39th regular meeting

6 ppl attended

Open exchange and announcements

Project discussion

  • Context: Reviving old archaeological research software tools
  • Concrete project: Reviving the “Tools for quantitative analysis” (http://tfqa.com)
    • James Allison contacted the author Keith Kintigh:
    • Prof. Kintigh appreciates the effort of rewriting some of the tools in R; he would even be willing to get involved directly
    • TFQA was a commercial project, but there is no significant demand for the old distribution, so making the rewritten code/tools openly available is OK
    • Some tools are computationally intensive and optimization may be an issue in R
    • There are some potential numerical analysis issues in computing the factorials for binomial probabilities for some of the tools - developers should rely on established numerical libraries and not implement this math from scratch
    • Matt Peeples has already implemented some of the tools in R (https://mattpeeples.net/data-and-software), but his focus was on the core algorithms - wrapping them in a convenient, well documented functions is still an open task
    • Various TFQA tools are described across different publications. See the discussion in the Google group for some relevant papers
    • Potential targets/low-hanging fruits to work on:
      • An R package compiling different archaeological diversity measure algorithms
      • A package or a set of blogposts/scripts reproducing some of the spatial data analysis tools
    • A key feature of TFQA is domain-appropriate resampling (e.g. temporal or spatial resampling), which should be preserved in any rewritten version
    • Technical observations about TFQA:
      • Multiple of the open-source TFQA tools are written in Delphi, a dialect of Pascal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software))
      • They were usually compiled for MS-DOS or MS-Windows, some compiled executables do not run any more on modern Windows versions and require emulation
      • The tools typically have a simple TUI (terminal user interface) that guides the user through the input preparation
      • Some of the tools are pretty complex and include multiple subcommands
    • Further discussion should happen on GitHub in dedicated issues at https://github.com/sslarch/tfqar

Next SIG Meeting: Wednesday, June 5, 2024

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

This was originally planned for last session, but had to be postponed

Scientific Scripting Languages in Archaeology

A special interest group of CAA International dedicated to scientific scripting languages in archaeology.


2024-05-08