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Open Source Protocols - Ep 180
296 Plays3 years ago
An important component of scientific research is reproducibility. In other scientific fields like medicine, protocols (step-by-step instructions) help ensure that another lab or another researcher can test our results. Lately, protocols for various technical aspects of archaeological research have been published, so Chris and Paul discuss the value of these publications.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/180
Links
- A Methodological Framework for Free and Open-Source UAV-Based Archaeological Research
- The FOSS UAV Protocol
- Small Object and Artefact Photography - 'SOAP' Protocol
- High Resolution "DIY" Photogrammetry - 'HRP' Protocol
- Read the Docs
- ShootPoints Web
- OpenDroneMap
- WebODM
- DroneDeploy
- Map Pilot Pro
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Membership Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Help support this network and become a member. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash members for details. It's just $7.99 USD per month or save on an annual membership. That's arcpodnet.com slash members to support education and outreach. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction to Episode 180
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, Episode 180. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss a recent paper that uses open source protocols. Let's get to it.
Social Media Contest
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I was just out in the yard playing with a sifting screen that I made that I haven't had the chance to use in the field, but my wife needed some compost sifted. So I got to play archeologist for a little bit in the yard. That was a lot of fun. How you doing? I'm doing good. I just got to comment on that real quick because that is a great
00:00:55
Speaker
Use of a screen right and I as you're gonna hear on this podcast cuz I think the ad is still running we have a contest that we're running for anybody who mentions us on social media you have to add us on social media or we don't see it you know so at arc pod net
00:01:11
Speaker
or anybody who's currently a member or refers a member or becomes a new member by the end of the month gets to choose any screen they want from AEO screen. It's a website. In fact, I think they're based out of New England somewhere. If I remember right, I might be thinking of somebody else, but either way, they've said that you can pick anything off of their website. And you might be thinking, well, I'm not an archeologist. What do I need a screen for? And thank you, Paul, for illustrating an exact use of a screen.
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah. No, I mean, beautiful looking screens they've got on their site. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So no, no, they're really handy in the yard for a lot of things, especially if you're an avid gardener, like my wife is not that she uses the screen, but I guess I do now. Yeah. There you go. All right. Well, I hadn't intended to talk about that, but you led me right into it. So that was perfect. We're doing great. We're out in seaside Oregon. It's a kind of a neat little coastal town that was actually established in 1899, I think.
00:02:07
Speaker
And they've got this really cool promenade. It's just south of Astoria, Oregon. And Astoria, a lot of people know, maybe not by name, but that's where the movie Goonies was filmed. So people usually know Astoria. Yeah.
00:02:23
Speaker
But you can actually go to the house. They have signs leading up to it that says, you know, hey, people live here, so be respectful. Don't like traips around in the yard. But, you know, either way, you can see it from the road. But all right. Yeah. Well,
UAV-based Research Article Discussion
00:02:39
Speaker
speaking of seeing stuff from the road, except not really, it's going to be a drone heavy drone heavy episode this time around with the article we have in the and the topic we're going to talk about. At least the first part is going to be drone heavy.
00:02:51
Speaker
So, hope you got your drinks ready. Paul, what are we talking about today? Okay. Well, I think probably when I was away in Iraq, you were asking me for some topics and there was an edition of the Advances in Archaeological Practice that came out in November and it was chock full of really interesting articles to me. And so, as you recall, last episode we recorded about the hedgehogs and marvelous mines, which came out of that same edition.
00:03:18
Speaker
the same issue. One of the other ones I pulled aside that I thought might be good to talk about was an article called Methodological Framework for Free and Open Source UAV-Based Archaeological Research. Of course, that free and open source, that ding, that's one check for me.
00:03:36
Speaker
UAV-based. Well, there's another check for me. The co-authors are Kelsey M. Reese and Sean Field. Sean Field was another ding for me because we actually interviewed him here on The Architect back in episode 117 in November of 2019 when he discussed the work he was doing at Chaco and Road Network. For my money, it was a very interesting discussion.
Toolset Justification and Workflow Thoughts
00:04:00
Speaker
It was a very interesting article that that came out of too.
00:04:02
Speaker
So I wanted to see what they had to say about this framework. And as I read it, as I started reading the article, I actually started going in a slightly different direction. So at first glance, I thought it's going to be a lot like that Hedgehog's article.
00:04:18
Speaker
But it turned out to be something really, for me, quite different. The previous one, that Hedgehog article was more of a show and tell. This one was more of a justification for a particular toolset and a particular workflow, along with a link to instructions to reproduce that toolset and workflow.
