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GIS in CRM with Heather McDaniel McDevitt - Ep 198
783 Plays1 year ago
Today we chat with Heather McDaniel McDevitt, co-host on the CRM Archaeology Podcast about GIS in CRM archaeology—her experiences and her opinions. We’ve got whats, hows, and whys galore, all grounded in her wisdom gained from many years studying, doing, and thinking about GIS.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/198
Links
- GIS Fundamentals: A first text on geographic information systems, Bolstad
- You Are Here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination, Harmon
- Maps That Changed The World - Smith
- Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas - Wood
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 198.
Hosts and Topic Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss GIS in CRM with Heather McDaniel McDevitt, a California archaeologist and principal investigator. Let's get to it.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to the Architect Podcast, everyone. Paul, how are you doing? I'm doing fine. Nothing new to report. I've just been doing little projects here and there. I decided to redo my contour map that I did at the end of 2021 with the drone data that collected Lagash because this last season we had an RTK GNSS receiver
00:00:46
Speaker
And we placed a whole bunch of benchmarks. So instead of when I did it before, I just had to average the elevations one flight against the other. But now I actually have some real on the ground, very accurate elevation points. So I reprocess the entire thing.
00:01:04
Speaker
And I'm just kind of waiting around trying to find out if I'm going to Saudi Arabia or not. It keeps on getting kicked down. It's a rolling one to two week window. Oh, wow. That's crazy. It's crazy to just have to be prepared for such a distant and long term trip. You know what I mean? It's just, yeah, it's tough to prepare for. You can't do anything.
00:01:24
Speaker
So anyway, that's like a lot of CRM projects. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, we're going to start. We're going to start. We're going to start. We're just waiting on a permit. And it's like, my God, I got to do something. You know, so yeah, I would be happy if I had an income again. Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't that be nice? So all
Heather's GIS Journey in CRM
00:01:39
Speaker
right. Well, we have another interview today and it's actually somebody that you guys in our audience here may have heard from before, because if you listen to the CRM archaeology podcast,
00:01:51
Speaker
Heather has been on the podcast for a few years now and she has been a really valuable source of just wisdom and insight on that podcast because of her position and her experience in archaeology and what she's done and in CRM in particular and on the business side of CRM and just project management and just all kinds of stuff. And it turns out she's got a real passion as I think, well,
00:02:15
Speaker
probably most people that get to a certain level kind of have to, but for GIS. And we talked last fall about getting her on to just talk about GIS in the context that she works with it at her firm and just her interest in GIS around that stuff. But for whatever reason, couldn't get the interview nailed down. So now we're going to do it. And I will formally welcome Heather to the Architect podcast. How's it going? Hi. Thanks, Chris. What a nice introduction. Thank you.
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, no worries. So, I mean, you're literally at work, probably have our GIS open on one of your screens right now. So, you know, that's just the life of that kind of person, right? But let's just kick this off. When we first started talking about this and you're like, you know, I could come on and talk GIS stuff. What were your thoughts around that? What are you, what's your passion around this?
00:03:04
Speaker
After I got my graduate degree in archaeology, I was working regularly, but I didn't have a actual full-time job nailed down. So I was working for a company. They really didn't hire full-time people. It's a very small company that was predominantly paleo.
00:03:21
Speaker
And so I didn't really see a whole lot of opportunity there. And it just, you know, I was just, I don't know, trying to find my way in in the archeology world, CRM world. And I had gotten a GIS certificate while I was going through graduate school for archeology and
00:03:40
Speaker
I thought, you know, at the time the chair of the department for the GIS department had really been trying to push some interdisciplinary graduate students. So people that were from other disciplines coming in to get a graduate degree in GIS. And at the time I thought, you know, this might be a really good opportunity for me to increase my skillset. And so I decided, you know, I was going to try to do that. They were making it very,
00:04:09
Speaker
attractive for me. It wasn't going to cost much because they were really working hard to get some other disciplines in. I actually really loved the department. It was such a great environment altogether. The professors are amazing, very invested. I decided I was going to take my thesis work
00:04:34
Speaker
and then expand it and look at predictive modeling and get a GIS master's. And so I went into the master's program for the GIS department after I graduated. And I was still working full time, but hadn't quite had that full-time position yet. While I was in graduate school, I nailed down a full-time job with the company I'm with now, actually. And at the time, they sold me because they were going to have me do
00:05:03
Speaker
40% GIS and 60% archaeology. And so it really is what got my foot in the door, that along with my skill sets with human osteology and final analysis, which they did not have at the time.
