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Digital Field Archaeology Apps - Episode 69
172 Plays7 years ago
There are a lot of options out there and no standard answer to the question, "What do you use to record digitally in the field?" Fortunately, Chris and Paul have some experience with this and Chris has worked on two apps for site recording in the field. We talk about the progression from fillable PDFs all the way to custom applications on today's episode. This is good material even if you're already recording in the field.
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Transcript
Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 69. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. On today's show, we talk about digital field site recording again.
Digital Field Site Recording
00:00:18
Speaker
It, like drones, is a rapidly changing space, but we have requirements and suggestions. Let's get to it.
00:00:25
Speaker
All right, Paul, welcome to the show. Hi, Chris. How are you doing? Pretty good. Pretty good. So we're we're both probably a little crazy right now. We're actually I didn't even look to see what day this comes out. I have no idea what even day it is today. But it might be our last of the season of the year, right? I'm sure it's our last recording of the year. Yeah. And I think this comes out next week. And for those of you listening, either in the future or whatever, we're recording this like five days before Christmas, 2017. So, you know, everybody's a little crazy. But
00:00:50
Speaker
I figured since, you know, it's pretty much Christmas for everybody. That's what celebrates that. And, you know, presents or gift giving and things like that, that we would try to we would try to gift to the archaeological archaeo tech audience one more time talking about field site recording forms. I don't know how long, how many times this has been mentioned on the architect podcast. But if we were keeping track of these things, not enough.
Digital vs Paper Recording Tools
00:01:12
Speaker
However, many times it hasn't been enough yet.
00:01:15
Speaker
Well, I mean, the simple fact that there isn't something you can point to, like when I say, are you going to record sub meter coordinates? And you say yes. And I say, what are you going to use? You're probably going to say a Trimble, right? You're probably going to say Trimble as the brand name, even though other things do it, you're going to say Trimble. It's our go to device for doing that. But if I were to say, what are you going to use to record your site with your field site forms and your field site data with that's not GPS related, what are you going to use to record that? You asked 100 people and you're going to get 100 different answers. Well, no.
00:01:45
Speaker
you're going to probably get 10 different answers, but 90 of them will be paper. And nine of the 10 will be problematic in the extreme, I think. Yes, yes. And I think I want to get just, you know, we've got some ideas and some things we want to talk about on this show, but just because you said that, I think I want to get some of the really problematic things out of the way right away, because I ran a poll, and I really should have pulled those results up had I thought about this, but I ran a poll on the Archaeo Field Text Group on Facebook,
00:02:15
Speaker
about a month ago, I guess. And I said, what are you currently using in the field for digital field site recording? Not what have you used in the past, like what are you using today? If you were gonna go do a project right now, what are you using? And the number one answer of probably about 30 answers, I think, was fillable PDFs. And we've talked, yeah, we've talked about fillable PDFs before. Now, two things I gotta say about that. One, I totally applaud people that
00:02:43
Speaker
even first figure out how to make a fillable PDF and second said they thought far enough ahead and said you know what I need to be recording digitally and this is the only thing I can think of to do right now it's I feel like the tech industry has failed them and not giving a better solution but I applaud them for at least not using paper and thinking this is the this is a good solution it's still a paper paradigm it is it is it cuts out a step of
00:03:10
Speaker
Well, it still, if you're looking at just efficiency and you're not looking at data, because those are kind of two sides of the coin that we need to look at here. We need to look at efficiency and we need to look at data. What are we going to do with these things?
Structured Data in Archaeology
00:03:21
Speaker
If all you're concerned with is efficiency and reducing your time that it takes you to finish this project and thereby increasing your profit margin, because if we're talking about CRM, then that's what we're talking about.
00:03:32
Speaker
then a fillable PDF is actually not a terrible solution because it almost completely eliminates the office work of typing up a site form into a Word document. If you're typing up that site form into a fillable PDF and that's 95% done when you leave the field, I say 95% because there's always error checking and things like that once you get back in the office. But there might be a few minutes per site record, but there's not a few hours per site record typing it up if you're using a fillable PDF.
00:03:58
Speaker
Now that's assuming your PDF is robust enough that if you have 25 pages of text, it can handle that. They're usually not, which is one of the big problems with fillable PDFs. But if you've just got some blanks to fill in, maybe you're just using fillable PDFs for your inventories or something like that, and it's just check marks or counting up something or something like that. But if you're doing variable types of descriptions, fillable PDFs are going to be an issue.
00:04:25
Speaker
So that's the issue there with efficiency. It might save you some time. It will save you some time if you've got an average site that doesn't take a lot of variability and you can fill it all out in the field and you're just error checking in the office. But then the other side of that coin is data. And that's how we're going to frame this conversation today. Yeah. What do you mean by data?
00:04:42
Speaker
Well, what I mean by data is the things you type into a fillable PDF are not actually data in most cases. You can't do anything with it. You might as well be writing it on a sheet of paper, but you can't take the data in a fillable PDF, extract that into like a table, put it into a GIS or put it into a spreadsheet or a database, and then do things with it. You can't analyze that data in any way. A fillable PDF is basically no better than paper when it comes to its data potential.
00:05:13
Speaker
Sorry, I'm going to throw out then a distinction then between the text that you entered to a fillable PDF is basically text and we have to distinguish between text even if it's entered digitally and data even if it's textual data.
00:05:31
Speaker
Does that make sense? Right. That does make sense. Yeah. So when I think data, I guess if I'm saying this right, correct me if I'm wrong, I think I'm meaning an easy conversion of the text that you're entering in the field, no matter how you're doing it, and converting that into data. Because you can collect paper
00:05:50
Speaker
information in the field. Obviously people have done it for decades. You collect information on paper, you translate that to a spreadsheet or something. Now you've created what I call data because data is something that you can do something with. You can store that, you can sort it, you can create tables, you can create pie charts, you can create all the fun graphics. You can do stuff with it. But until you get it into a format where you can do something with it, it becomes,
00:06:19
Speaker
It's not very useful, so I don't really consider it... I guess it's still data in a strict technical sense of the word, but it's not usable data. Well, what you're missing is a term I use all the time here pretty much daily. My work is structured data, and it's the structure that becomes the important part. I mean, you might have a beautiful description of an object
00:06:41
Speaker
But if that description isn't structured in a particular way, it's just a string of letters and words that
00:06:49
Speaker
a human has to go and pull apart in order to do anything with. But if it's structured in a proper way, so that if it's those cells in that spreadsheet, each cell means something. Is that ancillary meaning, that extra meaning about where it is, how it's positioned in relation to what column it is? Is that the width column or the height column? Something very simple that you can understand. That means something.
