9 ppl were present

Open Exchange

• John Aycock will give a talk on tuesday on archaeogaming: https://www.sas.ac.uk/events/archaeogaming-antics-computer-science-meets-archaeology, London time zone 4-5pm
• New ggplot2 release 3.5.0: https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2024/02/ggplot2-3-5-0/
  • changes implementation of legends and may break code
• Job postings for ADS positions: https://archaeo.social/@BlckheathHopper/112004422203426152
• Clarivate’s Web of Science and JOSS (Journal of Open Source Software, minimal review process on Github, 2-page introductions to software, nice to have something to cite) - dispute: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/112012152112087956
• Short update on French CAA chapter: sounds good, says Julian Laabs
• MOSAIC summer school 2024: no news yet?
• James Allison on EAA chapter of SIG interest: 9 papers submitted, 8 accepted
  • The organizers have not yet decided whether there will be an open space for spontanously presenting during the session (similar to the Little Minion sessions at CAA)
  • At EAA everyone may only present one main-author presentation, so these short elevator pitches might be great as a second minor presentation

Survey on SIG presentations and projects

• We will ask Nicolas Frerebreau first, then Shawn Graham, Jörg Baten and Daniel Kondor
• We will aks Nicolas to join us for the May meeting and see how it goes from there
• Winner for SIG project: Make old software useful again
  • e.g. https://github.com/sslarch/tfqar
  • James Allison has some old software in Turbo Pascal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal)
  • There might be automatic code translation programs already implemented, depends on the pascal version
  • Maybe LLMs could be useful, but buggy - sometimes helpful, sometimes take longer than to do it by hand
  • How do we get more concrete with this idea?
    • Gather project ideas and use a meeting to pitch them, then decide together which ones might be interesting for enough for ppl to create a working group
    • The result does not need to be an R package
    • @Everyone: please look for fitting little programs we could work on

Map of Computational Archaeology Teaching Material

• The map could be a bit more interesting, so more worthwhile to re-visit.
• Ideas to achieve that:
  • Automatically query papers for key words relating to the topics on the map?
    • Ben Marwick’s automated R Archaeology paper bot did something similar? -> Is he still maintaing that? https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology/blob/master/README.md#publications-that-include-r-code
  • Highlight some specific, particularly good materials? Could help ppl to choose where to start?
  • Re-toot the map regularly to remind ppl and invite them to add material
    • Easy to do this automatically every time the map is updated for mastodon -> but this depends on ppl adding new material in the first place

next meeting: 3rd April 2024