00:04:37
Speaker
That got me thinking about a whole bunch of other things that weren't directly in the article, but were sperm ideas that popped up because of this article. And as I've said a million times, that's something I like when something tickles my fancy and starts making me think about other things that may or may not be related and how they can interrelate and how they can make the practice of what we do better. At the very least, it's some fun thought exercises, but at the very best, it's practical things that I can incorporate into my own work.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah. And that's what I love about some of these articles too, right? Is I always, I always love taking things that you may not think have a practical use for the, you know, the science of archeology, but there then again, it does, you know, and sometimes it takes a suite of tools like these guys's approach. And you know, if you want to do it free and affordably, because what they mentioned is in the, in the beginning of the article is using drones to augment and maybe in the future replace archeological survey, like pedestrian survey,
00:05:35
Speaker
in some cases, maybe like the full scale survey. And I've actually talked about this. I was pretty excited when I, when I at least started with the abstract, I was like, wait, wait a minute. They're, they're, they're actually talking about something that, that I've been talking about for years, but if, you know, I've never
00:05:50
Speaker
of study on it or actually completed it. It's just been an idea since doing survey in China Lake down in California. But anyway, I love that they're taking this approach because like they say, the barrier to entry is often cost. In photoscan, what do they call it now? Adjusoft photoscan, I still call it that, but it's called... Metashape. Metashape, that's right. And it's really expensive to use that. And it's not
00:06:14
Speaker
No, it's not necessarily user friendly unless you're used to those types of softwares, but it's expensive and it's kind of the Cadillac of doing this kind of stuff. But as they show, there's other ways to do it. It might take a suite of tools that Metashape just does because they've got it all built
Photogrammetry Tools Comparison
00:06:29
Speaker
in, but that's what we're talking about. So excellent. Good on them for bringing this to light.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, and what they do is they compare Metashape against OpenDroneMap, which is another photogrammetry tool specifically catered towards drone mapping. These are both excellent. It's not a one is better than the other. One is definitely less expensive than the other, but they want to have a system of testing
00:06:55
Speaker
a way of doing their work that they could then document so that it could replicable, which is really what got me interested in this. It's that idea of documenting things in such a way that they are replicable because we'd like to pretend in a lot of ways, in a lot of ways we are in archaeology scientists,
00:07:12
Speaker
And one of the key components of science versus other human endeavors is replicability of tests. And so it's often been said that you can't re-excavate a site. So you have to document everything. So when it comes to excavation, you don't have that replicability that you might have with running another chemistry test, for example. Right.
00:07:35
Speaker
Right. But that's not the only thing that we do. We do all sorts of other kinds of work. And the idea of documenting how you do it so that you don't have to think through every last step. And so that, you know, if I do it and I've got it documented and then the next person that takes over the task or they read what I've done and they apply it to their site, they don't have to reinvent the wheel. That is a different kind of replicability. But it is one that I think really benefits our field. You know, and this is nothing new.
00:08:05
Speaker
But here they are talking about it in an open access journal article. Good for them. Talking about using it with free and open source software. Good for them. That lowers the barriers for entry. And with links then that go from this article back to the protocol,
00:08:21
Speaker
And if I haven't used that word yet, protocol, the way that I'm going to be using it whenever I mention it today is this notion of it's basically a set of instructions, right? And so in lots of different scientific endeavors, definitely in medicine, you have protocols. You do things X, Y, and Z. You do step one, step two, step three. Maybe it's a decision tree, but you follow along so that you can always get things in the same way. Right.
00:08:44
Speaker
So they have a link then from their article back out to the protocol that they've got hosted on GitHub, which means that that protocol is also open. And that's where I started thinking about other things because I've been receiving all sorts of, I guess the algorithm is throwing them at me. Sometimes it shows up in Twitter, sometimes it shows up on my newsfeed, but different open source
00:09:04
Speaker
protocols, not necessarily using open source software, but the protocols themselves are open source for different kinds of archaeological work. And that's where this really started to make me think a little broader, not the specifics of what they were doing, though I should probably talk about that a bit, but how what they're doing also serves as a model for what I think is a good way for us all to be working.
00:09:28
Speaker
So I'm going to actually reel us back here a little bit for what they do. I don't think
Drone Research at Mesa Verde
00:09:34
Speaker
they get really to the point of identifying archaeological sites, but they choose an area called the Mesa Verde north escarpment, which is slope terrain that's adjacent just to the north of Mesa Verde National Park. And across that area, they chop it up into different squares and they categorize those squares by the density of the ground cover.
00:09:57
Speaker
And then they choose four different squares that they determine our size, that they can fly them in a certain number of batteries. And then those different squares, those four squares are four different densities of ground cover, low, medium, medium, high, and extreme. Extreme ground cover!
00:10:24
Speaker
And then they fly their drones. And most of the protocol actually has to do with what you do with those photographs and how you process them. But they also do a side-by-side comparison of the results they got with the settings that they use with open drone map versus those that they use with Metashape to show that open drone map is
00:10:45
Speaker
entirely a good replacement for their case. Then again, the real meat of it for me is that if you go to that GitHub page, you can then see step-by-step how to install the exact same software. You can download their sample images
00:11:02
Speaker
and then test it yourself on your own hardware. See how long it takes. See if this is going to be a workable workflow. Maybe adjust it a little bit for yourself. That is a huge value for people, so we don't all have to reinvent the wheel. We don't all have to start at ground zero and try to figure out each bit of not just how to use the software, but if you're using open source software, a lot of it, getting it onto your computer is a hassle. And so they tell you how it's a very easy way to do it if you're running a Mac.
00:11:28
Speaker
Nice, nice. Yeah, it was well done, like how to guide. And in fact, I think it was in, if I remember pulling up the article here again, it's it's in their how to series anyway. So they they had a really good, like, you know, step by step. And a couple of things I want to point out in one of their figures, figure three, they actually have side by side open drone map. And then it says Agisoft photo scan. Like they changed the name of that what, like four or five years ago.
