Open archaeology, open source? Collaborative practices in an emerging community of archaeological software engineers

Zack Batist, University of Toronto
Joe Roe, University of Bern

This research compendium contains the data and code for an analysis of the state of the art in archaeological software engineering using the open-archaeo directory and data from the GitHub REST API. It accompanies our paper in Internet Archaeology:

Batist, Z. & Roe, J., 2024. Open archaeology, open source? Collaborative practices in an emerging community of archaeological software engineers. Internet Archaeology 67. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.67.13

Preliminary results were also presented at the CAA2021 Virtual Conference hosted by the Cyprus Institute of Technology, in S17, Tools for the Revolution: developing packages for scientific programming in archaeology?, a session organised by the special interest group for scientific scripting languages.

Usage

The compendium is provided as an R package. The main analysis is described in analysis/openarchaeo_collaboration.html, a Quarto document generated from analysis/openarchaeo_collaboration.qmd. To reproduce the analysis in full:

1. Download or clone the latest version of this repository
2. Build and install the package with devtools::install(dependencies = TRUE) (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+B in RStudio)
3. Render the analysis with quarto render analysis/openarchaeo_collaboration.qmd

You can also step through the individual sections of the analysis in the RMarkdown documents under analysis/ (_01-introduction.qmd, _02-background.qmd, etc.) These must be run in sequence and after the main document openarchaeo_collaboration.qmd, which loads the packages the analysis uses.

The GitHub data we used for the published analysis is cached in analysis/data/derived_data/oarch.RData. If you want to update or re-acquire it, you will need to set up a personal access token (PAT):

usethis::create_github_token()

Note that this is time-consuming and must be done in batches to stay within GitHub's rate limit.

Citation

Please cite the original paper as:

Batist, Z. & Roe, J., 2024. Open archaeology, open source? Collaborative practices in an emerging community of archaeological software engineers. Internet Archaeology 67. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.67.13

License

This work is copyright 2021 Zack Batist and Joe Roe and licensed as follows:

• Original data (from https://open-archaeo.info) – CC0 No Rights Reserved
• Code – MIT License
• Text and images – CC BY 4.0