8 ppl attended

Open exchange and announcements

• New version of “OmnesViae”, a route planner for the Roman Empire: https://omnesviae.org
• WebAssembly for scientific computing is gaining momentum: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00725-1
• New R package “centerline” to retrieve the centerline of spatial polygons (useful for spatial analysis/map plotting): https://github.com/atsyplenkov/centerline
• New online platform “Digital Atlas of Ancient Arabia”: https://ancientarabia.huma-num.fr/atlas
• Conference on distributed data management: https://distribits.live
• New Radon Database announced (not online yet) which will combine radon and radon-b: https://radon.ufg.uni-kiel.de, https://radon-b.ufg.uni-kiel.de
• The Mosaic Summer School 2024 (Kiel, Germany) about chronological data analysis was officially announced now: https://lscholtus.gitlab.io/mosaicchrono
• Another summer school titled “Computer and Geoscience in Archaeology” (Dresden, Germany) is open for applications: https://www.htw-dresden.de/hochschule/fakultaeten/info-math/studium/studiengang-archaeoinformatik/summer-school-computer-science-in-archaeology
• And one more summer school, the “Venice Summer School in Digital and Public Humanities” (Venice, Italy), as well: https://www.unive.it/pag/39288

Project discussion

• New SIG SSLA group project about reviving old, archaeological research software
  • Pitches:
    • Lisa Steinmann: Bringing the Quantatools R Package to CRAN
      • Code: https://github.com/maciejkasinski/quantatools and now https://github.com/lsteinmann/quantatools
      • Context: https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/101850/CAA2017_Kubicka-Kasinski_The%20Metrological%20Research_OA.pdf
      • State: The author, Maciej Kasiński, is not maintaining the project any more and is fine with a fork
    • James Allison: Recovering some core functionality from WinBasp
      • Context: https://baspsoftware.org and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinBASP
      • State: The author, Irwin Scollar, is not working on the software any more
      • Martin Hinz and Christoph Rinne obtained a copy of the code (16-bit Fortran) at some point in the past
      • Some functionality is already replaced by other tools, e.g. “tosca” (https://martinhinz.shinyapps.io/tosca) for Seriation/Correspondence Analysis or postaar (https://github.com/ISAAKiel/postAAR-python) for the detection of structures in posthole fields
    • James Allison: Tools for quantitative Analysis
      • Context: http://tfqa.com
      • State: The author, Keith Kintigh, may still be working on it. The software has been commercially distributed in the past
      • Joe Roe has started to compile a list of alternative solutions for the individual tools: https://github.com/sslarch/tfqar
      • Matt Peeples has implemented some alternatives: https://mattpeeples.net/data-and-software
    • Martin Hinz: CoinCalc
      • Code: https://github.com/JonatanSiegmund/CoinCalc
      • Context: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440317301309
      • Some of the functionality was already been implemented in another package “tapas”: https://github.com/JonatanSiegmund/CoinCalc/issues/2, so https://github.com/wfinsinger/tapas
  • See the SIG SSLA chat at https://chat.archaeo.social to see how these ideas are further discussed and developed
  • General questions raised in the discussion:
    • Is it good to provide simple graphical user interfaces, when we as a SIG actually want to encourage the use of scripting languages to ensure computational reproducibilty?
    • Did some of these old tools produce (proprietary?) data formats and would it be valuable to implement conversion tools to transform this data to more modern, open and human- and machine-readable formats?

Next SIG Meeting: Wednesday, May 8, 2024

We invited Nicolas Frerebeau to introduce the tesselle R package collection: https://www.tesselle.org