A day in the life of a lot of archaeologists

The 29 July marks the first Day of Archaeology, an online social media experiment that coincides with the Council for British Archaeology'™s Festival of Archaeology (an annual event, this year running from the 16-31 July).

The idea for this project came from a conversation between two PhD students, Matthew Law (Cardiff University) and Lorna Richardson (University College London), and builds upon a successful project called Day of Humanities, which documented the daily work of people working in a field now known as 'Digital Humanities€'.

So what is happening? The idea is very simple, over 350 archaeologists from around the world have signed up to document their working day via the use of social media. They will be submitting blog posts, photographs, video footage or a combination of these to demonstrate to anyone interested how varied the archaeological profession is.

All these submissions will be moderated and released through the project's website and disseminated through different social media networks - for example, on Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter (the hashtag for the project is #dayofarch). Some project members will also be making use of the latest entrant to the social media fray, Google+, and will be using a 'hangout'™, to promote archaeology digitally (details for this will be published later).

The project now has expressions of interest from people working on excavation in Belize, scientists working in laboratories, archaeologists talking about how cuts have affected their work, community archaeologists leading workshops and museum educators teaching the next generation about the magic of archaeology.

The very first post to be published, at 00:01 on the 29 July, will be from Maev Kennedy, who writes about archaeology €“amongst other things for the Guardian newspaper, about why she is in awe of archaeology. Once complete, the experiment will form part of Lorna's PhD research and will also be written up for academic publication and be used as a model for public engagement at this yearâ's Theoretical Archaeological Group conference in Birmingham.

So if you are an archaeologist, or have been, or you are even becoming one, thereâ's still time to sign up. Send the project team an email at dayofarchaeology@gmail.com or find out more by visiting the website.