00:11:57
Speaker
But everybody still calls it Agisoft PhotoScan, which I think is hilarious. They're never going to get rid of that from all the professional users. And you mentioned that they didn't really do artifact analysis or feature analysis, I should say, on those images. They did do
00:12:12
Speaker
a ground survey, like a pedestrian ground survey after the fact, after they, you know, flew their drones, and the ground survey identified some features. And I thought it was really interesting in figure four of the article, seeing those features drawn on one of the maps versus, you know, the side by side where it's not drawn and the side where it is drawn. And I'll tell you what, some of them are relatively obvious when you see them and others are
00:12:36
Speaker
not so obvious when you see them. And I'm not sure that if I were looking at this, I could pick it out, but I'm not the one that has to be convinced, right? Because ultimately the end goal of this kind of thing, once we kind of nail down drone survey and we get the resolutions down, we get the flying heights down and we figure out, okay, this is the best way to do this for the imagery.
00:12:54
Speaker
Well, now we got to do something with that imagery. And, you know, having a person look at it and identify features is one thing, but teaching a computer and an AI to do it would be a totally other thing. And that would be kind of the way to go. And then ground truth it by archaeologists. That's what I've been saying for years. And I think we're finally starting to get to the point where this is possible.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is. And I don't think I'm giving up any trade secrets, but the project I'm going to be working on for the next couple of months in Saudi, that's one component of it. There are a number of known archeological sites that we're going to visit, but we're expecting to find other sites. And part of that finding the other sites is to work on building a machine learning environment that can identify additional sites. So it'll be a combination of
00:13:38
Speaker
first-person, in-field, on-foot data collection that we feed back to the GIS team that tries to generate models that they'll send back to us to test. It'll be a process of refinement. That's what they're doing in this article too. That's not the point of this article.
00:13:57
Speaker
But it's clearly gearing up to something like that. And that's what they use for part of the test. I thought it was interesting that those side-by-sides, for my eyes, the open drone mapped ones actually looked better than the photo scan ones. And I think the reason is that the open drone mapped ones were a little smoother.
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah. And I think they're a little smoother because their resolution isn't quite as high, which actually is a good thing for this particular use case. Because what we're talking about here, remember, there's different ground covers. We're looking at digital terrain models, not digital elevation models. And so that becomes a software thing. Well, it's all a software thing. But
00:14:41
Speaker
So you stitch together your structure for motion, your photogrammetric images, and you get your digital elevation model. And it shows you the elevations at the top of all the bushes, for example. That's usually not what you really care about. You want the bottom of the bushes. So the digital terrain model strips out those anomalies. And there are a bunch of different ways for it to do that. And some may be more successful than others. Some may be overly aggressive.
00:15:09
Speaker
in those side-by-sides, I always saw the features that they were highlighting, that they traced. I saw them better in the OpenDrome map once. Right. Okay. Well, I personally like the crisper images myself. The smoother ones, they do have a certain, I don't know, appealing look to them because they are smoothed out. And then the photo scan ones, again, like you said, were a little more crisp and they're a little more abrasive from that standpoint. But I felt it personally easier to see stuff, especially if you
00:15:39
Speaker
I mean, I zoomed in on the PDF. I don't have the original images, but I'm assuming if you zoom in on the original images, especially inside the software, you're going to see some incredible detail on both of those. And from the looks of just these images in the article, maybe even more detail in the Photoscan one, which from an AI perspective, I don't know if that's better or worse for it to be doing shape recognition. Is it better to have
00:16:01
Speaker
higher definition in detail so it can really pick them out? Or does that add more artifacts, so to speak, like digital artifacts to the image where it can't really pick them out, but if it's smoother, it can pick up these identifiable shapes in this particular context a little better. Who knows?
00:16:17
Speaker
But anyway, let's go ahead and take a break and continue discussing this article on the other side. If you like hearing stuff like this, don't forget to go to arkpadnet.com forward slash members to help support us for just $7.99 a day or less if you buy it annually. And it really helps and keeps all this going and keeps Paul going to Saudi Arabia. No, it doesn't pay for that. But I'd like to think that it would send us to other places at some point in the future so we can really get some boots on the ground podcasting. All right, with that, we'll see you guys on the other side of the break. Back in a minute.
00:16:49
Speaker
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Resources and Event Promotion
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00:18:11
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00:18:27
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 180 of the archaeotech podcast. And we're talking about an article that you can find by looking down at your device or looking at your computer screen, whatever you happen to be on, and look at the show notes for that. So you can see the link to the article and a bunch of other links that we have in there that were mentioned and some other stuff that we just have in there. So check all that out. One of the things that is linked in there that is discussed in the article quite a bit, Paul, is the FOSS UAV protocol. And I keep seeing FOSS and
00:18:56
Speaker
free and open source in like the same context. And I keep thinking FOSS is like some sort of acronym for free and open source. Is it free and open source software? Is that what FOSS stands for? Yeah, exactly. Got it. I was just making sure. All right. So with that, let's continue.
00:19:12
Speaker
All right, so you were looking at that presumably then on the GitHub link, which like I said, they've got their actual protocol, not in this article, they link to the protocol. And the article itself is a discussion about the protocol and about their development of the protocol and about it's a justification that the protocol works, damn it.
00:19:35
Speaker
And it really got me to think about documentation because that's something that gets overlooked a lot in software. But good documentation is really, really important. And it's something that you and I know very intimately because we deal with documentation all the time. I mean, I know that
00:19:52
Speaker
You have to deal with it in your training with Done Safe and you've dealt with it with Wild Note. I had to deal with it, especially when I left my last job documenting a lot of the procedures of how to get this to work or where to look for that thing when something goes wrong.
00:20:09
Speaker
For the survey I just did in Lockage, I wrote up an instruction manual for doing the surface survey.