00:07:12
Speaker
Right? So the structure, I think, is where it really changes between just text and data. And that's the part that I think that we have to really focus on. Yeah. And that's an excellent distinction to make. And that's where fillable PDFs fail, because when you enter information into the fillable PDF, sure, there's structure to where that is. But the only thing that can read that is a PDF reader. You can't get it out. Once you get it to
00:07:38
Speaker
you know, to the computer off your tablet or whatever you're doing, it's still just a fillable PDF. There's no way to extract the individual things from those fields and have those field type tags or whatever attached to those pieces of information. Then it would become data if you could actually do that. Maybe something like that does exist at a high end form, but I'm willing to bet most people using fillable PDFs are not considering that or doing that.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, probably not. They're probably generally just flat fields, kind of not unlike typing in your name on the line, in place of the line on a Word document. We've all received Word documents. You have to fill out for different permission slips if you're a parent.
00:08:16
Speaker
excuse me, or for different medical forms, who knows what, that then you're supposed to go print out, but you fill out in the right slot. And so there's a little bit of structure to it in terms of the formatting, but you can't pull that out in a meaningful sense. The fillable PDFs, at least when they started out, there was an intent to have a backend to it, a web deliverable backend. So field A would be first name.
00:08:41
Speaker
and that would go to some database, someplace that filled out the first name and field B would be the last name and that would go to that same database in the last name. I don't see people doing that. I certainly wouldn't be doing that if I had a PDF, if I had a site form that I had to convert to a digital format and the easiest way to do that was to scan that PDF and then make fields on top of the right areas to fill out.
00:09:08
Speaker
I'm probably not going to go through all the effort to set up a server that links into that in a database at the back end of the server so that you can fill out that and then submit the form electronically to the back end. There are certainly easier solutions to that same set of problems nowadays.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the slight evolution of that is something else we have in our notes, which would be something like a web-based form like Google Forms. Because a Google Form, for anybody that's ever set one of those up, if you're just seeking information and you set up this Google Form, you can
00:09:44
Speaker
have people fill that out, and then the product that you get from that is actually a spreadsheet of the information. The fields that you have on the form, the questions or whatever, are the columns across the top, and then each person that answers is a row. So Chris Webster, row one, hears all his answers to the things across the top, and that's data. That's something you can do something with. And even in Google, you can take that form and then create quick pie charts and graphs and whatever you want from that. That's data right there.
00:10:13
Speaker
But the whole problem with a Google Form, aside from security, and that unless you're really careful with Google, all someone needs is the link to really get all that data in a lot of cases. There's obviously ways to secure that, but they're not ways that people really understand or use a lot of times. So I never put anything really sensitive in a Google Form, quite frankly. And the other issue is, of course, if you happen to be using Google Forms in the field,
00:10:40
Speaker
I'm not aware, maybe you can on an Android based tablet, but I'm not aware of the fact that you can use them offline. I don't know if you could to save information because I don't think it saves information locally. I think it saves it to Google servers. If you create a form, you answer it, then you create a new form. Like if you're just doing an inventory type of thing, or maybe you do have a full site form on there or something like that.
00:11:00
Speaker
I don't think I don't think you can use them without internet service. So if you're in someplace like pretty much all of the west coast out in the field, the western half of the United States, the intermountain region, you're not going to have cell service out in the field in a lot of cases. And I'm not sure you can use a Google form on any type of tablet in that
00:11:16
Speaker
Do you know about any of that, Paul? No, I don't. I know that Google Docs and Google Sheets, you definitely can use it in offline mode. The forms, I haven't actually tested that, so I don't know. It would be fantastic if you could. But another thing with the forms, Google Forms in particular, and I'm sure there are other similar sorts of products out there, is that your form is one form. Say you've got a sheet on your project, you've got one sheet for each artifact that you're finding.
00:11:46
Speaker
Right. You wouldn't have that option. You would have the one sheet. You would have to then go and make another old sheet to fill out object two and another old sheet to fill out object three. So even if it is usable in an offline form, it's not geared toward that. It's geared towards getting survey data about an individual, about things that they're doing, that sort of thing. It's not about doing 20 object forms because those are the 20 objects that you found on a particular site.
Database Solutions
00:12:15
Speaker
So, you know, it's maybe not the best solution in and of itself, even if it can do offline mode. But that offline-online distinction is another important part that we're looking at here, because again, I haven't mentioned this before, is that we're used to being online all the time.
00:12:34
Speaker
at home, at work. And most of the software developers are similarly used to being online most, if not all the time. But we as archaeologists have to deal with those cases where we're offline and have to be able to deal with intelligently having our forms and our resources and whatever else available offline and then being able to sync it back up to some centralized repository or server.
00:13:02
Speaker
So again, Google forms, I don't know that that fits the bill for that, but there definitely is a space there. It's not just archaeologists. I'm sure anybody that does any kind of field work has the same sort of sets of problems.
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure they do. And if we're talking about the two sides of the coin here, usable raw data for other things and efficiency, I feel like Google Forms, if you were able to use those in the field, and it did work the way we say we want it to work, that it kind of ticks both those boxes in a way. It's not very convenient. It's a little clunky, but it does tick both those boxes. The one box, the third one we'll introduce, which is security, as Paul mentioned and as I mentioned, it's not like Uber secure.
