6 people attending
ESTER-project by Martin:
- https://ester-project.org/
- will start in September in Kiel
- aims to calculate population densities with Bayesian statistics
- his job advert has been prolonged to end of May: https://ester-project.org/2025/05/01/were-hiring-join-the-ester-project-team/
CAA:
meeting of SIG boards/representatives may not take place (SSLA seem to the most continouus active)
SIG SSLA meeting at CAA on Wednesday evening
- place: https://maps.app.goo.gl/shwMwuVhJWyVg6bE6
- after conference AGM
- time: 7:30 pm
CAA 2026 probably in Vienna (online poll, was only option)
Lisa Steinmanns talk about APIs at DAI will be interesting, focused on showcasing what hopefully will happen with API-access
Updates regarding next meetings:
Zack will take over the Summer Meetings June-August
do we want to change date / time?
- Matteo would like to do another day than Friday in June
- Shawn needs to reply, whether he has time on Friday
- Martin forwards the email to Zack, who then can continue discussion
do a poll for July
meeting after summer:
- Emily Coco in September
- Gabriele in October: MAPA project (AI related)
idea: do another joint SIG meeting?
- maybe if there’s a SIG heads meeting, we can discuss this for a late summer meeting
- (we had a meeting with Little Minions and a meeting with Rchaeology)
Discussion:
paper about maintenance of open source code: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18971
- epidemiology / biology: baseline for coding known by many, but doesn’t mean it is maintained.
- archaeology has maybe more of an attitude based on sharing code and data (because all is modelling anyway)
- linked to expectation of being picked up by industry
- Zack: Canada happens rarely, but sometimes there is a spin off from research that works with the code developed from research
archeo riddle: paper is out now: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440325000287
- sadly only 5 participants
- the idea was great, we should have this more often
Maybe we could have some kind of competition or interaction like this as well?
examples - Shawn Graham: epoisien - competition and DH awards: https://carleton.ca/history/2016/open-context-carleton-prize-archaeological-visualization/ - 2019 Krakau CAA: tried to do a Hackathon, turned into a basic R lesson
Matteo would like to do a Hackaton, but lacks ideas
Zack: maybe a semester-long re-use project, or “open science fair” ?
Matteo: idea to create a wrapper for a tool, so others can use it in their preferred language
Zack: Hackaton for one week is commitment heavy and stressfull
Matteo: tag-along for people who know one scripting language (R or python) and transfer one package into another, together (cross-pollination of R and python)
advent of code: gives challenges for each day of the advent - Matteo has done it one year, it would be fun to do it in a group - https://adventofcode.com/2024/about - probably hasn’t been done in archaeology yet - could also be a challenge to try the challenge in a language you are not familiar with
Code Wars: https://www.codewars.com/
- tiny and playful tasks
- could be a cool resource to transfer ideas from
maybe discuss these ideas over summer?
next meeting
- organised by Zack
- talk by Shawn in June
- date to be announced
