Since the beginning of the century, the digitization of medieval manuscripts has been a major concern of institutions in the possession of such material. This has led to the massive production of digital surrogates for online display. Preservation condition and temporal and spatial limitations are no longer restrictions for accessing these objects, making them easily available to a potentially larger public than before. The databases created for hosting the surrogates are designed for different categories of audience, with various standards in mind and different levels of technical sophistication. Although primarily accessed for the texts they bear, the digital surrogates of manuscripts are also the object of study of a specialized group of users interested in their physical features. This review will discuss whether databases that comprise digital surrogates of Greek New Testament manuscripts built by different types of institutions are efficient in addressing the needs of this admittedly small audience. I examine questions of content, interface, organization, and rationales behind the choices of their creators.

In the digital age, cultural organizations strive to retain audience engagement especially via experimentation with novel technologies and social media. The latter are increasingly influencing the way cultural heritage is perceived, providing options for grappling with crucial issues in the sector, including sustainability, openness, and public participation. One tool that has been deployed to explore these issues is the chatbot, a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet. Chatbots run through different conversational interfaces, but they have a particularly heavy application in Facebook Messenger. Within the museums and cultural sector specifically, these robotic media are regularly proclaimed to offer novel engagement mechanisms that can empower participants to actively participate in the heritage process. However, most heritage Messenger bots are purely informative and object- or exhibit-centered, providing little opportunity for meaningful interactivity, creative expression, or critical engagement. This article explores and critically reviews three Messenger chatbots related to heritage organizations, concluding with suggestions for their future development.

Teaching and public engagement with the results and implications of bioarchaeological research have increasingly attracted more varied and social media-savvy audiences. Since 2010, the social media platform Instagram has also flourished, with millions of users forming untold numbers of communities of practice. Here, I seek to address the intersection of bioarchaeology and the virtual “stage” that social media represents. How is the discipline of bioarchaeology and the act of being a bioarchaeologist represented on Instagram? How do practicing bioarchaeologists (and enthusiastic supporters of the field) communicate about their own and others’ research, fieldwork, laboratory work, et cetera? With ever-greater amounts of scientific communication and public outreach conducted over social media (e.g., Gura 2013; Kling and McKim 2000; Wheat et al. 2013), it is worth investigating how the living who study the dead interact with each other, form community, and engage online audiences that increasingly contain descendants of the dead being studied. The review below is short; hence, the nature and depth of inquiry is restricted. Nevertheless, enough data are available to allow broader speculation and to suggest that there is space for more concerted future research.

In early 2017, Sarah Parcak used her $1 million TED Prize to build the GlobalXplorer° platform (https://www.globalxplorer.org) “to identify and quantify looting and encroachment to sites of archaeological and historical importance,” using a crowdsourced “citizen science” methodology popularized by the Zooniverse web portal. GlobalXplorer° invited the public to search satellite imagery from Peru for evidence of looting within 100 m × 100 m squares, training them along the way and gamifying participation. In this review, I test the platform and consider the applicability of GlobalXplorer° as a vector for changing the way that the general public perceives the global illicit trade in cultural objects.

In the push to provide further interaction with museum and heritage exhibitions, the internet has become an established venue, offering nearly unlimited space and options for providing extensions to in-person content. These internet-based supplements in many cases outlast the physical displays they are meant to accompany. After the exhibitions have closed and the museums have moved on, the digital content remains, a static placeholder for a particular viewpoint on heritage, curation, and public outreach. Such is the case with the Interface Experience, the Web extension to the exhibition of the same name, which ran for a few months in 2015 (Bard Graduate Center [BGC] 2014a). This site, which remains largely functional, is now disconnected from the exhibition it was meant to accompany, leaving it to stand alone as a study on the connections between digital outputs and materiality.

