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. link

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 in your github repository.
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 materials 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. Remember to update your PDAP document with anything you achieved this week.