Significance of Documentation in Research
00:20:16
Speaker
I've mentioned my surveying software that I put up on GitHub very recently. When I put it up on GitHub, the biggest thing I did was do a quick start instruction set in the README.
00:20:30
Speaker
So documentation to us is something that is really, really important. But we're typically talking about documentation of a piece of software. And what this article is talking about is not a piece of software, but how to use a dozen different pieces of software.
00:20:48
Speaker
how to install those different pieces of software, how to configure those pieces of software to make them run, to make that reproducible result, again, tie it back to that reproducibility goal of good science.
00:21:01
Speaker
And I don't even know what I want to say about this in particular, other than it was exciting for me to see, I guess in part because like I said, I've been getting all these different similar adjacent notices in my various social feeds and such about other projects that are documenting their procedures. How deeply have you ever been involved, Chris, in documenting anything for archaeological work as opposed to for the software products that you've worked for?
00:21:30
Speaker
You mean just documenting processes like this, that kind of stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Like this, a broader set where any particular piece of software is one component of a broader system. Sure. I mean, almost never, to be honest with you. It's just not something that... I don't know. It's just not something that people do and we should.
00:21:46
Speaker
Absolutely. I think that it's really important. That's where I was excited by the article. Again, by all these things that keep on showing up on my feed is because I think that this is a fairly overlooked aspect of archaeological research. Now, I could be entirely wrong with it when we get to the very sciency techie things, people who are doing radiocarbon, people who are doing DNA analyses, different kinds.
00:22:13
Speaker
of chemical analyses and so on, they've probably within their own labs have very explicit protocols for how to get a reproducible result, how to use that special widget that costs $10,000 that's sitting in the corner there.
00:22:28
Speaker
But this is also something slightly different because those are often private documentation, right? It's for my lab because it's written by me, for my coworkers, so that they can all know how to use these three pieces of equipment that we own. Whereas this article is much more broad than that. And also the things that, again, have been showing up on my feed are much broader.
00:22:53
Speaker
how to acquire and implement a whole set of different tools to make a desired outcome, which is for me a slight shift. Even the documentation I've done that's a little broader, the stuff that I've done for Dalton, for the school I worked at that involved five different pieces of software,
00:23:15
Speaker
to get an end result, it's still in-house stuff. It's not something that I could then turn around and show somebody that didn't work at the same school and have it be immediately useful for them.
Barriers to Open-Source Adoption
00:23:26
Speaker
They would have to reinterpret it for their own use.
00:23:28
Speaker
Right. And that's, that's one thing. I mean, they even point this out in the article, right? That there's something like six programs they're using to actually process the UAV imagery and then make the high resolution digital train modules. But you know, that's something you got to remember in the early days of some of these technologies, at least early for archeology, that if you do want to try this out on the cheap or free, well, there's probably going to be some extra hoops you got to jump through to make these things work because that's how free works.
00:23:57
Speaker
If you want to buy the Cadillac and have all the features pre-installed when it delivers, then you're paying for the Cadillac. But if you want to try this out but not spend any money and you'll need a little bit more expertise, then to be honest, this isn't the only thing that's going to require you to do that. Other technologies and I guess things that you do will
00:24:19
Speaker
usually require you to kind of bootstrap this and put a bunch of things together to make it work. And I'm glad there's people out there, like you said, that are willing to do that hard work. They don't look at a problem and say, well, that's too expensive. Let's do something else. They say, how can we do this and test it so other people can? And then they document this process, like you said, which leads me to another question for you, Paul. Where is your article in Advances? Are you writing it right now for your processes that you're doing right now so people can learn from you?
00:24:48
Speaker
Where's your article? I'm not writing it right now, but I think I will be soon. I just sent an email a couple hours ago to the project director asking her for permission to do that. The problem I have is not writing the article. I can certainly document again, because for me, it's going to be primarily documentation. I can document all the steps to generate the same results or virtually the same results or to replicate the same process on another site.
00:25:15
Speaker
But it's been so long since I've written for an academic audience that my writing style has gone totally divergent. And so that's going to be a problem for me is to bring that back in. I mean, I know how to cite, but I don't have a stock of articles and books and things I can cite.
00:25:32
Speaker
I've read them, but I didn't read them with the mind toward being able to pull quotes or to reference them later in an article. I read them out of my own interest. And so now, in a way, I'm a little bit of a crick. But no, I definitely do want to document the survey procedure, end to end, really, from how I drew the map and decided on the density of the survey, how we conducted the survey in the field, how we processed
00:26:01
Speaker
the artifacts that we collected, and then how I generated heat maps after that. Because the results were really good. And I do think that it's really replicable. And I think that if I can set out a set of instructions for people, probably in the same journal, because it seems to me the most appropriate for this, that would be a good thing. But no, I'm not there yet.
00:26:23
Speaker
I do want to actually, I'll backtrack a little too. I thought when you were talking about free and open source software, something I hadn't really grasped with, but it just kind of tickled the back of my head, is that it used to be 15, maybe 20 years ago, the notion of free software was free meant cheap and cheap, not as an inexpensive, but as in not as good as software that you pay for.
00:26:48
Speaker
Right. And now, and this article does demonstrate that, it's no longer free means not good. It means not as easy to install, not as easily supported, maybe. It doesn't mean by any stretch, not as good. And so that's
00:27:11
Speaker
To me, an interesting shift is where the balance in that decision matrix goes now. It's different than it used to be. As somebody that uses a lot of free and open source software and contributes to some open source projects, it maintains a couple now.