The podcast as a communicative medium continues to rise in popularity as an opportunity for individuals to express themselves in similar ways to traditional radio and television. Critically, though, the recording of a podcast does not need a full studio for production. Rather, an individual possessing a microphone, free editing software, and time can create an audio show that is then uploaded to the Internet for people to download and listen to. Although podcasts can be found via standard web searching, they are also often listed in podcast directories, such as iTunes, Sticher, Google Play, and Miro (Ortega 2015), and hence are easily discoverable through both desktop browsers and mobile apps, making it simple to subscribe to multiple shows. The iTunes store, owned by Apple, is a particularly popular directory: a podcaster must submit a special kind of link, called an RSS feed, to Apple and have it approved. An RSS feed is a dynamic link that lets anyone attached to it know when an update is made to a web page—in this case, a listing of podcasts. Once the podcast is accepted to the directory, various search engines can access it and allow people to search by name or category (chosen by the podcasters themselves).

Two of the biggest challenges in public archaeology teaching are getting interlocutors' attention and getting them to feel connection to past people. Inspiring focus and empathy in the short interactions we have can be difficult, especially when the subjects are very distant in time. New and scholarly produced forms of virtual reality show particular promise for getting and keeping the attention of our publics. In this review, I discuss several forms of virtual or augmented reality and assess them as tools for public archaeology practice.

Video games are one of today's quintessential media and cultural forms, but they also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past (Morgan 2016). This certainly holds true for Sid Meier's Civilization (MicroProse & Firaxis Games 1991–2016), which is a series of turn-based, strategy video games in which you lead a historic civilization “from the Stone Age to the Information Age” (Civilization ca. 2016). Sid Meier's Civilization VI, the newest iteration of the series developed by Firaxis and released on October 21, 2016, allows players to step into the shoes of idealized political figures such as Gilgamesh, Montezuma, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gandhi. Via these and other leaders, you aim to achieve supremacy over all other civilizations. This is done through founding cities, creating infrastructure, building armies, conducting diplomacy, spreading culture and religion, and choosing “technologies” and “civics”—philosophical or ideological breakthroughs—for your civilization to focus on.

This review assesses the capabilities of the technology of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as tools for increasing the presence of archaeology in our digital society. Instead of focusing on the academic value of the content of these courses, I explore their usefulness as promoters of rigorous archaeological practices and ethics, as well as the protection and preservation of cultural heritage. After enrolling as a student in six MOOCs, I have analyzed whether these courses successfully provided students with an informed and critical understanding of the field, as well as creating networks of advocates that can share this knowledge across their communities.

Are you an avid fan of Instagramed excavation finds, or YouTube clips of archaeologists? Ever visited an archaeologically-themed virtual museum? Or have you taken a tour of a historic site with a mobile app as your guide? Have you searched for the best Minecraft games deployed in the name of heritage? Or are you regularly on the lookout for blogs to keep you up-to-date on new archaeological thinking?

Beginning with our next issue, Advances in Archaeological Practice (AAP) will become the first major archaeological journal in the English-speaking world to to regularly review the highs and lows, the practicalities, personal experiences and audience impacts of the full range of digital media applied to our discipline. Moving beyond standard book or exhibition reviews, here we will explore any (and all) current digital initiatives produced to engage both general and specialist audiences. Our concern is to push on the boundaries of the review format, turning it into a space where the increasing array of digital outputs being developed and marketed in archaeology are compared and subjected to critical reflection.

Maintaining the public’s interest in the past has long been a major concern among archaeologists, and practitioners since Mortimer Wheeler have appreciated the value of reporting their finds through mass media outlets (Moshenska and Schadla-Hall 2011). While teaching the honors module Archaeology in Contemporary Society at the University of Chester in 2015, I wanted to assess the portrayal of our discipline in the news. I put together a computer lab session that collated headlines into word clouds and found some peculiarities of reporting across news sources. Yet when it came time to producing essays, few students chose to write about this subject. While there have been some great studies of archaeology in the media, they are aging fast and new work has yet to catch up with the digital world of online news.