Learning in a Pandemic: A Model for Virtual Outreach

When the Covid19 pandemic closed schools including K-12 and colleges, hands-on science labs and outreach events were also canceled. The question was how to continue to engage students and adults of all ages in optics outreach while they were at home and school lab equipment was not available. Our solution was to provide optics at-home workshops that teachers and students could do with their families using readily available items. The authors with the assistance Optica (formerly The Optical Society, OSA) developed and presented a series of eight outreach workshops through the We Are On program.

Material Culture Studies in the Age of Big Data: Digital Excavation of Homemade Face-Mask Production during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using digital data. Scholars interested in the materiality of past and contemporary societies have been limited to information derived from assemblages of excavated, collected, or physically observed materials;they have yet to take full advantage of large or complex digital datasets afforded by the internet. To demonstrate the power of this approach and its potential to disrupt our understanding of the material world, we present a study of an ongoing global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on face-mask production during the pandemic across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Scraping information on homemade face-mask characteristics at multimonth intervals-including location and materials-we analyze the production of masks and their change over time. We demonstrate that this new methodology, coupled with a sociopolitical examination of mask use according to state policies and politicization, provides an unprecedented avenue to understand the changing distributions and social significances of material culture. Our study of mask making elucidates a clear linkage between partisan politics and decreasing disease mitigation effectiveness. We further reveal how time-averaged asssemblages drown out the political meanings of artifacts otherwise visible with finer temporal resolution.

How to Record Current Events like an Archaeologist

This article shows how to record current events from an archaeological perspective. With a case study from the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, we provide accessible tools to document broad spatial and behavioral patterns through material culture as they emerge. Stressing the importance of ethical engagement with contemporary subjects, we adapt archaeological field methods-including geolocation, photography, and three-dimensional modeling-to analyze the changing relationships between materiality and human sociality through the crisis. Integrating data from four contributors, we suggest that this workflow may engage broader publics as anthropological data collectors to describe unexpected social phenomena. Contemporary archaeological perspectives, deployed in rapid response, provide alternative readings on the development of current events. In the presented case, we suggest that local ways of coping with the pandemic may be overshadowed by the materiality of large-scale corporate and state response. Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for American Archaeology.