GIS as a Career Enhancer
00:05:17
Speaker
So GIS was a great window opener for me, door opener, I guess.
00:05:22
Speaker
But as I started making my way up the ladder, actually at some point they took GIS away from me. They were able to let me have access to ArcGIS because they didn't want me tempted.
00:05:37
Speaker
to work with it because I had other stuff I needed to do. And I do enjoy, you know, there were some times where, you know, at GIS they get overloaded and it's just easy enough for me to go in there and make what I need. But we do use GIS just to, for analysis and just to kind of wrap our head around, you know, certain tasks. And so I still do use GIS. I'm not fully GIS really. It's just a tool. You've got people for that now.
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:10
Speaker
I mean, I have too much of my plate for that. Now I leave it to the people that are keeping up with it. That's the other thing is I try to keep up with it, but it is something that you do have to exercise. You know, it's not something you could just do and then step away and then come back and be able to pick it up. Like you had no time missed. Now I can, it's like riding a bike. I go in there and I, you know, look around and it's intuitive to me, but.
00:06:38
Speaker
it takes some time for me to get to re-familiarize myself if I've been away from it for a while. Especially things change, right? Things are updated. But I don't get to do the analysis. I have done some. Probably the last time I did any kind of predictive modeling was about five years ago. That was serious predictive modeling.
00:06:59
Speaker
Okay. You're a graduate certificate. Let's just go back to the beginning a little bit here. Did, were you required to do any, like a special project for that? Or was it all coursework or it was a, it was a three year program and it was very similar to the way it was set up for the archeology, uh, masters.
00:07:15
Speaker
And that was two years of robust classes, which I'd already taken quite a few. So I'd already got my certificate. I had done a suite. It was a suite of five classes. And that's actually what hooked me, which was smart on their part. And then I did a few more classes because I enjoyed it so much. So I'd already knocked out quite a few of the classes needed for the master's. And then
00:07:43
Speaker
The project was the predictive modeling. So I'm in the Santa Barbara area, Santa Barbara channel
Scientific Use of GIS
00:07:50
Speaker
region, comparing the channel islands with the mainland.
00:07:55
Speaker
Oh, okay. That's pretty cool. It's fun because, you know, there's not a lot, there's so much work done on the islands and you would think the other way around, right? But there's just a ton of work done on the island, on the Northern, specifically Northern Channel Islands. And there's, you know, comparatively not as much on the mainland. There's, you know,
00:08:16
Speaker
good amount, but if you were to compare relative, there's more there. And the academic, the research is predominantly academic on the islands. Yeah, I'm a little curious about the sense of not being current in it if you're not using it all the time. GIS tools are so common now and we use them for so many kinds of visualizations. Do you mean
00:08:38
Speaker
with respect to the predictive modeling, which is a fairly advanced use of GIS, or do you just mean in general that jumping into any dark GIS looks different because you haven't used it in a year and you'd need to refresh yourself with it? That's such a great question because I think most people when they're looking at getting a GIS degree and they're trying to say, or they want to get a certificate like I did or
00:09:03
Speaker
A lot of places don't have that. We're just taking a few classes so they can say they have that skill set. They need to understand that it's completely different. Having the ability to create figures is not the same as GIS.
00:09:18
Speaker
GIS in its definition is actually analysis. It's a science and it's geographical information science, right? And if you really, if you have a degree in GIS,
00:09:33
Speaker
like an actual full degree in GIS, not just taking a few classes where you have another degree. And specifically, if you have one in a graduate degree, it is focused on how do you analyze with the data. So the initial classes that you take are really, they're really about, which are all important, they're really about how to create figures, how to do initial data,
00:10:02
Speaker
mining data analysis, but it's not heavy duty at all. And a lot of it is also cartography, learning how to communicate data in a figure, which is key. Like you can have, there's so many maps. I don't know how much you guys are in the maps, but you know, there are really good examples of very poor maps that may be pretty, but they don't make any sense. So that that's a big part of GIS too.
