For my engaged archaeology project, I created an eBook. It’s only ten pages long, but includes a glossary and several interactive elements. I decided on targeting the book towards thirteen and fourteen year olds; I figured this would be a good age range as it’s just about the time that kids start to choose their high school classes.
In my proposal I said that I would try and explain the differences between paleontology and archaeology. I also set out to explain the goals, tools and methods used by archaeologists, as well as some interesting archaeological discoveries. I believe my final project accomplishes these goals, however the current version is a little light on the tools and methods.
As writing often does, when I really got into composing the text for this project, it took on a life of it’s own. The final copy takes the most time to explain what it is archaeologists do, and why they do it. Special emphasis was placed on survey, excavation and engagement, with engagement being the largest of those three. I tried to use this book to make a case for young people, who are starting to think about careers, to explore archaeology. The book never gets very deep into subjects, obviously at ten pages, but I didn’t want to write an essay, as I can’t remember wanting to read droll writing when I was in eighth grade. I tried to make the book as captivating as possible by including interactive elements on (almost) every page.
The interactive elements proved to be more of a challenge then I anticipated. I used Apple’s iBooks Author software to create this project. As this software is brand new (it came out in January, I believe) there are still quite a few kinks and clunky menus that Apple needs to work out. The biggest of these problems was the 3D graphical models you can include in the book. The software only accepts one specific model format, collada (.dae). These files are HUGE, and they don’t work well with older iPads (really only the first gen), which is what I have. So I was only able to include a small, and somewhat dull model, as it was the only one that didn’t cause my iPad to crash. I still found the way you can manipulate and interact with the model entertaining. However, I do wish I was able to include some of the more complex models (like the Pyramids at Giza, the Roman Colosseum and Pantheon, and the Emperors Palace in Japan).
I also included video clips, my favorite being the intro to the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens. There are several photo galleries in the book as well as two quizes. The quiz widgets ended up being one of my favorite elements. There’s a whole rang of question formats you can include in them, form standard multiple choice, to pictures, and labeling images. I still have fun going back and playing with these.
After Dr. Watralls lecture on digital archaeology I really wanted to include some of the elements from the rome reborn site as well as projects that CyArk had been working on. However both of these resources had very strict licensing regulations. Instead I explained the Rome Reborn project and linked the webpage to the text, I also included a couple direct links to apps in the app store that were produced by CyArk.
A lot of you gave me some great advice and ideas in the comments of my original proposal, I didn’t take the time to point them out but hopefully you can see some of your suggestions that I’ve included.
Finally here is a link to the book, you can either download this onto your computer and move it to an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, or you can visit the site from one of those devices and directly download it (it takes a while).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.