Chiara Bonacchi

• PhD
• Chancellor's Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Heritage at University of Edinburgh

This article assesses the role of the pre-modern past in the construction of political identities relating to the UK’s membership in the European Union, by examining how materials and ideas from Iron Age to Early Medieval Britain and Europe were leveraged by those who discussed the topic of Brexit in over 1.4 million messages published in dedicated...

This paper draws upon the experience of several years of running a multi-application crowdsourcing platform, as well as a longitudinal evaluation of participant profiles, motivations and behaviour, to argue that heritage crowdsourcing cannot straightforwardly be considered a democratising form of cultural participation. While we agree that crowdsou...

This article provides the first theoretical treatment of the ontologies and epistemologies of digital heritage research at the time of the interconnected and social web, based on extensive empirical and analytical investigation. We draw on observations and concepts developed while conducting the first study of public experiences of the past that ut...

This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework to study heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies by combining approaches from the humanities, social and computing sciences. We use such a framework to examine how ideas of human origin and ancestry are deployed on Twitter for purposes of antagonistic ‘othering’. Our goal is to...

How was the Roman Empire invoked in Brexit Britain and in Donald Trump’s United States of America, and to what purpose? And why is it critical to answer these kinds of questions? Heritage and Nationalism explores how people’s perceptions and experiences of the ancient past shape political identities in the digital age. It particularly examines the...

This study investigates the dissemination of archaeological information on Twitter/X through the lens of cultural evolution. By analysing 132,230 tweets containing the hashtag #archaeology from 2021 to 2023, we examine how content and context-related factors influence retweeting behaviour. Our findings reveal that tweets with positive sentiment and...

This is an online publication which can be accessed here: https://epoiesen.carleton.ca/2023/11/17/sketchbridgingromanscotland/

Rapidly growing research in urban heritage studies highlights the significance of incorporating participatory approaches in urban transformation projects. And yet, participation tends to be limited, including only certain segments of the population. It is also acknowledged that cities are ‘dynamic’ and ‘complex’ systems. However, there is extremely...

For some time, archaeology and heritage have been experiencing a huge increase in the amount of available ‘’Open Science’’, in terms of digitized and born-digital data concerning human history and prehistory with all their contemporary legacies. This has been due to a combination of numerous research and cultural resource management initiatives, fo...

This special issue examines the dynamic relationships between production, availability and uses of big data, contemporary collecting, heritage value-making and social activism. The shift from an informational to a more profoundly interconnected Web and the resulting emergence of an unprecedented deluge of often unstructured data are transforming ho...

This article illustrates an approach that draws on topo-stratigraphic building archaeology, architectural anthropology and heritage studies to assess transforming social values of urban built heritage in the longue durée. These three research traditions are closely relat- ed, but often pursued for the study of urban environments at the exclusion of...

This special theme examines the dynamic relationships between production, availability, and usage of Big Data, laying out a research agenda for digital heritage at the time of the ‘data turn’. Over the past 15 years, a proliferation of heritage data has been generated by ‘ecosystems of distributed practices’ enacted by the co-working of bodies, cul...

Open Access https://www.fupress.com/archivio/pdf/3944_21712.pdf

Questa comunicazione si prefigge di sintetizzare e riflettere brevemente sul tema dell'esperienza in contesto museale, partendo da una revisione critica della letteratura pubblicata in museologia e proponendola come spunto per sviluppi futuri dell'archeologia pubblica italiana.

In his debate piece, ‘The Brexit Hypothesis and prehistory’, Kenneth Brophy foregrounds some of the possible consequences of archaeology’s media and public exposure. While recognising that (mis)appropriations of research for political purposes are nothing new, he stresses that these instrumental uses might have been amplified by a more interconnect...

Knowledge production, today, relies increasingly on exchanges between groups of people who connect through the Internet. This can happen in many forms that include, for example, consulting and amending Wikipedia entries, engaging in Twitter conversations about a certain topic, or developing research software by building on existing code released un...

The Iron Age and Roman periods are often defined against each other through the establishment of dualities, such as barbarity–civilisation, or spiritual–rational. Despite criticisms, dualities remain prevalent in the National Curriculum for schools, television, museum displays and academic research. Recent scientific studies on human origins, for e...

This special issue focuses on digitally-enabled co-production in archaeology, by bringing together papers that were presented at the session Communication as Collaboration: Digital Methods, Experiences and Values, organised at the 21st Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (University of Glasgow, 2015). The session was part o...

This brief update introduces the framework of a newly funded research project entitled ‘Iron Age and Roman Heritages: Exploring ancient identities in modern Britain’ to be undertaken collaboratively by Durham University and the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and supported by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2016–2019)1. The project asses...

The articles in this section of Internet Archaeology came out of a Theoretical Archaeology Group session at Manchester University in 2014. The session was motivated to explore issues associated with 'digital public archaeology' (DPA). The articles presented here deal with a number of themes which arise when doing digital public archaeology.

This article presents critiques and analyses of recent work in digital public archaeology (DPA) in the United Kingdom. It first locates different strands of DPA within the wider field of public archaeology, and begins to map out the diverse forms, aims and sources of DPA. Next it critically examines the models of 'communication' that are present in...

This article reviews existing case studies in the ‘crowd-funding’ of community archaeology, as well as offering preliminary results from a small-scale experiment conducted alongside the wider crowd-sourcing efforts of the MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org). In so-doing, it also considers the possible role of a hybrid reward- and donation-ba...

There are thousands of forgotten archaeological archives hidden away in repositories all over the world, lost worlds where many scholars have toiled away for years, trying to record every detail and bit of information available about rare and precious archaeological objects in an attempt to bring order and understanding to an almost incomprehensibl...

Archaeology has a long tradition of volunteer involvement but also faces considerable challenges in protecting and understanding a geographically widespread, rapidly dwindling and ever threatened cultural resource. This paper considers a newly launched, multi-application crowdsourcing project called MicroPasts that enables both community-led and ma...

This paper offers a brief introduction to MicroPasts, a web-enabled crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding project whose overall goal is to promote the collection and use of high quality research data via institutional and community collaborations, both on- and off-line. In addition to introducing this initiative, the discussion below is a reflection of...

Despite the continuing growth of Public Archaeology as a field of studies, the composition and behaviour of the ?public? for archaeology are still heavily under-investigated. This paper addresses the neglected area of archaeological audiences and offers insights into the public?s experience of archaeology in the UK and Italy, focussing on museums a...

This article examines the experiential values of archaeological television, through the case study of Time Team. It proposes a framework of analysis and provides new evidence to demonstrate how this TV series has contributed to the construction of the current public understanding of archaeology. By exploring the composition of the more dedicated au...

Forthcoming *review*

Archaeologists now face a myriad of digital ways of engaging with the public – social media, online TV channels, games, etc. It is critical that this potential and its limitations are closely assessed and utilised to make archaeology a genuinely public activity. Archaeology and Digital Communication examines how archaeology engages the public in th...

1. L'occasione di presentare per la prima volta, non solo in Italia, una mostra su una delle aree archeo-logiche più importanti del mondo e che negli ultimi tre lustri ha visto il susseguirsi di straordinarie sco-perte da parte di alcune delle più prestigiose scuole archeologiche internazionali è offerta dalla collaborazione, in particolare per le...