Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Just as we are settling down with the transition to open source, it would seem that a lot of other people are at least considering their options along the same lines, for whatever reason. This thread on the osgeo_discuss list, started off as a question about the value of open source to individual’s careers, but rapidly morphed into a discussion about replacing the ESRI packages. This seems to have lead to a general consensus about the areas where the open source packages do well and do badly.

The consensus seems to be that the open source packages are great for the behind-the-scenes and/or web-based work, assuming a relatively technically literate user, but that cartographic capabilities are sadly lacking at the moment. Furthermore, if you’re looking for one single replacement, then you’re out of luck- but you can assemble a toolkit that will get you all the capabilities you need, in a modular fashion. This does require a change in mindset- but it’s a lot more flexible and hopefully more powerful.

I hope that this recent upswell of interest and consensus about where the open source packages need improvement will help focus development in those areas. This does seem to be happening: this page is about plans for a cartographic library that can be shared amongst different packages. Sign up to show your support!

PS- if you’re in the UK you can still come along to our first UK OSGeo meetup at Stansted tomorrow (Thursday 1st) at 4.30. It’s free to attend, there will be some talks to start with (better finish writing mine), then we’ll sit down and try and figure out what we want a UK local chapter to do. There will be tea, coffee and biscuits too, so what are you waiting for!

This is an “interesting” one- particularly if you manage a lot of windows pcs in a domain, so you have domain users and local users on your pc…

I started getting complaints from people that the spell-checker in word didn’t work. What they meant was that the spelling and grammar options simply weren’t available to them. I checked that the language was set, and found that it wasn’t, and not only that, but it didn’t seem to persist if I did set it, even if I set it as the default. When I tried to close the document after some time messing around with it, I got a message telling me that I had tried to make a change to the normal template but that I didn’t have permission to do that.

In a bit of a light-bulb moment, I temporarily set Domain Users on the pc to be members of the local Administrator group. That worked- suddenly all the spelling and grammar options were available. Now I just have to dial back that security setting until I can allow people to check spelling and still keep my IT boss happy!

Apologies for the delay- it’s been a roller-coaster week at Archaeogeek Towers due to family health issues. Hopefully it’s getting sorted now though.

In the process of preparing Portable GIS, I needed to change a string in multiple files of multiple formats within multiple folders. I looked at various windows- based options, most of which had a charge associated with them, but one of my colleagues suggested a linux approach.

“Sed” is the command that you need, found in most linux systems. In windows you can install it as part of the unxutils toolkit. The following command in linux works recursively through the folders in a root directory changing string1 for string2 (be careful with those single quotes if copy and pasting as wordpress likes to restyle them):

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i ’s/string1/string2/’ {} \;

With a large number of files this might take some time to work (a usb stick took an hour to work through on my ubuntu server vm but maybe that’s not a fair benchmark).

I’ve spent the best part of the day musing (whilst working, obviously) about this article, on rivers as archaeological artefacts. It’s a really good article, on how we perceive rivers in archaeology, given their pesky tendency to change course, texture, size and so on.

It suggests that we tend to think of rivers as primarily natural features, part of the landscape and full of nice ducks and fishes. Or, in archaeological terms, we treat them as environmental features and subject them to a barrage of scientific techniques designed to test their sediments, so we see them as nothing more than receptacles for more interesting things that have fallen in, such as bugs, seeds, people, boats, etc. We don’t tend to take notice of them as cultural features in their own right, as we would a road, or even a field.

I’m not sure that I totally agree that rivers get ignored as cultural features, after all I’ve spent the best part of two years on projects where the river was a fairly central feature. However, I do think we could perhaps do more by them, give them the credit they deserve, after all in prehistoric times (and more recently in some areas) they were the primary transport network, and have always been social and political boundaries, supplies of food and drink, and the location of most of the industry.

With my database-head on, I think we need a method of describing them in a way that embraces their flexibility and dual nature. They are never just going to be one thing at a time, which makes it difficult to use standard methods of classification. To classify a standard archaeological feature, such as a mill, we would tend to say that it had several phases of use that follow on from each other, but at any one time it has one primary function. Obviously this isn’t going to work for rivers! Another approach would be to split a river up into sections, and define a different use for each section. These would need to overlap so that you could show multiple uses.

I’m not going to take this much further right now, but it has made me think a little more about rivers and how we look at them, and I will try and apply this next time I get one in a project…

So, here’s to rivers and all that sail on them/fall in them/use them/draw pictures of  them/write stories about them.