7 ppl attended

Open exchange

• Ben Marwick:
  • Archaeology CRAN Task View
    • CRAN has updated the way task views are maintained
    • Ben et al. prepared a draft for an Archaeology task view: https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology/blob/master/Archaeology.md
    • Everybody is invited to check it for completeness and suggest changes on GitHub
  • Incentivizing archaeological journals to request/support/verify computational reproducibility
    • Ben reached out to the editors of various journals to argue for more data/code sharing
    • He suggested two concrete changes:
      • The journals should support Open Research Badges (e.g. https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-research/open-recognition-and-reward/open-research-badges.html), which is a relatively easy thing for the journals to adopt
    • A more work-intensive idea involves to specify the new role of a “Associate Editor of Reproducibility”. This role involves checking the computational reproducibility of papers, if the authors opt-in.
    • The editors were pretty receptive to these ideas so far - Ben has more meetings lined up
  • New paper: “Women in the Lab, Men in the Field? Correlations between Gender and Research Topics at Three Major Archaeology Conferences”
    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2023.2261083
    • Code: https://github.com/yichun33/archyconfgender
    • Ben’s short introduction of the paper sparked a discussion about gender parity in our group. When we organize meetings we should be conscious about who we invite to maintain a balance - not just regarding gender, but also regarding other diversity parameters. We could consider formalizing this notion in our statutes.
• Florian Thiery (https://fthiery.de/) contacted the SIG SSLA to ask if any of our members would like to join him in chairing a session at the EAA2024. The session will frame/discuss research software as a special kind of research data.
• John Aycock asked a modified version of the question that already came up in the 31st meeting (2023-07-05). Back then he asked about programming language features archaeologists may desire. Now he focused on tools to translate from one language to another (transpilation). Keywords of the discussion:
  • Simpler ways to express chronological models (e.g. oxcal)
  • Visual coding, e.g. https://education.rstudio.com/blog/2019/10/my-javascript-internship-at-rstudio
  • Standardized data analysis pipelines for certain data categories: burial site data, compositional data
  • Managing site data is a major unsolved question of archaeology, despite many attempts
• Other news items, mostly compiled from Mastodon by Clemens Schmid, Sophie Schmidt and Ben Marwick:
  • Typewriter-styled maps in ggplot2: https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/creating-typewriter-maps-r
  • Interesting discussion “How to comment on dead systems in a review”: https://archaeo.social/@Drdonnayates/111147003931585716
  • New fuzzy-join package: https://github.com/beniaminogreen/zoomerjoin
  • Zack Batist’s PhD thesis is online: https://zenodo.org/record/8373390
  • webR and shiny become integrated - just as predicted: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3707250/shiny-r-web-framework-arrives-in-wasm.html
  • The ROAD database got published: https://archaeo.social/@sommer@fosstodon.org/110820072946462861
  • Inequality joins are now easy to do in the dplyr R package: https://r4ds.hadley.nz/joins.html#inequality-joins
  • The ADS has prepared a new archaeological data management guide/checklist: https://www.archaeologists.net/digdigital

Conferences

There are currently open calls for papers for the CAA2024 in Auckland (https://2024.caaconference.org, until 19th October) and the ArcheoFOSS 2023 in Turin (https://www.archeofoss.org/2023, until 20th October).

Next SIG Meeting: Wednesday, November 1, 2023

We invited two colleagues to introduce the Archaeo-riddle competition: https://theia.arch.cam.ac.uk/archaeoriddle