13 ppl attended
Organisational matters
- Duration of the SIG SSLA steering committee election cycle
- We did not make a decision about this when we elected the commitee
- The members present in this meeting have no strong opinion about the matter
- Ideally the full committee would not be replaced at once. Instead a certain overlap of members should uphold continuity
- The current committee (Martin Hinz, Sophie Schmidt, Clemens Schmid) will prepare a suggestion for the next meeting
- “How to join” instructions
- Martin Hinz prepared a guide with steps for new members to formally join the SIG
- Everybody liked it - except for the name “Boarding guide”, which should be changed (according to the native speakers)
- A link to the document can be found in the Slack channel
- The document is available for review until 2021-07-08. Then the committee will publish it on the website
- More ideas to welcome new members
- Automatically invite people joining the mailing list to the Slack workspace
- A “Welcome officer” could handle these duties (volunteers wanted!)
- The self introduction on Slack could be formalized with a template, e.g.:
* Name: zack
* Pronouns: he/him
* Year Started at iSchool: 2016
* Research: archaeological databases, interdisciplinary collaboration, open data
* Academic Background: interdisciplinary studies (carleton), anthropology (mcmaster)
* Ask Me About: bad sci-fi, old movies, my cats
* Other Roles at the iSchool/UofT:
* Learn More Here: zackbatist.github.io, twitter.com/mtl_zack
Conferences, meetings and sessions
CAA2021 debriefing
- More room for discussion would have been nice, generally and in our session S17
- For future sessions a roundtable + lightning talks format might be better suited for meta-topics like software development. Concrete 15min papers might work better in a session with a specific, scientific topic
- Reminder: The CAA recordings are still available for conference participants in case you missed talks you wanted to see
- The meta analysis by Ben Marwick, Zack Batist and Joe Roe in S17 was very interesting and should be repeated in the future
- The workshop S31 organised by the SIG was surprisingly well visited - Workshops like this should stay part of the SIGs core profile in the future
- A future workshop topic might be “Collaborative working on Code”
The (in-person?) conference Theoretical Approaches to Computational Archaeology is asking for submissions now
SIG activities
Compiling lists of resources is a useful, not too time-consuming, well divisible and - as illustrated by the meta papers in S17 - even scientifically valuable task. That’s why we would like to continue working on this beyond the software list OpenArchaeo.
Conference list
- Idea: A list of upcoming conferences/workshops in the field of computational archaeology
- Mainting such a list requires constant action by a couple of motivated people explicitly responsible for keeping it alive
- This is complicated by a number of technical challenges (e.g. timezones)
- As Martin Hinz (absent in this meeting) suggested this idea, discussing a possible implementation will be postponed until he is available again
Teaching material list
- Idea: A list of openly available teaching material (vignettes, videos, blog posts) for computer applications in archaeology
- This could be combined with OpenArchaeo on one web platform
- Multiple question remain to be discussed (e.g. scope and self-limitation to material targeted explicitly at archaeologists?)
- A working group formed around Sophie Schmidt to discuss an implementation: Joe Roe, Dean Anthony Arcega, Agnes Schneider, Thomas Huet, Zack Batist, Petr Pajdla
Open exchange about activities and software updates
- https://archaeologicalethics.org - “sources on archaeological ethics”
- https://www.fieldwalker.org - “articles on ancient landscapes and archaeological survey in the Mediterranean, alongside featured project pages with links to official survey websites and open data sources, plus event listings for relevant archaeological survey events”