00:27:32
Speaker
I'm happy to see that change. I'm happy to not have to fight that battle, to not say, oh, we can either do the cheap thing that's free or we can do the expensive thing that's going to be good. Do we want good results or do we want cheap results? That's not the balance anymore. Yeah, you're right.
00:27:48
Speaker
There's a little bit of a caution there too, though, because there is still truly, truly cheap software out there, cheap or free, that is just not written very well. But that's why you read articles like this and you get into the communities like you're in where people are talking about this kind of thing and saying, well, this is good, this is good. Because there's some really
00:28:08
Speaker
really solid people out there that are committed to the idea that some of this stuff, you know, to the open source idea, you know, the open source, this can be modified by, you know, by anyone with the skills to do it and people can add to it. You know, you can, you can create these things and you don't have to set out to make a billion dollars while you're doing it. Cause I mean, more than like you're not going to anyway. So, you know, there's that. Yeah, I agree. There's, there's some really good stuff out there these days and it can be found by, you know, crowdsourcing.
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a good thing again. Back to the question about documentation as a variation on this open source world. I've mentioned a few times now that I've been getting lots of different
00:28:54
Speaker
feeds of different documentation. One that's popped up a few times, actually two, are on a site called protocols.io. These two are SOAP, the Small Object and Artifact Photography Protocol, and the HRP, the High Resolution DIY Photogrammetry. I don't know where the D went from
00:29:15
Speaker
DIY in that HRP. Anyhow, these are similar sorts of things published on a site that's dedicated. Now, that site protocol.io is mostly geared towards people, towards laboratory scientists, but it does have, as of my check earlier, almost 20 archaeology
00:29:36
Speaker
tagged protocols on their site. And so that might be a good place. And you mentioned when we were talking about open source software is, you know, find the communities. Well, one of the big problems with any of the open source stuff, especially with the finding of the documentation, is where do you look? Where do you find that community? Do you go to Reddit? Do you go to Stack Exchange? Do you go to the wiki of the website that made or is distributing the software?
00:30:02
Speaker
Is there an email address? Who knows? It can vary really widely and the quality of those communities can vary really widely. But this discoverability is then another part of open source, open access. If you've documented a procedure that's a good procedure and you want people to see it and you want people to work with it and maybe adapt it to their own, maybe use it straight out of the box the way that you've done it,
00:30:30
Speaker
but apply it to their own research, you got to have it someplace where they're going to see it. This article, again, is in a place that people will see it. It's an open access article. It links to a GitHub project, or repository rather, which is by the nature of GitHub. It's also open. You could take their protocol there and adjust it to your own needs. You can see it. It's right there for everybody to see.
00:30:57
Speaker
It's done for Mac, so I would be comfortable. I could run it directly on my computers, but it uses a Linux installation engine more or less called Homebrew. I don't use Homebrew. I have no problem with Homebrew. I just don't care to use it. I would always rather either compile or find different installers rather than use Homebrew on my own machines. I don't know why I have that prejudice. I just do.
00:31:25
Speaker
But I do know the pieces of software that they have, and I could install all of those without Homebrew. So I could take their protocol, I could fork it so that you could do that same installation without Homebrew. I could fork it so that I could install one of my Linux boxes pretty easily. Because again, it's all documented and it's reliant at every step of that process on open source software and on an open documentation of how to do it.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah. So they have it on two ends. On the AAP article that's open, they have it on the GitHub repository that's open. These ones that I mentioned, Soap and HRP are protocols.io, which is you can have your own internal private protocols on their website, but you can also, it's mostly, I think, intended for open source ones.
00:32:17
Speaker
And I was thinking then, too, about other open access, open source, easily accessible. Where do people find what to do? I've got a huge playlist in my YouTube channel of different videos I want to see, of different people, some of whom have been guests on this show, explaining how to do X, Y, or Z in grass or in QGIS or in R or whatever. And YouTube, geez, YouTube videos are how-to videos on YouTube. They're absolutely huge.
00:32:46
Speaker
I don't know how often you, Chris, end up on WikiHow, like when something goes wrong in the RV. I end up on WikiHow a lot. That discoverability, anyhow, that's something else that I think that we have to keep in mind because, yes, you could host it on your own blog. You could host your set of instructions on self-hosted Wiki or something.
00:33:11
Speaker
But maybe that's not always the best place. But I don't think that we as an archaeological community have rested on any one platform. Right. Yeah. I mean, another place that I think would be very sensible would be Read the Docs. I end up on Read the Docs all the time for different software because it's the preferred place for documentation for Python projects. Since I mostly program with Python, I end up on theirs all the time.
00:33:36
Speaker
I don't know if that makes sense for archaeologists. Right now, protocols.io to me seems like it makes the most sense for archaeologists. GitHub to a lesser extent, but in intriguing ways, it also makes a lot of sense. I don't think there's an answer there, but I do think that probably over the next year or two as we start seeing more things like this project,
00:33:59
Speaker
there'll be a consolidation around one or two different places as the go-to places to find open source documentation. Right. Okay. Well, I think with that, we will take our final break. And I'll just remind everybody, did you go and sign up for your membership yet? If not, arcpodnet.com forward slash members so we can keep all this going. And we've got more podcasts we want to do, more live events we want to do. And having some members supported income on that is what makes all that possible. So
00:34:28
Speaker
We will see you guys back in just a minute to wrap up this discussion. We've got a contest. The folks over at AEO Screen are giving one of our listeners a brand new screen. Pick anything from their website and they'll ship it to you. Not an archaeologist? No problem. These are great for gardening and other tasks around the house. I mean, come on, right? Anyway, these are great screens and you won't be disappointed.