00:10:31
Speaker
That's such a good thing to say too, right? Cause it's not just about doing the analysis. I actually heard somebody tell me last night, he's this kind of older guy and he's got all these colloquialisms, but he said when I hadn't personally heard before, he's like, nobody needs a drill. They need a hole. They just need a drill to do the hole. Right? And so he's trying to say, what's the actual problem you're trying to solve here? You don't want to, you don't want to buy that. So nobody needs GIS. They need maps.
00:10:57
Speaker
They need analysis and they need answers. But GIS happens to be the best tool for that job. But if you don't give an output that somebody can make sense with, then you just wasted all your time, right? Because what's the point? Yes. And I have another thought, a way of looking at that from another perspective.
00:11:15
Speaker
But I don't know if you want to take it in the next segment. Let's take a break, and then we'll open with that on the other side. So we'll be back in just a minute. Welcome back to episode 198 of the Architect Podcast. And Marissa, you're talking to Heather McDaniel-McDevitt about her GIS and her GIS work and the stuff that she does at her firm. She's not a GIS specialist, but
00:11:37
Speaker
This is just such a great conversation because I mean, even if you don't feel like you need to learn GIS in your life for whatever reason, you're using GIS products and it's helpful to understand mechanism around this thing, even if you just have a cursory knowledge of it to understand how these things were put together so you can better articulate to the people at your firm that do do these things what you need, right? Because there's always two different sets. And that's what we were just kind of talking about is you've got the people putting data together
00:12:06
Speaker
and putting all these maps and things together. But if they can't put an output in that either you understand or somebody can understand in a way that you actually need it, then everybody's just kind of wasting their time there. And you had some more to kind of talk on that subject Heather before the break.
00:12:21
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. That's a really good way of putting it Chris. I think that, you know, it goes both ways. Let's say you're trying to get an archeology job and they, the job description says that you must have some, some kind of command of GIS. Typically what a CRM firm is looking for is somebody who can create figures. It's not analysis.
00:12:43
Speaker
And so if anybody's ever really looking for a job and they look at that and they just being able to take GIS and create appropriate figures, which are typically the same thing almost every time, right? You want a project location.
00:12:59
Speaker
you want a project vicinity other two different types and this may be more specific to california where i work but i know i've worked outside of california too we use those as well basically a overview where does your site
00:13:14
Speaker
Project site fit in the grand scale of things. And where is your site actually? So a lot of times that's more of a zoomed in where you can look at the type, the characteristics traits of the site. And then. Then you have a site plan and those types of things. And so most of those are just, yes, you're, you're working with GIS to communicate.
00:13:36
Speaker
aspects of your project, but you're not doing analysis. What's the difference between creating a figure and doing analysis? Analysis is just bringing in all this data and trying to figure out something that you wouldn't be able to figure out or wouldn't be able to communicate, both figure out and communicate without a tool that can take all this data and spit out things that overlap, just to make it as simple as possible.
00:14:06
Speaker
Let's say one thing, you're trying to look at predictive modeling. You put in the traits of the sites that you do know that are there, and then you look at the commonalities between those sites, and then you try to find that on your landscape in areas that you don't. Let's say you have a larger area.
00:14:27
Speaker
a county or city and you apply the set of data that overlaps and you put it on your area that you're looking at and it allows you to have certain areas that pop up and tell you, okay, this fits your parameters here.
00:14:44
Speaker
And this may have a higher probability of having a site. So all this is, that's analysis. You see it a lot in biology and a lot of with habitat. And, you know, we're, we're humans, right? Habitat's important to us too. So in biology, I think GIS is probably used more, more in biology than, than a lot of the other technical disciplines. If you work in an environmental firm that has multiple disciplines. Yeah. So.
Effective Communication in GIS Projects
00:15:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think that that's one thing that people need. I think a lot of people don't realize that when a CRM company is asking that you have some GIS knowledge, it's typically so you can make a figure. And a figure is important, but a figure is not analysis. Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. More of a representation, right? Of something, right? And I like to think of it as. Yeah. Yeah. And I like to think of
00:15:40
Speaker
JS work is more the end product and working backwards. I do this with my other job too. I ask a client, well, what are you actually trying to achieve here? And then I try to work the steps back to create that result. Paul worked with me and my company on a project out in Nevada a couple of years ago.