00:13:45
Speaker
So the next logical question, and I feel like 14 minutes into this podcast, we should explain what the hell the show is about. Because what I'm trying to cover here is this is really for people who, well, two types of people, people who want to record digitally in the field and there isn't an off the shelf solution for you right now.
00:14:05
Speaker
The people that are like, how do I do this? Where do I go? I feel like we're trying to go through the thought process that someone would naturally have. They'd think about a fillable PDF. They might think of Google Forms. I think the next thing that people would think about, because I did see this as an answer on the poll, and I know people that are actually doing this in the field right now, which is, and this is a logical solution too, at least here in Nevada, is to just use a Word document in the field, whether that's on some sort of robust, I know.
00:14:34
Speaker
I know, um, whether that's on some sort of like field computer, uh, or some sort of tablet or something like that, that's running Word. I've seen people do that. And that is, I can't fault people for that. That is a logical solution because what we do typically here in Nevada.
00:14:50
Speaker
And I know in California is you have your printout of the actual site form. It's just a printout of the Word document or PDF that the state issues basically. You write on that and then you go back to the office, you open up that same Word document and you type everything into it. So it would be logical for someone to think, well, if I just brought that Word document in the field, I could avoid the paper step and type right into it. But again,
00:15:14
Speaker
We're going to have the same problems as a fillable PDF, except we're going to have more problems. First off, it's not data. You're typing your words next to other words that are the same words on the page. It's just words on a page. You can't do anything with it once you get it in there. Maybe you're not concerned with that. OK. It is relatively secure if it's just a Word document locked on your tablet, as long as you keep all that in-house. So there's that. Yeah, it's not shared across the web.
00:15:41
Speaker
Right, exactly. So if you upload that at the end of the day or something to your servers, then you're probably OK. But it's not super efficient. And you might think it is, because you're cutting out that step, and you're just typing it in a Word document. But if anybody's ever tried to type anything into a Word document, and they didn't have invisible characters turned on, and they hit Enter key, and it all hell broke loose, and they don't know what the hell is going on, try doing that in the field, in a wind, when you've got your crew chief saying, are you done yet?
00:16:08
Speaker
destroyed the formatting on this Word document, and it all went to hell. That is a pure hell in itself, which actually brings up another problem that all of these things we've talked about have together, which is when we go in the field, a crew of four typically here in the West, we'll have features to record, artifacts to record, site information to record, just basic site information, and then GIS information. That's typically why we have a four-person crew.
00:16:36
Speaker
the crew chief will hand out the paperwork for those different things unless people have the blank ones with them. You'll have artifact logs, you'll have feature forms, and you'll have the site forms for the basic site information. And each person does their part. And then in the office, all that gets synthesized into a single site record document. Well, the biggest problem with using something like a Word document as your site form and things like that is now you're taking the three or four different Word documents or pieces of documents
00:17:03
Speaker
And then you're trying to put all those together if people all have their own tablets and they're working on individual pieces. Same thing with a PDF, same thing with a Google Form. Unless you really broke everything up into its individual constituent parts and you could put it all back together again and not confuse one site for the next, then you're fine. But that's really difficult to do. And that's where databases come in. Databases are pretty much the answer to that problem.
00:17:28
Speaker
Before we move on to databases, maybe we can do that after the break. I would say the reason why when you said word documents is because a PDF at least is, it follows very closely a paper paradigm, right? So you've got the PDF, which is the card that you have to fill out, the form that you have to fill out, and what you fill out on it is what you're writing there in pencil or pen on top of that form.
00:17:55
Speaker
So it's kind of a weird metaphor. Word document, it looks like it's paper, right? You're going to print this out at the end, presumably, but you're actually inserting the text into it, right?
Enhancing Flexibility with Databases
00:18:09
Speaker
So it's so easy then to screw up the formatting.
00:18:13
Speaker
which is the real advantage more so than anything else of having paper is that you can really strictly control the format of the display and the information that's on it. And as soon as you go to a Word document, you kind of have the illusion of that. And that illusion can be burst, you know, just by the slightest, you know, you accidentally hit tab, you accidentally hit return, you know, there's some,
00:18:36
Speaker
your field that you have to fill in. You've got a little more data that can fit into that line that they gave you and it pushes the next line down and everything goes to hell. For me, it's the worst of all worlds. Every year, we get a document over here from our lower school
00:18:54
Speaker
where they have all the teachers in the classrooms and the new teachers. And everybody's indicated, it's all a Word document. Everybody's indicated by a little asterisk or a little plus or a little something next to their name to indicate that they're new or they've changed what room they're teaching in. And it's just a
00:19:14
Speaker
horrible document and I don't even have word on my main computer because I hate that program. So I open it up in LibreOffice and then the formatting screws up and so they've spent a lot of time to make sure that it shows up just on one page and I open it up and it goes to the second page.
00:19:35
Speaker
And I cringe every year when I get this. I'm just like, you know, why don't you just send me an Excel file? If you really want to use Microsoft products, that's fine. Send me an Excel file with everybody's name, the room that they're in, and another field that says new person or changed room. And I'll have it as data. But yeah, that use of Word documents.
00:19:58
Speaker
for collecting data is just the worst possible way of going about it, I think. So if any of our listeners are thinking about doing it, please save yourself a problem. Print that Word document as a PDF and turn that into a fillable PDF as the very minimum, because at least you're doing everybody else a service, including yourself, when it comes time to assemble those to put into a report.
00:20:22
Speaker
I mean, it's not very user-friendly, but at the very least, type into an Excel document, you know? Just create the data. But people don't do that because it's not pretty. Well, it's not that it's not pretty, but it really isn't user-friendly if you're trying to find a certain column and entry, and where do I type this in, and it's just a pain in the ass. We're visual people, right? We like to see things laid out in a visual way.
00:20:48
Speaker
A big part of that, I think, and I definitely was talking about this here, and we'll get to this after the break, is you said database-driven programs. And I think that we as archaeologists and anybody that does any kind of data collection has to think about the difference between data in and data out. And that Word document, that PDF, those can be great for data out.