00:34:49
Speaker
We'll pick the winning entry at the end of May. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash screen for details on how to enter. It's easy and you can get multiple entries. Increase your chances by helping out others. That's arcpodnet.com slash screen for details on how to win.
00:35:08
Speaker
Want to talk to the hosts of this show and other fans? Then join our membership program and get exclusive access to the hosts, other fans, and early access to these episodes and bonus segments and content. You'll also get forever access to our live show back catalog and any other shows ad free. Head over to arkpodnet.com slash members for details. That's arkpodnet.com slash members.
00:35:32
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 180 of the Archeotech podcast. And you know, Paul, something I want to comment on as you're mentioning right at the close of the last segment was about using YouTube to learn stuff, right? We all do that, right? We all, I mean, to be honest, my go-to for RV stuff, because there's a lot of YouTube RVers out there, is, you know, just YouTube my problem and chances are I'll find a hundred different videos on that topic and I can kind of pick and choose.
00:35:58
Speaker
it's a little bit understood that when you go to YouTube or something like that, you are going to pick and choose. You can kind of look at the, maybe look at the likes in the comments and stuff like that and say, okay, so this one, you know, was a little more, this one came out last week and they have two videos. I don't know if I'm going to trust that one as much. This one has 300 videos and 85,000 likes on it. So maybe that one's a little more trustworthy, although that is not a measure of anything either. Maybe they're just weird and people like that.
00:36:23
Speaker
So, but the funny thing is it's this weird thing on the internet and in people's psyches about certain sites. So for example, YouTube is seen as a place where you can go to learn stuff, understanding the fact that things might be crazy over there. But when you tell somebody that, you know, you're linking to like a Wikipedia article or something like that, they're like, Oh, you can't trust Wikipedia. It's total garbage. Like, you know, because it's, because it's written by other people. And it's like, how is that?
00:36:50
Speaker
It's actually peer reviewed by a lot of people. Sure, if somebody gets in there and writes something and it's not checked or seen by some of the Wikipedia warriors out there in a short order, then yes, some misinformation could definitely be put out, especially about political figures and topics and stuff like that. People love going in and just making changes to articles and then seeing how long that sticks.
00:37:12
Speaker
But chances are, it's not going to stick for long, which is kind of the whole point of Wikipedia. And I just find it as an interesting thing when I was thinking about, when you're talking about YouTube, that nobody really thinks of Wikipedia for serious stuff just because
00:37:28
Speaker
it's seen as a place where it can be easily altered. I'm like, what about YouTube videos? They don't even list their sources on a YouTube video. Well, some do, but most people don't. And then I guess the other thing I was thinking about is, man, there is a business here, isn't there? Because some of the things you've been talking about today, I really only have knowledge of because I've worked around coders a lot when I had my office at the Reno Collective, listening to you talk about a lot of this stuff, to be honest, listening to this podcast.
00:37:58
Speaker
It has to has taught me a number of things is i just don't regularly go to you know i've been on the github website before but i've only been there because somebody sent me a link to go do something right click on a link in these articles but i've never submitted anything over there use anything over there and some of these other things you're talking about like i have zero experience with all that stuff and and somebody listening to this reading an article like this.
00:38:19
Speaker
man, their brain is just going to light on fire when they're thinking about these things because they just don't even know where to start. You know what I mean? And while these things might be getting easier through time, as things like this do, it really seems like there's a market for somebody to
00:38:34
Speaker
you know, somebody that owns a company that could set these things up and either even run them for other companies and other people that would ultimately, obviously it would ultimately have to save them money in some way, shape or form, either them trying to figure out how to set it up or the process itself saves the money because that's why you pay for services to get done is because you can't do it as cheaply and it'll save you money. But I don't know. Have you heard of anybody kind of setting out to do this as a service? Was it largely academic still?
00:39:01
Speaker
I think it's largely academic, but you mentioned peer review and at the risk of now sounding like I'm advertising for protocols.io, those two protocols, both at the top say peer reviewed.
Peer-reviewed Protocols in Archaeology
00:39:17
Speaker
They're done. They're cited like articles. You see the names of the authors. You see their institutional affiliations. It's not some random dude sitting in front of his computer.
00:39:28
Speaker
It is actual scientific researchers saying, hey, this works in our lab. If you want to reproduce it, here are the steps that you can do to reproduce it in your lab. And that's really good. We don't have that with GitHub. And that's why I'm very intrigued by the protocols that I own one. But I don't really care one way or the other. I just don't want it to be 97 different places to go to. I'd much rather have it be a handful of places.
00:39:57
Speaker
open again so that we can share what works and what doesn't work for us as researchers, as archaeologists. One of the big things, and this is getting inside, but everything I say is on the side, that really gets me is with GIS work is how do you document your procedures? I
00:40:19
Speaker
I had a number of visualizations in my dissertation that I went ahead and made a cookbook as an appendix at the end of the dissertation so that people could reproduce my imagery in grass, which is what I did them in.