00:15:59
Speaker
another company was partnered with us to do the GIS work and also some of the survey. And we basically needed to know, well, where can we survey? Because the variables were slope. The UF4 service didn't want us looking at anything over 30%. And then also
00:16:15
Speaker
we needed to know access and properties and then the segments that we were actually surveying at that time because there was a lot of different segments out there. So those are all the variables and they needed to have pretty high resolution topographical maps of that whole mountain range because there's a lot of topography out there. And then understand some other bits and pieces too. And they put all that together and you end up with a map that says
00:16:39
Speaker
survey there. We tried to shade all those in. That's more important for that survey here because you're going to fall off the side of the hill. Right. Right. Exactly. It's so handy. I don't necessarily need a heavy knowledge of GIS to get that. I need somebody and I need to be able to give them the information that I need and articulate it in a way that
00:17:02
Speaker
that I can use, but also in a way that they can understand to provide the result. Because the GIS department sometimes, especially at bigger firms, I've noticed, I don't know how it is where you work, but they're not often archeologists, right? They're GIS specialists. Oh, that's hired as hired. That's exactly where I was hired. I was hired by that liaison.
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. That's good. So you can translate those differences back and forth, right? You have to be that person that can interpret both sides. That idea of being able to translate, I think is really important. Chris, you raised it twice now about what's your end result? Your end result isn't to have a drill, it's to have a hole, the right size and the right place.
00:17:42
Speaker
And that's something that, in IT, I was asking constantly. People would say, oh, I've got this problem. And they'd tell me what they tried to do to solve it without actually explaining what the problem was in a way that was broken down to the, I tried to do X and Y happened. And that's, you know, so I'd always have to roll back all their questions back to that point. And it seems to me that because we use GIS so heavily in its
00:18:07
Speaker
basic just using the tool form for making figures like Heather's saying and in more advanced forms like what she's advocating for as analyses. It seems to me that having people in the business that can translate or can speak this common language I think is really useful. I would like to hear what Heather has to say about that because I'm sure that's something she bumps into all the time. You mean how to communicate
00:18:34
Speaker
How to communicate effectively what the sets of expectations and goals are when you're talking about products that intersect with GIS, whether they're figure creation or analyses that are part of that workflow.
00:18:49
Speaker
That's such a very good question. But we have a fairly large GIS department, and we have some that we really prefer to work with. Because either they just get it, they've caught on, they're into analysis, they're very detail-oriented, they're really interested in archaeology. So even though they're not archaeologists, they love doing the figures because it gives them at least some kind of window into what we do. And then there's others that we've worked with for a while, so they know exactly what route
00:19:19
Speaker
want. So communicating, I think the best way, if you've never done GIS, the best way to think about it is that GIS works in layers and it's, and I'm going to age myself here, but when I was younger and I was into, you know, certain, I was into like history, was kind of nerd and I was into history and, and I was always curious. Yes, we all were.
00:19:45
Speaker
I was curious how an area changed over time. And I thought to myself, you know, I could take, you know, transparencies that you put on an overhead and draw each, you know, have a map of each time period and then put those things on top of each other and look at how things change. So that was what was in my head.
00:20:06
Speaker
And since that's what's been in my head, that's how I always see GIS. When you're communicating with a GIS analyst, you need to explain to them how you want your information layered. That's like very key. And sometimes they'll help you with that too. Another thing that that's important is how do you use symbology to communicate so many different pieces of information? That's hard. And it, you're not everybody, not every GIS analyst is good at that. And
00:20:36
Speaker
That's where I wish that GIS programs spent more time on cartography than some do. There's some that don't spend hardly any. There's a whole theory behind cartography. There's an art behind it. There's some amazing books out there.
00:20:55
Speaker
that are literal art pieces. You don't even know you're looking at a map and you're looking at a map. If you're looking at it, you actually, in your head, your brain, your cognitive, you know, your brain tells you you're looking at the map. But if you just walked by it, you would think you're looking at a piece of art.
