CAA/SSLA workshop at CAA 2022, Oxford (W2)
Organised by Sophie Schmidt, Clemens Schmid and Florian Thiery
When: 2022-08-08, 15:30 - 17:00 BTS
Where: Online and in person, Lecture Theatre at the School of Archaeology (1 South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3TG)
Abstract
The archaeological community is moving beyond the traditional modes of scientific communication, such as research papers, monographs and conference talks, and interacts online on a daily basis. Especially for archaeologists, who use and develop advanced, computational tools, a new kind of platform increasingly extends mailing lists and social media here, and has proven invaluable for collaborative work: Version control systems to develop, share and test manuscripts, figures and code.
But not just coding archaeologists collaborate online to co-create. And co-creation is riddled with pitfalls and challenges – for anyone. Ensuring that datasets are unified and tidy, that details in projects are documented reproducibly, and that each colleague is indeed working on the latest version of a text or script is neither trivial nor easy. Proper version control can simplify the collaborative process for small teams, larger research networks and the community as a whole – and is also helpful to back up single-author work.
In this workshop we will demonstrate how archaeologists can concretely profit from code sharing platforms and version control software, guide the participants to navigate these digital spaces and tools confidently, and showcase how they can streamline and improve common (research) tasks. We will give a practical introduction to some of the most popular systems: Git, a powerful command line software handling and documenting changes in (text)files, and the platform GitHub, where projects can be stored and shared online.
The following topics will be covered:
- The markup language Markdown for writing text collaboratively
- The software Git and how to use it for day-to-day work
- The GitHub website and how to set up projects for collaboration and sharing
- Community interaction with Issues and Pull Requests
- How deviating document versions can be merged
We will close with a real-world example from the Linked Open Data community – the SPARQLing Unicorn QGIS Plugin by the Research Squirrel Engineers – for which Git/GitHub is the basis of collaborative software development. This ties in with the proposed session “Workflows and experiences on collaborative working and community building using digital tools”. Both session and workshop are organized by the CAA Special Interest Group for Scientific Scripting Languages in Archaeology in cooperation with the CAA SIG on Semantics and LOUD in Archaeology (Data-Dragon).
The workshop will be online and open for up to 18 participants without any prior knowledge. It should be streamed, so non-participants can follow along. We ask participants to submit a very short motivational statement with their current knowledge on the subject instead of an abstract.