00:40:40
Speaker
I've had to refer to those a few times over the years when I can't remember what to do because typically when you generate a new layer in GIS based off of a transformation from an old layer, there is no internal documentation of what that process was. What module you use, what settings you use, any of that stuff. Lately, I've been
00:41:02
Speaker
documenting that internally by just making notes for each of the layer, but that also feels extremely fragile. And I would love if there was some way of exposing this stuff that happens internally within the GIS out to some public venue so that it becomes quite easy then for somebody else to follow along, try the same settings, maybe the same inputs for the data sources, maybe their own data source inputs.
00:41:28
Speaker
be able to follow along with the same settings and generate something comparable. I think that would be hugely important, but I haven't seen anything like that. Actually, this is an open invitation for any of our listeners. If I'm just blind to something that everybody else does, or if there's something new out there that does this already that I haven't heard of, I would love to know about it because I think this is critically important for the kind of work I've been doing lately and will be doing going forward. Back to the article. The authors
00:41:55
Speaker
Not only do they talk about using the fully free and open source path, including open drone map versus the mostly free and open source, except for the one big expensive thing using Metashape PhotoScan. They also talk about different software for the drone mapping.
00:42:14
Speaker
That was another thing that actually appealed to me. They use drone deploy for actually flying the drone. And this is software that gets installed on the controller, actually on your phone or tablet that's usually attached to the controller. And that's what they're using. And drone deploy is not free software.
00:42:36
Speaker
It's closed source. I use it in Iraq. It's excellent. Where they make their money is you can have the free controller software, but they make their money by having an easy path to upload the photos that you take into their website and have it do all the processing for you. So you don't have to have your own fancy computer. You just have to have an internet connection.
00:42:58
Speaker
Right. And they do great with that, but that's what the authors are not doing. They're not doing the end-to-end with drone deploy. That drone deploy part, and they mention it, there are a number of different programs that you can use instead installed on your phone or tablet that you're using when you're actually out in the field flying. I've
Software for Drone Missions
00:43:16
Speaker
been testing one lately called Maps Made Easy because they have drivers for the drone that I've got, the Phantom 3 standard.
00:43:25
Speaker
Okay. Which is an older drone and a lot of ones don't have it. So if you're looking at things to try to replicate this, you don't have to go strictly with drone deploy. You could go with any of a number, there are probably dozens of different ones out there. You just have to be cognizant of whether or not they support your drone. That should be obvious, but might not necessarily be. But that also, that introduces a kind of variability that
00:43:51
Speaker
is going to change a little bit of the process too. Let me give you an example. Drawing the maps of where you're going to fly. Now, when you do a photogrammetry drone mission, you typically program the area that you want and the elevation and it knows the camera that you have and you tell it what kind of overlap between one picture and the next. And
00:44:15
Speaker
then it will draw a zigzag pattern that goes across that area that meets all those parameters. So drone deploy, you do that right in their software or you do it on the web, you download it onto the tablet, you're good to go. The DJI Phantom 4 RTK that we use in the field
00:44:37
Speaker
doesn't have a way of installing drone deploy on it. So your choices are either use the DJI program that's built in to do all that same thing, draw the outlines, set the elevation, the overlap, blah, blah, blah, and have it do it, or else you can use drone deploy
00:44:52
Speaker
and then do like what I did, write a little script that will take and translate their thing into a KML that I can import into this, but I can't install drone deploy, so that's a bit of a pain. Prior to this RTK, we had DJI Phantom for V2 Pro. The V2 Pro has a built-in attached tablet on the controller that doesn't have that piece of DJI software to do that flight plan.
00:45:22
Speaker
no way of using that drone with any mapping software, which is, you know, that's a problem. So, you know, this isn't just another kind of a side warning in this case is that if you're buying a drone for something like this, you might want to steer away from a drone that has a controller that has a built-in screen because you probably can't get the mapping software onto that screen if it's not already built in.
00:45:48
Speaker
So, even though there's dozens of different things out there, like drone deploy, like maps made easy, like Litchy, like whatever, actually, Litchy doesn't do that kind of plan. It doesn't matter. You might not actually be able to use them for a variety of reasons. I don't know. That's my little rant. Is it just that the onboard DJI software is just not up to snuff for really commercial use?
00:46:10
Speaker
They're really trying to hit commercial users with some of this stuff, right? Like they really have a hard advertising campaign for the commercial use of their drones. And it would surprise me that for the ones with the built-in screen, unless those ones are not
00:46:25
Speaker
necessarily geared towards commercial users. They're geared more towards hobbyists, but archaeologists tend to buy them because they're cheaper, which might be the case, that it wouldn't be up to snuff for what you needed to use. I think it's not the notion of the commercial user versus the non-commercial user. It's the kind of commerce. DJI
00:46:46
Speaker
There are things that are designed for mapping, for agricultural uses, for the photogrammetric mapping like we're talking about. They have their own program built into that controller that you're expected to use. The ones that aren't designed for those but have the built-in controller are for the photographers. They have software that's similar but it flies paths that point around an object, follow me, that sort of thing.
00:47:13
Speaker
But not a regular flight plan that's going to get you at 100 meters, 60% overlap over these five hectares. Right, right. So it's a different use case. And it turns out that the ones that don't have those built-in controllers are more flexible because you can then install on your Android or your iOS device any of all these different programs you want, provided that they are compatible with your drone.
00:47:40
Speaker
Yeah, that should all be obvious, but I haven't seen it spelled out and I've seen people accidentally buy the wrong kind of drone because they think it can do what it can, what they want it to do. And in the abstract it can, but they can't get the damn software on the controller to do what they want it to do. Right.