00:21:14
Speaker
If that makes sense. And so we all think we have to have a box and we have to have roads and we have to have, you know, these, these things that, you know, every map has to have. And then you realize that's not true. There's so much noise on maps that don't need to happen. That's the art of GIS is figuring out what is noise and what is important.
00:21:34
Speaker
But then also in our business, when you're working with environmental firms, there also has to be some kind of consistency. So people expect a map to look a certain way. So you can only play with it a certain amount. But what I love are those projects where we're actually working on a project right now, where it's a really important village site near our office. And at one point, it was an island in the middle of a very large slough.
00:22:01
Speaker
And yeah, it's, and it was big. And the Island in the forties was just taken down by, I don't know, like, it was, I don't know, three quarters of it was
00:22:13
Speaker
taken and used as fill to fill in the slew so they could have an airport there during wartime. And so, you know, quite a bit of it's gone, unfortunately, but being able to communicate. We have one figure that worked. I worked with GIS quite a bit to demonstrate how
00:22:33
Speaker
the island was, but thankfully that didn't happen until like the 40s. So we have a decent amount of historic aerials that have the island, and then what happened to it, and then looking at all the different excavations that have happened. It's actually one of those sites that people would give their right arm to excavate at. We actually happen to be doing a day of recovery at it right now. And
00:22:57
Speaker
Being able to identify the areas that have been looked at already, take all the data so that we know where we have potentially intact or known intact deposits. It's a lot of information on one figure, but I think we came up with a pretty good figure that anyone, even if they're not archaeologists, can look at it and understand it.
00:23:21
Speaker
Cool. Nice. Well, that's actually a good segue because I wanted to do some of the stuff you guys have worked on or are currently worked on. That's interesting and has some, some, some good analysis or analytical techniques and things like that, or some fun maps. And we'll do that on the other side of the break and our final segment back in a minute.
00:23:40
Speaker
Welcome back to the architect podcast is our final segment episode a 198 and Heather this go around. You led right into it with your last example at the end of segment two, but I wanted to talk about some interesting scenarios you've had working for this company in the past or maybe even currently where you guys had to do something that wasn't just a, you know,
00:24:01
Speaker
a line drawing field map, which is probably 70% or 80% of what a GIS department ends up doing. Location maps and site maps, but some really cool, interesting stuff and some out of the box kind of thinking that had to happen from a GIS standpoint.
00:24:17
Speaker
I think just off the top of my head, the first thing that I think of is an experience that we had when we were working with tribes and they were consulting on a project. There's sometimes where there's just a distrust of, and for good reason, of the datasets that we as archaeologists use on a regular basis. One of those things is in California is called CRIS, which is the database for all site records and
00:24:46
Speaker
former reports. There's a lot of holes in that, right? It's all dependent on whether or not people turn in their site records, turn in their reports. So there can certainly be negative bias and tribes are definitely concerned with that. And also, you know, okay, so you did turn in a site record or you did turn in some, you know, you did do an investigation, you're turning your report. Maybe they are not all that convinced that the investigation you did was all that,
00:25:14
Speaker
you know, appropriate or that you came to the findings you should have. And so that your methodology was flawed. And so, you know, just because we have information doesn't mean that's all that convincing to some people. And so, you know,
00:25:31
Speaker
The one thing, you know, was just helping out with this informal, it was an informal consultation that eventually helped inform the formal consultation. And I came up with an idea to look at all the sites because they were convinced this one area had to have a site there. And I knew looking at
00:25:53
Speaker
the landscape, I just didn't make sense to me that there would be one there. But I knew that that's not enough. And I don't blame them for being critical of that. And so having something where we could actually say, this is data.
00:26:10
Speaker
Not what do we know are there sites here but. Looking at what like i was saying before that the predictive modeling and looking at the sites because there were quite a few sites around the area which. Many people say if you have sites surrounding an area then you know you have a higher probability of this area that has been looked at having a site.
00:26:29
Speaker
Well, not necessarily, because you have to look at the natural landscape. Right. And without all good archaeologists do. And so, but being able to communicate that not just with a map, but be able to communicate that with all the data and demonstrate that we've taken all the data and all the understanding that we have of the natural landscape into play and we've incorporated it into this analysis and come up with findings that were more believable.
