a conference. Here’s a recent post where I describe how to do that. “3 Ways to Use Social Media to Crowdsource and Blog the Conference Backchannel” – http://bit.ly/fo8I2r It includes how to use Prezi and a few Twitter visualizers to do the same.

  2. Hi Peter,

    Thank you for the link & the how to! I wasn’t able to attend either conference, and so I was very glad of Nicolas’ and Jessica’s work. Hopefully, more of us will begin to do this, thus opening up conferences to a wider audience!

  3. Yes, Jess and Nicolas did a great job! Not only of tweeting immediately, but of transforming tweets into coherent narratives. I hope this will happen more often at archaeological conferences in the future. Although I have the impression that the outreach of these things is not as wide as we might hope. As all people mentioned in the tweets are made aware of the story but all other interested people should find out about it themselves or be invited to have a look. Are there ways of making these sort of things more visible?

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