An assistant Carleton history professor is turning to social media to help gather reading material for his new fourth-year seminar that begins in the fall of the 2014-15 academic year.
Shawn Graham, who teaches digital humanities, is crowdsourcing course material suggestions from his Twitter account, @electricarchaeo, for HIST4805B, which focuses on issues surrounding the illicit antiquities trade.
Graham said he is new to teaching about the antiquities trade but looks forward to learning more on the subject.
“I will be learning as much as the students, which is an exciting position to be in,” he said.
Graham said he turned to Twitter to get a better idea of what students should read for his course.
“I have a good sense of what I would like students to read, but I also wanted to find out what the field in general felt students should be looking at,” he said.
Through Twitter and his blog, Electric Archaeology, Graham said he can “plug into a vast network of archaeologists and historians.”
Individuals who responded to Graham included researchers from Glasgow University, who currently have a major investigative project on the antiquities trade, and other researchers and senior figures in the field.
The professor said he sees using social media as an innovative way of doing his work.
“If I never used Twitter, there would be very few people who knew about my research or be interested in my teaching,” Graham said.
The history course is in conjunction with a larger project led by investigative reporter Jason Felch, co-author of Chasing Aphrodite, a work on various museums’ involvement in the illegal antiquities trade.
Graham said Felch has collected a great amount of information collected about the antiquities trade—so much, he is unable to assess it alone.
“He’s looking for help to analyze this information, to find patterns, to track down some of the antiquities that have been looted,” Graham said.
https://storify.com/Charlamedia/professor-shawn-graham-crowd-sources-his-reading-l