00:21:12
Speaker
they're terrible for data in, and we have to make that sort of distinction. And if you think about that early enough in your project, in the design of your research, you'll avoid a lot of headaches down the road.
00:21:26
Speaker
Indeed. Yeah. All right. Well, let's take our break and then we'll come back and talk about databases. On this break, you will hear about the members program. We've had a couple of new members in the last week or so from this recording. Thanks for that. I know all the support helps. So check it out, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. We're adding new content to the member site. You would have heard this podcast probably about a week early if I'm on my stuff and I get it done on time.
00:21:55
Speaker
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00:22:25
Speaker
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00:22:44
Speaker
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00:23:01
Speaker
Okay, welcome back to episode 69 and we are talking about digital field site recording and this episode is for all those people that want to do this but don't really know what they're looking for. I'm trying to go through this order of progression from the things you might think of to the things you probably should be looking at.
00:23:18
Speaker
And also, this is really handy for anybody out there that has app development chops and can maybe produce something like this, because as we'll find out near the end of this segment, there aren't a whole lot of options out there. And as we said at the beginning of the last segment, if you were to ask a bunch of people, there isn't a standard answer for the answer to this question. I don't think that one company needs to monopolize the industry, but that isn't even an option right now. Nobody's even remotely.
00:23:44
Speaker
Carving out a tiny little niche of the industry right now. So but we'll get into that later when we ended the last segment we were getting into Really the culmination of all these different technologies and what you really should be looking at which is a database application and databases I'll admit for even myself, you know back when I was like in grad school I didn't have a lot of experience with databases and I met a guy who was at the grad school at the University of Georgia and he was like a database architect and
00:24:09
Speaker
And he was showing us this background back end of a database like the relational tables and all that stuff And I my mind was just blown like I'd never seen anything like that before I had no idea what I was even looking at all the lines connecting everything and it was a total mess But he understood it and I know way more about databases now than I did back then I think I'd still probably struggle with putting together a nice efficient one But I think I would
00:24:33
Speaker
I don't think I do too bad, quite frankly, but you really got to pay attention to how the thing is built because it'll run slowly or crash when you're trying to access data from the database. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Basically, what we're talking about here, though, is using something with relational tables. Really, that just means that tables relate to each other to break that down.
00:24:56
Speaker
And having that as your underlying architecture. And the biggest reason for that is flexibility. You want to be able to displace different things on your screen. And the way to do that is to be able to call them up from tables that are stored within your database. And then not only that, but as you record new data, those are stored in tables that the database creates, right? The database creates these tables that you store your new data in or the day that you're recording.
00:25:21
Speaker
And then the interface that you're using, the user interface, the UI or GUI, some people call it the Graphical User Interface, is the visual pleasing expression of the database basically. That's the layer on top that allows you to not have to look at all the tables and lines to make it simple.
00:25:39
Speaker
Let me try to give you a real-world example, but one that anybody can understand. If you have a well-constructed database, and we're talking about relational databases here, I'm not talking about NoSQL databases, which I'm still trying to get my brain around.
00:25:58
Speaker
Say you have a table that has quadrants, your excavation quads, and you've got another table that has artifacts, and the quadrants table has at a minimum the dimensions, the boundaries of the quadrant that you're excavating.
00:26:15
Speaker
And the artifacts have their own locations, right? They're 3D locations in space. You could very easily, in a relational database, ask the table, ask the database to say, hey, find me all artifacts that are in this particular area.
00:26:36
Speaker
And so you could show then which quads match that. You can break it down by different, depending on what kinds of data you've collected. And that's, again, gets back to the thing of data in, data out. But you can break it down. You can slice and dice it in different ways. Give me all the pot shirts. Give me all the figurines. Give me everything metal. However you want to categorize it, depending on the variabilities of your site.
00:26:59
Speaker
and be able to look across diagonally and vertically and horizontally and slice and dice all that data that you've collected, all those little bits of information and be able to pull out stuff that's hopefully meaningful. Really, really, because we as archaeologists are very visually focused, it really hits the ground running when you start mixing that in with the GIS and then you can
00:27:26
Speaker
have databases behind your GIS so that you can display any of these different variables or multiples of different variables. Give me all the metal objects that are figurines across the site and display it there. You get this way of querying, which is a big part of SQL.
00:27:49
Speaker
Sorry, let me back up a little bit here. Relational databases, most of them use an interface which is called Structured Query Language, SQL. It's a very simple programming language developed in the 1970s, I believe, and it's very mathematical. As soon as it starts to click with you how to program in it, you can use it with different kinds of database backends and then you can transfer the difference between Postgres and Oracle and MySQL.
00:28:18
Speaker
are really just differences of dialect. You learn one, you can kind of tweak it a little bit and rewrite the query for something else, but you learn ways of then interrogating your data and cross-cutting it, asking all these strange little questions and then one question leads to another and you can slice it a different way and slice it a different way. But you're only ever able to do that if you first entered your data into that database
00:28:42
Speaker
in a nice, structured, sensible way. That's why I'm so adamant about not using that Word document, but would much rather have a nice front end, be it a web browser interface, be it TapForms, be it Codify, be it Wild Notes, be it anything else, FileMaker.
00:29:05
Speaker
structures your data as it goes in, so that way you can pull it out in really interesting and meaningful formats. And that is the key. You know, be able to enter it in an easy way and be able to extract the information in an easy way, and then to store it so that other people can do it. Absolutely. You know, that's the nice thing about a database, yeah, is, you know, as scientists, you're always trying to create something that is reproducible. That's the hallmark of good science, right? Somebody should be able to look at your data
00:29:34
Speaker
at your raw data and produce similar results. Well, one of the best ways to be able to do that is to store raw data. If I go to look up a site at the BLM right now and I go back and I find the original CD that's buried in with the report in this BLM file cabinet, I'm more than likely not gonna see any true data on that CD. What I'm gonna see is a PDF of the report. I'm gonna see PDFs of all the site records and I'm gonna see the photographs and I'm gonna see the GIS
00:30:03
Speaker
information, the GIS files, but it's basically just the shape files that represent the site, you know, the points, lines, and polylines, but not real data. So if you collect that information as data, then you can link your database. Once you get all this information out of your tablets, you can link that database with your GIS.
