So, you want to become a member of the CAA Special Interest Group for Scientific Scripting Languages in Archaeology? You have questions about the qualifications you need? You want to know how to become a member? Wondering what the benefits are? Ask no more! Here are the answers you’ve been looking for.
What is needed to become a member
As for the prerequisites, there are really none, except an interest in advancing transparency in archaeological research through both human and machine-readable computer programs. Whether you are already an experienced programmer in this field, or you are just starting out, it does not matter. Our group aims to provide an inclusive forum for exchange. Furthermore, we have made it our task to spread the knowledge about the possibilities and advantages of scripts over point and click software for scientific work and to establish it in a broad user group. Therefore, we are happy about every new member and hope that you will enrich us with your input and questions. To become a member of the Special Interest Group, you also do not have to be necessarily a member of CAA as such.
How to become a member
To become a member, simply join our mailing list at https://groups.google.com/g/scientific-scripting-languages-in-archaeology.
From here, there are now several ways in which you can integrate yourself and participate in the discussion. With your membership application, we will add you to our mailing list, through which the most important information will be disseminated in a timely manner. But of course this is only a one-way exchange. Your active participation can take place much better in other ways.
Regular Meetings
The most important exchange platform is certainly our regular meeting. Once a month, on the 1st Wednesday, this takes place between 5-6 p.m. CET on Zoom. The link is send around a couple of days before via mailing list and google group. Here we discuss the organisational development of our group, the latest software in the field of archaeology, and all other important things concerning our work as a group as well as your work with archaeological data. This is also the right place if you are interested in actively participating in the further development of the group and in contributing ideas and initiatives.
Matrix Server
We also recommend that you join our Matrix server for chatting. We use https://chat.archaeo.social , which is a general platform for digital and computational archaeologists. There you can be invited to our channel for CAA SSLA. If you have joined the server, it would be nice if you could briefly introduce yourself on the #general channel. We generate sub channels as needed. Most useful is, e. g. the #help-wanted channel, where you can ask questions and someone will surely be able to give advice. And you are free to communicate directly with any of the members or create your own channels for specific initiatives and projects.
Members list
Finally, it would be good for all other members, but also for the outside world, if we can permanently learn something about your membership and your competences. To do this, you can add yourself to our list of members on the homepage. We host this homepage via Github Pages. To make changes to the homepage, for example to add yourself to the list, you can fork it (https://github.com/sslarch/sslarch.github.io) from there. Then, under content/members/, you will find individual small markdown files that contain the most important information about our members in an easy-to-understand syntax. Feel free to use one of these as a template and enter your own data. Of course, don’t forget to save it under your own name. Once this is done, feel free to make a pull request, and we will be happy to add you to our list.
Github Organisation
You are also welcome to join our GitHub organisation. Just contact us and we will be happy to add you as well.
Initiatives and Activities
Finally, feel free to get involved in any of our various activities. The groups for maintaining the Twitter account, the OpenArchaeo software list, and other initiatives are always happy to have active participation from members. Maybe you have a good idea for an initiative yourself that will benefit you, us, and the whole community of computational archaeologists. We would be happy if you could actively contribute to our work with your suggestions.
So, all these are offers, you don’t have to participate in all activities. But we would be happy if you would support us in one way or another to realise our ambition to establish understandable, comprehensible, reusable and reproducible analyses as the gold standard in archaeology. Welcome on board!
