University of Maryland

Graduate Student, College of Information Studies

Other Affiliations: University of Maryland Baltimore County, Dept. of Ancient Studies
Sarah Lawrence College, Anthropology

Graduate Student

iSchool, College of Information Studies

About

Jarrett Farmer is currently pursuing his M.L.I.S. in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Prior to coming to College Park, with the support of a Howard P. Rawlings grant, Jarrett had the opportunity for post-baccalaureate study of archaeology and the classical languages in the Department of Ancient Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His paper Canaanite Trade in the Early 1st Millennium and the Spread of the Alphabet won the Ancient Studies writing prize in 2008. With the generous support of a Christopher P. Sherwin award, as well as a UMBC Ancient Studies travel grant, he worked on an excavation of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600-1100 BCE) site of Iklaina, in the area of Messenia, Greece. While abroad, he studied the Great Megaron at the Palace of Nestor as a symbolic and performative space. His resulting thesis was published in the 2011 UMBC Review.

Jarrett’s current research focuses on the teaching of information literacy to undergraduate classics and archaeology majors. Prior to the advent of easily accessible online research tools like Perseus Project, TOCS-IN, and JSTOR, philologists and archaeologists often spent long hours pouring over giant tomes and backlogs of journal publications to do their research. Language learning was done by rote memorization. Today, the tools available to emerging classicists are immense—from instructional software to productivity tools and online reference materials—and are growing every day. However, these tools have yet to be fully applied to the pedagogy of Greek and Latin languages and literatures. How can we fully bring information technology to bear to teach students to interact with the ancient world, and turn them into good scholars for today’s world? This study is focused on developing a set of best practices for a truly relevant, and information literate, pedagogy of archaeology and the classics.

In addition to his research on Bronze Age Greek archaeology and IT in classical pedagogy, Jarrett is broadly interested in the place of public libraries in a free and egalitarian society. During his years of work in the public library systems in Maryland, he has researched how information literacy is the basis for a functioning democracy.

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