Week 4 - Oct. 5

If you were at Billings in week 3, you go to the Library (ground floor) GIS Lab in week 4. If you were in the GIS Lab in week 3, you got to the Billings Estate in Week 4.

Location: GIS Lab, at the Tunnel Entrance to the Library

Theme: Maps have power

Have Read for Today:

Hacıgüzeller, P. (2024). Archaeology, Crafting Maps and Political Change, in T. Rossetto and Lo Presti, L. (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities. London: Routledge. link

Hacıgüzeller, P. (2017). Archaeological (Digital) Maps as Performances: Towards Alternative Mappings. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 50(2), 149–171. https://doi-org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/10.1080/00293652.2017.1393456

The Plan:

The GIS librarians will take you through the basic concepts of geographic information systems, one of the foundational technologies and approaches for computational/digital archaeology and so commonplace now in the discipline that its assumptions and ways of representing the past sometimes pass without comment.

When you have completed the workshop materials, if you still have time, use what remains to work through the ‘skill building’ session below. You do not have to do these things on your own, but if you do collaborate with someone, you can practice good digital ethics by thinking through how to acknowledge that collaboration in your research compendium.

Skill Building:

Any files or code you create in the GIS workshop, please store as a research compendium.
Digital Literacy Intro. The DHPrimer is an in-browser environment for a gentle introduction to a variety of code-related issues. Visit the website and do its on-boarding service; everything lives in the browser and I cannot see your interactions with the site. This is a work-in-progress I am building that is meant to help you with the basics in a welcoming way. There is an ‘Orientation’ lesson and 3 lessons on ‘Digital Literacy Foundations’. If you’re feeling up to it, ‘Python Basics for Humanists’ would probably be handy too.

Each lesson says that it will take ‘1hr’; this is just a place holder figure. It probably won’t take you anything like that at all. Just see how it goes. You read the materials on the left hand side of the page, and then in the top right there’s some starter code. You can modify it, run it, click for hints, or click to reveal fully working code. It’s meant to be a space to try things out, low-key, low-stress. Keep notes on what you’re doing and what seems to work and why.

Retrieve spatial data from the Archaeology Data Service, using Google Collab and a code notebook. linlithgow_spatial.ipynb is a modified version of work created by Dr. Rachel Opitz that shows you how to retrieve archaeological spatial data from the Archaeology Data Service in the UK using Python. Work through that; it’s ok if things break or don’t go according to plan. That’s partly the point: I’m trying to teach you to value the process as part of your learning. I’m not interested in ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ today. So when (not if!) things go wrong, document it. What were you trying to do? What did you expect would happen? What kind of error message did you get? Document, document, document! Write it all down, take screenshots. Put all of this in your research compendium.

Future You will appreciate what Past You went through.

Homework By Friday at noon, have your research compendium for this week complete and in github. Make explicit connection between your fails (which are not really ‘fails’, just the difference between Future You and Present You) and the ideas you encountered in the workshop and in the readings.