00:26:59
Speaker
And so that is what we did. It almost covered an entire quadrangle of the Toblo map. So it was a pretty big area. And so we did that. We also did one, you know, what's happening a lot out here.
00:27:14
Speaker
right now is wildfire protection plans. So you don't have the time to go and survey everywhere in a wildfire protection plan because it is literally an entire county it can be, right? Or an entire city. So how do you do that? How do you figure out where you might have a potential of having an archaeological site? And so all that was predictive modeling and finding areas of sensitivity and a gradation of sensitivity.
00:27:43
Speaker
and then preparing mitigation measures that were appropriate for each level of sensitivity. Those are, I really love projects like that. And just for context, yeah, for our Eastern United States listeners or Europe, for that matter, some of the California counties are probably bigger than the state or country you live in. So they're pretty huge.
00:28:06
Speaker
The largest county in the United States is in Southern California. San Bernardino. Yeah. That county's enormous. You can be somewhere you didn't even think you were near it and you just pass a sign that says entering San Bernardino County. You're like, what? I'm in the Mojave. What's going on? And then you're on the other side. Yeah, it's huge.
00:28:27
Speaker
And that really brings up a good point because there's sometimes where you're walking into an area that you may not be all that familiar with. And that's where GIS can be helpful. I think GIS can start you on the path to having good field methodology.
GIS in Fieldwork Planning
00:28:44
Speaker
Starting with GIS will really set you up to do your best work.
00:28:49
Speaker
in the field. And especially if you're doing like, we cover a huge area. So I can't go and just look, yeah, I'm not going to know every single area. There's no way like the back of my hand. And so GIS really helps with that.
00:29:03
Speaker
I'll agree. Chris was talking about the slope write-offs that we had in Nevada, and I think I'd mentioned on a previous episode about being told to dig for the foundations of a building in one location, and then I looked at the LiDAR hillshade for that area, and I could see the foundations where they actually were, which is where we thought they were based off of having Doug's STPs all over that area.
00:29:30
Speaker
And then we could verify and argue for why we really should look for the foundations of the building here, not where we were told to initially, which would have been avoided had it all started in GIS.
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah. And that's part of, you know, obviously what we're doing here, it's not just for communication, but for just logistics. I mean, logistical planning, right? You know, another you were talking about slopes. So one of the largest or the largest project I'd ever worked on, which is have to say probably my one of my favorites was something called the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, which is in the San Fernando Valley area, right on the edge of the L.A. County and Ventura County.
00:30:09
Speaker
and Southern California. And it's where NASA is on there, NASA is on there and Boeing and there was an accident that happened back in the 60s. And so it was a cleanup, super fun cleanup site. And the original archeologists that had done work in that area had only found like, there's one, a rock art site that's probably one of the most well-known rock art sites in the United States called Borough Flats.
00:30:36
Speaker
or at least it's very impressive. You don't know about it. Look it up. Everybody knew that that was there because people have known that for a while. It's a social site, but they had only looked at the ballot. They had all just said, okay, we're not going to look at slopes because there's no habitation that would happen up there and everything.
00:30:59
Speaker
They only found like five sites in this entire 6,000 acre project site. And after we were done, there was almost 200 sites that were there. And that was because you know that you have all this rock art, it's typically in rock shelters, right?
00:31:19
Speaker
you know, looking at where in the slope idea, I understand the slope idea, but that's where GIS can help you and you can say, OK, well, what is out there? If there is anything on the slope, what is what is out there? And then looking at, you know, outcrops and geological outcrops and actually looking at the landscape to see, OK, we're not going to do the slope, but let's see if there is a potential of having other types of sites out there and at least pointing those areas and looking at them so you're not
00:31:47
Speaker
have these blinders on and miss almost 200 sites. So Heather, let's round this out. You've given a pretty full-throated argument for why GIS done right is a good thing. Can you give us just a few examples before we go about things you'd like to see more of or things you'd like to see less of by people using GIS or not using GIS in CRM in particular, but archaeology in general? Oh, geez.
00:32:16
Speaker
Just a simple little question. I would say, first of all, not creating maps for the sake of creating maps. I think that when you have a map, it's got to mean something. And other than your figure one, figure two, which in many cases, agencies request or require, excuse me.