00:30:22
Speaker
And then now, when somebody opens up your GIS for your report, and they click on that artifact, they actually see the data that you collected with that artifact, or they see the data you collected with that feature. The description, whatever fields you set up that you want them to see, they should be able to see all that. And that's really just linking one to the other. And that's not that hard. That's actually kind of easy. That GIS is designed to be able to link to a database.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the greatest thing about it. And the other thing a database gives you is when you have tables that are talking to each other, this relational style tables, you often have, and Paul, I'll get the term wrong here and maybe you know what I'm trying to get at here, but there's usually, I think it's like a key field or something like that, the field that links those two tables together. There's something that gets you from one table to the next, right?
00:31:15
Speaker
Well that term, that term can be something related to, now if you're really gonna build a database and you got some crazy database architects out there, they'll have their own things that help all these go together. But where this comes in handy is, let's say that term is just the site number that you created, okay? That's the field, and the field is probably site number, and then the site number is whatever you typed in, and that links it to the other tables. Well if you have that, and you've got four tablets out in the field, and you say, you record artifacts, you record features, you record site description,
00:31:45
Speaker
and you record whatever else there is, and you all use the same site number to start with, and all your tables have the same site number at the top of it, then once you bring this all back together in the office, your database ought to be able to put all that together pretty easily and bring all that stuff back into one site because they're using that key cell in the table, that key line in the table or key row to be able to link everything back together. And then you can work on export depending on what you're doing, you can export that into
00:32:15
Speaker
into your GIS. You can export that into however you're creating the final word style looking PDF of your site form that the agencies require. So I'm looking forward to a day when the agencies don't actually require PDFs of forms anymore. They just require data.
00:32:31
Speaker
They just require the database because there really is no point in giving them the site form anymore. It's really a holdover from just typing up site forms. There's no reason for them to have the PDF of that. It really should just be data and then give them the report. If you want to pull up the site form,
00:32:48
Speaker
Well, that should be in an interface that they have either at the office or that's online, and whatever interface you're using pulls the data of that site into whatever graphical user interface you want to use, whether it's a map and you're looking at individual things or you really do want to see it laid out as a site form or something like that.
Beyond Traditional Methods
00:33:05
Speaker
But we need to think beyond the paper.
00:33:08
Speaker
and stop limiting ourselves to that format. That's one thing I did when I was consulting with Codify is I was trying to get us to think beyond the paper because a lot of solutions up until, well now, quite frankly, are what I was calling paper on glass. It's really just the paper version. That's what a fillable PDF is. It's paper on glass. It's the paper version on glass, but we have
00:33:31
Speaker
billions of dollars behind this technology, whether it's an Apple tablet or a Samsung tablet, it doesn't matter. There's billions of dollars behind these technologies and yet we're still trying to put a fillable PDF on there. Let's think beyond that, beyond the interface and figure out the best way to actually most efficiently record stuff in the field. What would that look like if you had an unlimited design aesthetic and you didn't have to constrain yourself to the paper? You just have
00:33:55
Speaker
The best way I was thinking about it is I would cut up a site form and physically cut up the paper and just lay the fields in front of me and say, how would I want to see these filled out if I'm laid out if I'm actually just doing this in the field? How would I want to see that laid out in front of me on a tablet if I didn't need it to be a sheet of paper? What would I want that to look like? And think beyond two dimensions, too. Think three-dimensional even with your interface. I'm digging down into the site.
00:34:20
Speaker
Why not have that be a three-dimensional representation? We were thinking about all kinds of crazy stuff that never came into fruition, but that's what you have to think with this new technology, is let's get ourselves away from the paper and into something like that. Yeah, and as long as you're collecting those data in a structured format, you really can think multi-dimensionally. It doesn't just have to be three dimensions, think the fourth dimension, time. I mean, we are archeologists, we deal with time all the time. Nope, Joe meant there.
00:34:50
Speaker
We deal with time all the time, and we think in the fourth dimension frequently. It's really important. Do I think that this is really Islamic? Do I think it's Islamic? That matters as to how I'm going to interpret this site. Maybe more, maybe less, depending what the object is, depending what my research questions are, but it's a critical part of what we're discussing here. I'm going to add, before we talk about some of the possibilities that we can open up, is that
00:35:16
Speaker
that when we're dealing with database-based programs, we also get two really big features that are critically important to our later research.
00:35:28
Speaker
that you don't get through something like a syllable PDF. And you definitely don't get through a Word document. You absolutely don't get on paper. And this is a huge advantage as you get data integrity and you can also get standardization. And what I mean by that, data integrity, we've all been familiar with, you know, you fill out a form on the web and it asks for an email address and you can't hit go until you've put an actual, you know, paulatlugaul.com and you've got that at, I didn't accidentally, you know, hit the exclamation mark there.
00:35:59
Speaker
It won't let you go. That's data integrity. It makes sure that what you're putting into it, it asks for a dimension. What are the linear dimensions of an object? And you put in 23A and it says, no, that's not actually a linear dimension. It's like, oh yeah, 23 because it's 23 centimeters.
00:36:18
Speaker
You know, something like that. You can check for that sort of stuff when you're dealing with data as data and then standardization. And that gets partially to what you're talking about with the key fields in the databases. So, you know, basically what you can do is you'll have table A and table B. And let's say that
00:36:42
Speaker
Instead of having to write down the site name, you know, we're working in a part of the world where we've got sites, let's say, name sites. Instead of having to write down the site name and potentially having somebody misspell it, you just pick it off a list and it's site four, right? But they don't have to know that it's site four. That's in the backend. The computer's going to take care of knowing that it's site four and knowing that it's site, you know, 3,000 in four. It doesn't matter.
