Department's Web Site Celebrates Second Birthday
by John Kantner

After nearly two years in existence, the Department of Anthropology's Web site (http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/index.html) has been visited over 200,000 times. On an average day, around 300 visitors peruse these online pages, exploring popular features on human evolution, Mayan prehistory, Yanomamo ethnography, Anasazi architecture, and Nasca archaeology. The Web site has garnered numerous awards and accolades, including Apple's Quicktime Web Challenge, a Platinum Award by NetGuide, and a four-star (of four) rating by Magellan. A2Z ranks the site as the most popular anthropology department Web site. And the site has been mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, New Media Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Archaeology, HomePC, and The Scout Report.

Any Web site can be made to look pretty, but it's the content that ultimately impresses visitors and keeps them coming back. Continued interest in the department's Web site requires both updates to existing features as well as new material. So far, several graduate students in the department have contributed their time and energy towards creating and maintaining this site, but in a perfect world, everybody would help. In addition to enhancing the department's image, your contributions to the site are also a good way to promote yourself as an educator savvy enough to use new technologies. Of course, all of us are very busy with our own work, and for this reason, several different levels of involvement are outlined below:

1) The department's Web site includes a substantial amount of information about both faculty and graduate students. This is the most difficult information for us to maintain, and your help is solicited. Take a few moments and examine the following URLs to ensure that the information we have for you is correct:

For graduate students:

For faculty:

For both faculty and graduate students:

2) Create your own personal home page to link to the department's Web page. Your personal page(s) can include a description of your research, a vitae, abstracts or full copies of papers, and photos of you in the field. You can see examples of other graduate students' pages at http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/create/

3) Provide us with a project page describing your research program and its progress. This should be a fairly substantial contribution directed towards your peers, rather than to the general Internet population. The idea behind this is that information on your research will be available for other scholars with similar interests, perhaps resulting in stimulating dialogue and new contacts. Or develop a new Web feature! Our self-contained features provide interactive experiences on various anthropological topics. They should be directed towards a general Internet audience. Unlike all of the other aspects of the department's Web site, which are geared towards self promotion, our features provide a public service that teaches people about anthropology. Right now, we have a preponderance of features on archaeology and physical anthropology. We really need someone to help us develop more features oriented towards cultural anthropology. Examples of our features can be seen here.

According to NetGuide, the UCSB Anthropology Department's Web site "mixes creativity with hard work to offer an experience on the Web that most university pages lack." If we are to continue to be this cool, we need your help! Have questions about how you can assist? Contact a grad student who already has a web page. And be sure to check out the accompanying article on our new computer, which is all set up for making Web pages.

Back to AGSA volume 3(1) index
Back to index of all AGSA volumes
Back to main UCSB Anthropology page