00:32:36
Speaker
But having a bunch of maps for the sake of having a bunch of maps doesn't make sense. And then the other, and it just confuses things. Remember the reports that we write have got to be palatable to the reader. And many times, most times, those are not archaeologists. And so you have to look at what is it you're trying to communicate.
00:32:59
Speaker
If you are, I see this, I say a lot, but I see this, you know, when you're looking through reports that other people have done to kind of gather information about your project, you see people that kind of step into the information that they're giving with maps. So they'll have multiple iterations of pretty much the same map where they just keep adding new information on top.
00:33:22
Speaker
It's not helpful. If you have, to me, I think in some instances, maybe it's helpful, but for the most part, it's not. If you had several maps that every time you're adding some layer, or you're not adding a layer, you're saying, okay, I'm only going to give this information on this map. I have a project site and I get this information overlaid on top of the project site. Then the next one, I say, okay, now I'm going to
00:33:48
Speaker
give you this information. I'm going to take away the old information. I'm going to put a new data set on here.
00:33:55
Speaker
For me, what I would do is I would lay all those maps up and I would be trying to compare. Well, that's not what GIS is meant for. GIS is meant for you to be able to look at all the information at one time. That's why we have geo-referencing, why we have the ability to actually spatially tie information. It's not just the data. Let's say we have maps, we have historic aerials, all these things that we can spatially tie so we can more accurately
00:34:24
Speaker
overlay things on pieces of information on top of each other and really see where, you know, where information pops out that make you want to look at that area more than another. And so I would say having too many maps that is, to me, kind of a pet peeve, but just, I would say people need to kind of rethink that approach. I see it a lot. And I think that it might just be because a person's not a GIS person.
00:34:50
Speaker
so they don't see it like that and you may have let's say you have an archaeologist says you have to do it this way i mean basically they're just asking for gis to give them a digital form of their handwritten map that's not what gis is for you know there's a lot of work
00:35:06
Speaker
For nothing just do your hand written map but that's what you're gonna do unless your handwriting said that but behind those kinds of approaches is a very frustrated gi s person i'm sure the same put this in one figure if you would just let me so.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah. That gets at some of the ideas that you were talking about earlier about symbology and GIS programs and also about communication and having a shared language that we can understand. You don't have to necessarily flatten everything into each map just shows one kind of feature, but you can smartly show them all, provide you've got good GIS people on one side and archaeologists are willing to work with them on the other side. Right.
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah. And one of the things I was thinking of, Heather, when you were saying, you know, GIS is not about just digitizing hand-drawn maps. I mean, as a small company owner, when I was first starting out, honestly, I had a cursory knowledge of GIS. I took one graduate class in GIS just to kind of get my feet wet and then
00:36:04
Speaker
When I started owning my own company, I couldn't afford ArcGIS, so I was using QGIS, which was fine, and doing my own tutorials and just kind of figuring out what I needed to do. But I learned really early on, when I did have to digitize, not necessarily hand-drawn maps, but in some cases hand-drawn maps, but in a lot of cases just
00:36:24
Speaker
just making a map out of something I made in the field. I didn't need a complicated GIS tool. I actually used some other stuff on my iPad to create those maps with their spatial relationships just to communicate the idea because that was the easiest tool for the job and I didn't use GIS to do that. I ended up having more projects and getting more stuff rather than
00:36:44
Speaker
again, staying in your lane, rather than me trying to spend all this time and figure this out and do a good job. I hired a contractor, somebody I knew, who was a GIS specialist to do the GIS work for me because that's going to cost me money, but it's way less money than me trying to spend my time trying to do it. But I was able to communicate to him because of my knowledge of what I needed and the process, exactly what I wanted out of his work, and that was a good relationship to have.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think that same project that I was talking about at the time, it was a smaller company and they didn't have the money for a tremble or anything like that. So we actually did the old fashioned compass and tape recording of all these sites. It was a lot. And I, because at the time I was actually in, I was in that graduate program for GIS, I thought right away, I'm like, you know what? We need to set up a convention, a symbology convention. Now we have to have,
00:37:43
Speaker
so that the symbology is across the board the way it needs to be, so it's consistent, so that one person isn't using this. I mean, that's, if you look at Sanborn's, there's some convention there, there's some consistency, there's not, and that's like, usually you're trying to figure out, what does this mean, you know?