00:37:09
Speaker
It gives you the name that you can read and you can pick the right one off the list. That's the standardization part. You and I both go out in the field and we both fill out our paper forms and you're a good speller and I'm a bad speller and you spell the name right and I spell it wrong and somebody else takes it. We hire some temp.
00:37:28
Speaker
to type in all our paper forms and they just do a verbatim. Now, if you want to search for the name of the site, they'll only get the ones that you spelled because you spelled correctly, that you spelled out that you spelled correctly and they'll get all the ones that I did won't show up because I misspelled them consistently. Well, you can standardize that through database collection.
00:37:48
Speaker
through the collection of data with the database backend by presenting just the right answers to the data collectors, the right possible answers. So nobody's going to do a typo. And that is an enormous benefit going forward. So I just wanted to put those two things out, the data integrity and standardization, and they're linked, they're joined at the hips.
00:38:10
Speaker
But they're really important for the data back out. They improve the data in so that the data out is also improved.
00:38:19
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That's an excellent point, too, because that's one of the things we were working on at Codify was creating kind of a standard, not a standard site form for the United States, and I want people to freak out. They love their site forms and their particular layouts in different states. However, a standard input method for sites, and the way you do that is with a relational database. So if I tell the database I'm working in Nevada, or I tell the database I'm working in California,
00:38:47
Speaker
The tables that the front end I record with records into are for those particular state systems. So when I export as those site forms, they look like they're supposed to look. But the simple fact is you can have the same
00:39:02
Speaker
type of field on 50 different site forms from 50 different states, it's the same data that you're entering in, but they all call it something different. So, you know, having that standard entry format is a way to go. Now that's how we were trying to think of Codify, and I don't know if they're still doing that because I've been with them since May. So I don't know if they're still doing that. However, DINA, the Digital Index of North American Archaeology,
00:39:25
Speaker
They are doing sort of the same thing, but the other direction. They're standardizing the way information comes to them, basically. So they're creating a database of existing things. And instead of having everybody enter something into a standard format,
00:39:41
Speaker
Because that's not what they're doing. Nobody's entering information into DINA like that. DINA is going to different states and getting their site information. They'll take a look at one of their site forms and say, okay, this field on your form maps to this place in our database. This one maps to this place. So once they figure out that mapping, they can suck in a state's entire database.
00:40:01
Speaker
into theirs and now it's in their standardized database and that's again like you said another powerful feature of databases is to be able to have Standardization like that different terms that mean the same thing in the same table So when somebody queries it no matter where they're from they get the same information and that's what they're trying to do So with codify it was we were trying to put everything in in a standard way and with Dina They're trying to accept everything in a standard way
00:40:25
Speaker
That makes any sense. No, it totally makes sense. And then there's also the other bit is that especially those of us who work in the old world, I don't know how much it applies in the new world, but I'm sure it applies quite a bit as well. Multiple different spellings for things and multiple different languages and texts.
00:40:43
Speaker
for, let's say, site names, right? So I work in the Middle East, so I might have a French transliteration and an English transliteration. I definitely have the local Arabic spelling of a site. And all of those, you know, if people were to write them in just as text,
00:41:04
Speaker
There's no correlating between them. You would have to know that the French is C-H and the English is S-H and actually the Germans, because they're very pedantic about it, are doing it as an S hot check. And good for them. And then the locals are writing out with the Sheen character, which is in a totally different script.
00:41:29
Speaker
So you have the ability then if you're dealing with data as data of doing translation tables too. So I could reference a site by its ID and we can spit it out the other end in the Arabic or the German or the French or the English spellings.
00:41:45
Speaker
like that and it doesn't matter. The recipient then can see it in their own best format as well. So, you know, there's so many opportunities to hear that I don't see any downside at all to any archeologist
00:42:01
Speaker
I don't see any downside that would prevent any archeologist from going to a database driven system.
Digital Tools and Applications
00:42:09
Speaker
The only one is that it's quicker to convert your existing Word documents to Word documents that you can put on your tablet or if you go a little bit farther to turn it into a PDF with fillable fields. But beyond that, you're really, really hamping yourself down the line when it comes to data analysis.
00:42:29
Speaker
And I think we've, as a field, turned the corner now. I think that we're far enough along that we really have to think digital first for all its major advantages. Yeah, absolutely. So, all right. Well, we are going to go a little long on this segment because I only need a few minutes for my app of the day, so I think we can cut into that a little bit. Yeah, me too. Yeah, okay. So, because one of the things I, you know, we're not going to get to everything we want to talk about here, but one of the things I do want to mention right here near the end is
00:42:59
Speaker
What's available for you to use now? So if you've come this far, what's available now? And I will say there are a number of companies out there that are really trying to do the right thing here. They know that this is a problem. They're trying to solve it. And I applaud them for that. And I wish that there was a solution for them so they didn't have to spend, create a position for app developer.
00:43:20
Speaker
How many companies now have an app developer on staff? Really, it's not even an app developer, more likely. It's a person who has those skills, and now that's what they're doing. That used to be the GIS department. I knew people who would study GIS, and then they'd do a little bit in the department, and now they're part of the GIS department, and they're not archaeologists anymore. I've seen that happen organically a number of times, but I think that's happening with app development now.
00:43:42
Speaker
You can learn that on the side, and then you're like, oh, hey, we should be doing this, and I'm gonna kinda do this on the side, and then it kinda becomes your job with that company. A lot of big companies are trying to solve their own problems, and they're the ones that are,
00:43:54
Speaker
I don't want to say doing it right, but probably doing it for a longer term sustainable way is they're building a database and then they're building a way to interface that database in the field. That's the nice thing about FileMaker, if you're using FileMaker, you can use FileMaker Go on a tablet, on an Apple tablet, an iPad.
00:44:12
Speaker
And FileMaker Go is the graphical interface to the database that you're using. Okay, so that's actually how Codify works. No, that's not a secret to anybody. Michael will show you the back end if you ask him. Codify is built on FileMaker and the interface that you see is the graphical interface that FileMaker
00:44:31
Speaker
allows you to do, then you download that FileMaker Go app, you access the database, and a lot of people are doing that, and a lot of programs, a lot of academic stuff across the country, they all kind of go to FileMaker because it's a really good, easy to use database, and then they build this interface on the front end for them to use.
