Un-#VEiLing the potential of Social Media: Open Archaeology for Public Engagement

Abstract

Visualising Engineered Landscape (VEiL) is a landscape archaeology project based in Aquileia (Italy), which combines traditional methodologies with innovative digital technologies. Despite growing interest worldwide in Public Archaeology, in Italy VEiL is a unique example of an archaeological field survey project developing digital public engagement through Social Media (SM). VEiL adopts a planned communication strategy, combining different SM (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook): multiple SM accounts enable customisation of contents according to the SM specific community, and to adapt communication patterns on the basis of audience response, matching public understanding and scientific authenticity. The adopted approach proved successful in reaching a broad and heterogeneous audience: the analytics show steadily increasing numbers of followers, ranging from academics to cultural associations, other public archaeology projects and general public. Through digital engagement media, VEiL enables non-specialists to look behind the scenes of a research project. Posts that highlight diachronic landscape transformations are the ones with the highest interaction, suggesting a growing interest in local communities for local history: consequently, local landowners and residents feel more confident in sharing useful information with archaeologists. Direct, un-mediated interaction with VEiL project members increased followers also among scholars, attracted by the possibility of sharing reciprocal expertise in an informal fashion. This paper describes the SM strategy, adopted by VEiL, of sharing the progress and results of ongoing research and how it fosters a direct connection between academics and public.