00:38:01
Speaker
You know, I think that that is also something that GIS can do, you know, with companies. If you have a smaller company, even larger companies may not have it. Just putting together a data dictionary, putting together an actual set symbology. And then that can be tied to technologies like collector and other, so that when you're finding things in the field, that you're using that same symbology across the board.
00:38:26
Speaker
It really cuts down on time and expense. And it also, once you start training people what to look for, it's more intuitive to them. Yeah. So in the last just couple of minutes here, this podcast, Heather, this has been great.
Recommended GIS Resources
00:38:40
Speaker
You mentioned to us during the break that you might have a few books for people to check out and we'll put links for these in the show notes, but what were you thinking?
00:38:47
Speaker
So there's a few books, some are just for fun and some are actually really, I think, good resources. So there's one that's a good resource. If you don't know, it is a thicker book and it's many times used as a textbook in a GIS program, but it's called GIS fundamentals, a first text on geographic
00:39:05
Speaker
information systems by Bolstad. That's a really good comprehensive textbook type resource. And then there are a few others that kind of talk about the theory of maps and how they came to be and why we as humans, we have a map in our head. I mean, I'd like you to bring one person to me that
00:39:28
Speaker
doesn't walk around and have a map in their cognitive map, right? Where they are right now. I mean, it's whether you think about it or not, you do have a map gone going in your head all the time. So what's that? So, uh, well, it may not be that great of a map, but she has one. So
00:39:53
Speaker
So there's one called You Are Here, and that's called It's You Are Here is the name. That's by Catherine Harmon. It's called Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. And then a fun one is Maps that Changed Our World by John OE Clark. And then one that's really just fun to look at pictures as art or the maps as art is Everything Sings, Maps for Narrative Atlas by Dennis Wood.
00:40:22
Speaker
And that's a fun one. Just looking at how they communicate information in these maps is pretty cool. And it gives an explanation, too, of why they made it the way they did each map.
00:40:36
Speaker
Well, that's awesome. I'm going to throw this off into left field really quickly here before we wrapped up. The other day I was having a conversation with my sister, who's an artist and an arts educator, and she gave as an assignment to one of her classes, do a map of your childhood neighborhood. Nice. And it became this incredibly intense discussion about what is a map and how important is the realism and the spatial accuracy versus the effective
00:41:06
Speaker
accuracy, you know, what you remember, what matters and so on. And so I think that some of these books are actually going to really help her. She has nothing to do with archaeology.
00:41:15
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, when you're looking at maps and its size doesn't mean that that, let's say you're looking at a neighborhood and you have a size, you have a one house that's bigger on your map than all others. It doesn't necessarily mean that that was the biggest house on the block, right? That might've been your most important house, right? Your house or your best friend's house, or there's so many different ways of communicating information. Yeah. And maps, maps are so much fun.
00:41:45
Speaker
All right.
Closing and Acknowledgments
00:41:46
Speaker
Well, Heather, this has been great. I'm glad we finally connected on this show. And if you guys want to hear more of, you know, Heather's ideas and opinions, check out the CRM archeology podcast here on the archeology podcast network. It comes out every Sunday. No, we record every Sunday. I don't even know. It's been 10 years. It comes out every Wednesday.
00:42:04
Speaker
Every other Wednesday, yes. I'll get it right eventually. You'd think after that long, I would know. But yeah, we have some great discussions over there focused solely around the job of cultural resource management and all the aspects regarding that. And in fact, we've got a lot of interesting topics, but it's usually focused around CRM. So check that out. And again, Heather, thanks for coming on the show. This has been great. Thanks for having me. This has been really fun. I don't get to talk about
00:42:31
Speaker
GIS in this kind of way very often. So thank you. Yeah. Well, we've been trying to have you on for a while. So it's great that we finally did. And it's great to finally actually kind of virtually meet you after hearing you on the CRM podcast for so long. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, thanks, Heather. And thanks, everybody else. And we'll see you guys in a couple of weeks. Bye-bye. Bye.
00:42:56
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 lugall.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.
00:43:21
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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.