Need or Problem:

Larger context of this project is the Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project, a research and education program with Stanford archaeologists and several organizations in San José, CA. Objective of this program is to catalog and analyze the collection and to curate the material, which was inaccessible to researchers and the public for more than a decade. The faculty approached me as she was planning to teach a class where students would investigate some of the artifacts. It was important for her to document the research results over time, to make them accessible to the public, and to draw responses and recognition. She was envisioning a website where the availability of weekly progress reports with the option to join a discussion of the postings should allow the visitor of the site to become a "virtual participant" in the class.

Solution:

Weblogs are archive- and template-based publishing tools for web content with the possibility to submit comments from the readers. They are often searchable and configurable for different purposes. The convenience of those 'built-in' functions of a blog application outweighed by far the advantages of using a more general Web authoring tool like Dreamweaver, which would provide complete control over all the design aspects.

Design:

Based on some research and testing I had done before I installed Movable Type, which at that time was one of the best documented, free blog applications available that could be run on the Stanford Leland system. To envision possible usage scenarios and evaluate the functionalities with the faculty I designed a prototype for site. Based on our discussions I implemented the site and developed a special template to be used for the weekly postings. I prepared instructions for posting, provided initial support for the lab group, and closely monitored the site during the first months of its existence. To estimate usage I extracted statistics from the server logfiles.

Challenges and Changes:

The website went live late 2002 and has been up and running ever since. It is mentioned in articles on several news sites, like the Stanford Report and the San Jose Mercury News. Despite its publicity, though, the number of comments from the public is lower than we had expected.

One of my initial concerns was to confront the users with a template that would require direct editing of html code. However this has been working surprisingly well and never caused any ill-formated postings. Rather this project can serve as example of how a faculty can be introduced to a new technology and purposefully integrate it into her work.

The site does require my occasional attention for maintenance like backups, minor revisions in the hard-coded parts, comment spam protection, and software upgrades.

Conclusions:

I applied a strategy similar to the project described here for another archaeological field research project (http://www.stanford.edu/group/presidio/updates/index.html). However, such tools have relevance not only for archaeology but for ethnographic research in general. Collaborative web technologies provide powerful platforms with a tremendous potential to facilitate collaboration within and beyond the classroom and in and between research communities. Exploring that potential and proposing innovative approaches that are relevant for anthropologists form major part of my work as an ATS.