00:44:49
Speaker
So that's what's available is a database application like FileMaker. You can do something like I've used in the past because I didn't actually know how to use FileMaker at the time, which was TapForms. And that's really just manipulating that front end part of it. The database is happening behind the scenes with TapForms. And there's MementoDB for Android. And there's, God, I can think of a few of them off the top of my head. There's a bunch of form creation apps. TapForms, I mentioned because
00:45:15
Speaker
It's commonly cited as the number one form creation application for iOS devices. It doesn't work on Android. And they've been around for a while. But TapForms is pretty cheap. It's like nine bucks, I think, on the App Store, maybe a little more. And you can create your own forms on TapForms. And that information exports as a table of data that you can do stuff with if you know how to do that.
00:45:40
Speaker
That's what I do. I use that table of data to bring that into a database if I need to, or just bring it into a Word document with this merge form that I created. And then it creates that Word document for me, which I can error check, and then send off as a PDF and I'm done. Fill all the requirements.
00:45:57
Speaker
Of course, one of the other ones is Codify, which we've talked about extensively. We've interviewed Michael Ashley on here about Codify on the Architect podcast a long time ago and talked about it pretty extensively. Codify, I'll be honest, I don't really know what they're doing right now because they've taken most of their website down and they just want you to call them. I think they're doing like
00:46:16
Speaker
Custom solutions for people don't quote me on that because there's nothing saying what they're actually doing on the website So I don't really know But I know what they were doing which was basically leading in that direction where you would talk to them they do this data audition which you can apply for on their website at codify.com and they will go over your system and find out what your particular needs are and then take their system and craft it to work with those needs and you'll pay them, you know, whatever that cost to do that and
00:46:43
Speaker
I don't know what the costs are. I don't know if there's ongoing costs or if it's a one and done. I don't know what any of their structure is right now because none of that's on their website anymore. That's Codify. I'm going to chime in right here between these two modes of FileMaker, TapForms, and Codify. FileMaker and TapForms on the one side and Codify on the other side is what I've seen a lot of in academic archaeology.
00:47:05
Speaker
where either you go with a very generic system and you try to craft something out of it that's going to work for your particular project, or you go with something that's more directed, that's more closely targeted to the archaeological community, in this case, Codify, which is very much targeted toward the archaeological community.
00:47:27
Speaker
and have somebody else make relatively minor adjustments to their system in order to work with your project. So those have been the two basic modalities, but you know, I'm thinking you said tap forms is about 10 bucks. If you're not
00:47:42
Speaker
collecting data digitally yet, do yourself a favor and just download that and play with it a bit. It might serve your needs fairly simply if you find that it's limited in some way or you find that you need to go a little beyond and you need a little extra assistance in getting up to speed. You're only out 10 bucks. What's your time worth?
00:48:04
Speaker
Then you can look up to other kinds of products that are going to be more crafted by somebody else for you, which is going to be more expensive, obviously. But again, what's your time worth? What is a normal archaeological project cost? I was talking to a friend of mine and he was telling me that his relatively minor excavations in Turkey cost a quarter million dollars a season.
00:48:31
Speaker
That was exactly my reaction, my God. That $10 or the $1,000 that it might be to have somebody else take that $10 product and make it work for you, or I don't know what Codify's price structure is like, so I can't comment on that.
00:48:49
Speaker
is still just a fraction of that overall operating budget. But again, if you're collecting the data properly and you're collecting it as data digitally at the start, it's going to make all that analysis and all that publication down the road so much simpler for you. It's going to save you hundreds, thousands of hours years down the road. Maybe not in the CRM field where you're not dealing with things generally over the course of decades, but certainly if you're doing it
00:49:17
Speaker
on an academic project where you're going year after year, year after year, you know, group of undergrads after group of grad students to the same place, it's going to pay off down the way. You owe it to yourself, you owe it to your project, you owe it to other archaeologists and everybody else that's interested in that data, which frankly is why we're doing the work, to do it right from the get-go. So, you know, take a look at that.
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't really going to mention this, but since you kind of brought it up and threw out some crazy wild numbers, I will mention it. I've been kind of off and on for the last, I guess, five or six years. Again, I don't really promote this very much as a service, but I just did one a month and a half ago for a company that found me online at DigTech, what the hell is my website? DigTech-LLC.com.
00:50:08
Speaker
I have a thing on there where you can, I build TAP forms for people. I have a lot of stuff already built that I'll sell you, but if you want some specific stuff, and it's only $75 an hour, and I can do your standard one page form in that hour and create a Word merge document for you.
00:50:24
Speaker
I'll tell you what, if you want to go digital site recording and you have no other options right now and maybe you even bought some iPads or you want to buy some iPads or you can use them on your phone, your iOS device or whatever, 75 bucks for a form like the one I built for this company just about a couple months ago was a shovel testing form. I already had a shovel testing form, but I customized it a little bit for them. They had some extra fields they wanted in there.
00:50:46
Speaker
and sold it to him. It was a straight $75 because it was one hour worth of work. And I'll tell you what, if you've ever manually entered shovel testing data, then you know what it's like to shove a pencil in your eye because it's terrible. And that's all.
00:51:01
Speaker
And there are no forms for shovel testing. I mean, people create forms to collect the data, but there's no like state forms for it. So it really just goes in as a table in your report. So you're actually just trying to collect data about shovel test. Why not start that way? Why not start with data? And that's what I created for them with TapForms was
00:51:17
Speaker
a way to just collect the data, and now it's a simple one-button export, and their table's done. Their table is completely finished. They can drop that right of the report. I'm just going to say this for our listeners, in case you're wondering, that was not a setup. I did not.