00:47:58
Speaker
So another thing that they talk about, you know, we're talking about open drone map versus photo scan. And I thought it was interesting that they go with open drone map in their example, which is a command line program. And I've been playing a lot with aerial photogrammetry lately myself.
00:48:15
Speaker
not using drone deploy, but using stuff installed on my own computers. And I settled on WebODM, which is a side project of Open Drone Map. And it's a web-based front end to ODM. And it's been really good for me, much more intuitive than Open Drone Map, which gets us back to this whole question that we're talking about with free and open source software about usability and
00:48:39
Speaker
support and such. And I'm finding WebODM's usability, even though I love command line programs, when I tried to open Drone Map, I was just a little bit at sea. And WebODM just was obvious. The interface was so easy to me that I went with that.
00:48:55
Speaker
So now for what it's worth, that would be another thing. If I were to take their instructions and fork it a little bit, maybe I'd fork it in that direction just to make it a little friendlier for the user. But again, having it all command line makes it easier to be scriptable. So there's definitely something to be said for that. Okay. Well, that's good. So one of the last things you have in our notes here is a pro tip for marking different batches of photos from the authors. Let's talk about that.
00:49:23
Speaker
Okay, so this one here, it wasn't in the article, it was on their GitHub page. And I love just little tips like this that just are so obvious. So I'm going to share two, one that wasn't on theirs and one that is. And I don't know if I shared the first one before, but I've been telling everybody here is that if you're doing
00:49:43
Speaker
photogrammetry across a field, across a site, across a large area, you typically use ground control points and you can purchase them, whatever. Surveyor was telling me that what he uses are those black and white kitchen tiles, the vinyl tiles. They cost about a dollar each. They're a foot across
00:50:05
Speaker
You can place the point of your GPS or your total station prism right there on the cross in the middle.
00:50:21
Speaker
The author's pro tip on their GitHub page is, for me, feels the same way. With drone deploy, when you tell it to go to its flight, it takes a photograph right as it's taking off. I mean, just before it takes off. So you'll have all the other photographs will be straight down from the air, but there'll be one that'll be the grass or the dirt right in front of the drone. I think that maps made easy, that their Map Pilot Pro does the same thing because that's what I was playing with. I'm not sure if I accidentally hit the shutter or not.
00:51:03
Speaker
So that that first picture is the mission and then it goes and flies the mission and has, that way you don't have to sit there and look at, you know, six, 700 photographs and try to figure out where the barrier is between the first mission I flew today and where it is with the second mission. Just simple little hack that is so obvious once you hear it and so brilliant and I love that.
00:51:13
Speaker
regardless of whether your software does this automatically or not, they suggested taking a whiteboard and writing on that whiteboard what the mission was.
00:51:29
Speaker
Yeah. And I've been doing a variation on that. Well, I guess not a variation with some things that I've done in the past and one way that we actually currently use that in the RV. And we've posted some of this on our RVing YouTube channel, but I'm way behind on a lot of it, but we still record it is we record a time-lapse video from the center bottom of the windshield of the RV every time we drive.
00:51:51
Speaker
And I've taken those videos and added little commentaries to them and put them up on the, our YouTube channel for people traveling a certain route that maybe they want to see it in real time. Well, in rapid time and time-lapse view before they drive it, you know, it just might be a fun little thing to have access to.
00:52:08
Speaker
But I'll tell you what, you know, by the time I fill up the card, I've got like a, I don't know, like a 256 gigabyte card inside the GoPro and time lapse for like, like a six hour time lapse only takes like 20 minutes. And so it takes a long time to fill up that card. And by the time I get it done, I'm like, where the hell did this start and end? So
00:52:26
Speaker
Most of the time now, I actually finger right on the iPad what the route is. We're going from this point to this point. And when we turn on the time lapse, it's the first thing that you see. That way I can easily identify the video and be able to tell where it goes. Otherwise I've got to either go back and look at our navigational history and find out where we've been and where we're going and what was the next place that we went and look at road signs and try to figure it out. It's real pain in the ass. So yeah, being proactive on your organization saves you a lot of time on the backend.
00:52:56
Speaker
Yeah, it certainly can. In a microcosm, I think that's the benefit of an article like this and about the protocol that they did. They're being proactive by
00:53:08
Speaker
telling you beforehand, hey, do those steps and you can just play along. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, I love the conversation that this article inspired for us and I hope it does for you guys as well listening to this. And hopefully it encourages some people to go out and check out some alternative solutions. And at the very least,
00:53:28
Speaker
take a look at this article if it's something you're interested in doing and see how they did this. And the nice thing about the suite of software that they used is you could probably slot other pieces in for each one of these steps. If maybe you prefer something else or you think something else might work a little better, try it. And more important than try it is tell people about it. Tell people how it went, good or bad.
00:53:53
Speaker
If you're not into writing an academic paper, then just come on the podcast and let's talk about it. That'll be better than nothing and just doing it in the dark. Any final thoughts on this, Paul? No, 100%. Share your notes. Share your work. We'll all benefit. It'll make the field stronger.
00:54:13
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. All right. We got an interview coming up next time, and it's a little bit outside of archaeology, but closely tied to education and the stuff that we should be learning. So I'm pretty excited about that. We'll see you next time. Thanks a lot.
00:54:33
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:54:59
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster and Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:55:27
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Please consider joining our growing core of members over at arcpodnet.com slash members. If you liked what you heard, consider leaving a review wherever you're listening to this.