Create 2024-05-08.md

Author: nevrome

content/minutes/2024-05-08.md

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+---
+title: "39th regular meeting"
+date: 2024-05-08
+---
+
+6 ppl attended
+
+## Open exchange and announcements
+
+- Even more summerschools:
+  - atRium Brno Training School on computational archaeology
+	  - https://petrpajdla.github.io/atRium
+    - funding available for participants
+	  - planned for 16-20 September 2024, deadline for applications is May 31st
+  - Summer School in Digital Palaeography
+	  - https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/digital+palaeography+summer+school+2024/684265.html
+  - Neural Networks for Archaeologists, with Python
+    - http://www.mappaproject.org/nn4archaeologists
+- EUROPEAN DS4CH: European Data Space for Cultural Heritage
+  - Flagship initiative of the European Commission to accelerate the digital transformation of Europe’s cultural sector, and foster the creation and reuse of content in the cultural and creative sectors
+  - https://www.photoconsortium.net/european-ds4ch
+- GitHub & ORCID collaboration
+  - https://info.orcid.org/orcid-and-github-sign-memorandum-of-understanding
+  - it is now possible to link GitHub and ORCID accounts
+- New software tool for PCA analysis in genetics (triggered a discussion in the group about the use of PCA in archaeogenetics)
+  - https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-024-05770-1
+- R packages to make PCA and other methods of multivariate statistics available within tidy(verse) workflows
+  - https://github.com/corybrunson/ordr
+  - https://github.com/ISAAKiel/quantAAR
+- Online Survey of Cultural Heritage Professionals
+  - https://alexandriaarchive.org/fair-care/
+- TETRARCHs: Running seminar series on computational archaeology
+  - https://www.tetrarchs.org/index.php/category/seminars
+- Archaeological paper in Nature by Riris et al.
+  - "Frequent disturbances enhanced the resilience of past human populations"
+  - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07354-8
+
+## 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
+    - https://groups.google.com/g/scientific-scripting-languages-in-archaeology/c/8na4TLw47Xg
+  - 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