4 ppl attended

Organisational matters

• The steering committee election cycle was set to two years with a three month overlap period. The next election will therefore be in October 2022
• The “How to become a SIG SSLA member” document discussed in the last meeting is online now: https://sslarch.github.io/documents/becoming_a_member
• As an experiment we introduce a new recurring point of order “Show and tell” for our monthly meetings, that replaces/enhances “Open exchange about activities and software updates”. 1-2 volunteers show some interesting and preferably unpolished work-in-progress/tech wizardry in slots of 5 to 15 minutes
• We now have a common google calendar, to share events relevant for all SIG members: https://groups.google.com/g/scientific-scripting-languages-in-archaeology/c/3dLYnoP1ywI (Members of the mailing list should already be able to edit it)
• For many SIG members it might be better/indifferent to move the meeting timeslot by one hour. We should discuss this in the next meeting

Conferences, meetings and sessions

• EAA2021: Martin Hinz prepared a useful list of sessions that focus on quantitative apporaches and computer applications (CfP is closed, though)
  • 16 “Economic Archaeology” and Quantitative Approaches – Measuring the Variations in Production and Consumption from Archaeological Data, 8 Sep 9:00 ‐ 13:00
  • 130 BIG‐BIO: Opportunities and Challenges of BIG Data with a Focus on BIO‐Archaeology, 7 Sep 14:30 ‐ 18:30
  • 235 Is Machine Learning in Archaeology Fact or Fiction?, 10 Sep 9:00 ‐ 11:00
  • 267 History of Measuring and Calculations in Archaeology, 8 Sep 9:00 ‐ 13:00
  • 269 Between Variability and Singularity: Crossing Theoretical, Qualitative and Computer‐based Approaches to Types and Typologies in Archaeology [PaM], 10 Sep 9:00 ‐ 16:30
  • 297 Modelling Complexity: Past Interactions between People, Climate and Environment [PaM], 11 Sep 9:00 ‐ 16:30
  • 382 From the Field to the Computer. The Validity of Quantitative Methods Regarding the Quality of Archaeological Data, 11 Sep 14:30 ‐ 18:30
  • 445 Digital Methods and Typology: New Horizons, 8 Sep 9:00 ‐ 13:00
  • 487 A network for agent‐based modelling of socio‐ecological systems in Archaeology (NASA), 9 Sep 9:00 ‐ 16:30

SIG activities

• Conference list

  • Martin presented a prototype that captures his vision: https://martinhinz.github.io/ssla_conf_list
  • As discussed in the last meeting: Maintaining such a list is a considerable time investment (volunteers wanted!)
  • An alternative option might be to enter the relevant events into the SIG’s new google calendar, which could then be dynamically queried for a list on our website

• Teaching material list

  • The responsible working group is invited to report their progress/discussion in the next meeting

Open exchange about activities and software updates

• OpenArchaeo now has an InternetArchive collection for long term storage: https://archive.org/details/open-archaeo

Show and tell

• Clemens Schmid - Simple Stream processing of tabular data in R, which enables handling of very large files: https://gist.github.com/nevrome/2d13733583d9f0c0dfaadc4c0b12aedf

Next meeting: Friday, September 3, 2021