00:51:32
Speaker
I was going to suggest doing this, but take that as proof of concept. It's money well spent if you're thinking about your data collection upfront and early, and then also it's still probably money well spent if you realize that you're a little at sea to get an expert to help you.
00:51:53
Speaker
Okay, well, let's push through this last bit here real quick so we can get to our app of the day. The last two, and there really is only one more thing to mention, which is WildNote, but we mentioned FileMaker. I want to just stress just because I don't, and maybe WildNote is the same thing, but I can't say that because I don't really know. But when we say FileMaker and then we say Codify, just keep in mind that when you get Codify, you're actually getting FileMaker as well. Because FileMaker is like,
00:52:20
Speaker
It's like saying I use metal to build a car or something like that. It's just the tool used to build Codify. And it's the same thing with TapForms. I could actually call the forms I create with TapForms something else if I wanted to. And I'm using TapForms as my construction tool. That's what Codify is. So if you want to know what the backend of that is, you can't look at it because it's locked down. I mean, he'll show you, but if you just get it, you can't see it. Because that's kind of proprietary information as well.
00:52:46
Speaker
is the way somebody used that to construct what you're seeing, but that's what Codify is. And I'm only mentioning that because I don't know what WildMaker's WildNote is built on. And we've interviewed WildNote before on this podcast, so I'll try to link to that in the show notes. But WildNote is another one of those, it's another form creation service, and theirs is a little bit different where you create the forms essentially in their online interface on a browser on your computer, or you download the forms they already have. They have a number of forms that are ready to go.
00:53:16
Speaker
and you basically create your projects and things like that ahead of time. Now, my information's five years, five months old, so things could have changed rapidly in this space, but take that with a grain of
Selecting Digital Tools
00:53:27
Speaker
salt. Yeah, they were under heavy development when you talked about them.
00:53:31
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, everything's fluctuating. So who knows what they're doing right now. But essentially it was their built in forms or you could create your own with their own fields to build them all in and then basically sync your tablet to that online account that you have. And now you can go use those forms in the field. So it's kind of a
00:53:48
Speaker
The way I see it is it's kind of a hybrid between Tapforms and Codify, essentially, is it's doing that thing. The biggest difference with this one, which is why I really like what they're doing, because this is the solution I've been looking for. I feel like my entire archaeological career.
00:54:03
Speaker
is it's something you can buy that's off the shelf. You can just, if you already have the tablet, and I think they might even be into tablet rentals, but I'm not really sure, but if you already have the tablet, you basically just download the app, sign up for their service, pay a monthly fee that's ridiculously cheap right now, and you're done. You know, you pay it for it by the month for as long as you need it. If you only need it for this month, then you use it, and then you get rid of it. If you don't work over the winter, you don't have to pay for it over the winter, so. That's nice.
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah, and you get all your data out and you're done. You don't have to worry about it. But even if you were paying for it, I want to say it was like 25 or 30 bucks a month when I looked at it last. I don't know what it is now, but that was ridiculously cheap. When you're looking at saving potentially hundreds of hours, at least dozens of hours in the office, and if you calculate that out by the $50 to $100 an hour billable rate that it takes somebody to type all that stuff up,
00:55:00
Speaker
I mean, you're saving a ton of money, and it's a no-brainer to pay that much money to get that kind of service. Anyway, hopefully there will be more from WildNote in the future, and hopefully Codify, we can get more information from them in the future as well. I don't know if their website is under construction or what they're doing, but I look forward to finding out more about what they're doing in the future.
00:55:24
Speaker
Anyway, I think that's all we have time for. Paul, do you got anything, any final remarks on databases or anything you want to mention before we close this out? Yeah. The one last thing, and I'm not going to go into this because it's another full episode probably, is that we've been talking about textual data here, numbers and text. And that's just one kind of data. Archaeologists, again, we're visual. We've been taking pictures and doing drawings of our data ever since archaeology has been archaeology.
00:55:52
Speaker
And we have all sorts of new ways of incorporating those as well as 3D and different kinds of sensor data on down the road, different non-textual data into our reports, into our data collection routines. And I think that the digital recording really opens up the doors to that in ways that hadn't been opened before. So, you know, I'm just going to leave that hanging out there is that, you know, think big.
00:56:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And as you were saying that I created another episode idea for us and I think I actually could have created two or three photographs in the field. We could spend an entire episode talking about how to take and catalog your photographs. It might be the same thing as a codify or wild note or tap forms or something like that.
00:56:40
Speaker
But they're treated a little differently, and there's reasons for that that you need to understand and be aware of. Because some of those applications, when you take pictures in them versus importing pictures into them, will actually change your photograph in ways that you may not be aware and you may not appreciate. So, you know, they change the metadata, basically, is what they do. Same thing like when you upload a photo to Facebook. It used to include the location information, and now it only includes that if you tell it to.
00:57:04
Speaker
Because in the early days of Facebook, pedophiles were just looking at the locations of photos and going to houses with children with photos. And that actually happened. So they no longer do that unless you tell it, I want my location to be there. So anyway, that's a whole other topic. We're going to take a break real quick and then come back with our app of the day segment. I'm going to run an ad for my DigTech concierge service, which is basically
00:57:31
Speaker
If you have all these questions, I basically set this up so I can be on retainer for you, which I've noticed people don't want to just talk for a minute. They want to talk every time something new comes out. They want to talk every time something, you know, some newfangled thing or they have an iOS update. They're not sure if they should do it. It will break all their apps. They have a computer update. They're not sure if they should do it. I get phone calls and emails from people all the time. I figured I'd set up a yearly service where you basically hire me for the year and you can call me 24 hours a day. Well, maybe not 24 hours a day, but most of the time.
00:58:00
Speaker
throughout the year, and then I can help you through your tech emergencies. So listen to this ad for my Dig Tech Concierge service, especially with the new year starting up. You can start it off right with high quality tech information. Let me go through the pain of all that stuff so you don't have to. All right, we'll be back in a minute with our app of the day segment.
00:58:22
Speaker
Hey podcast listeners, do you find yourself wondering what the latest tablet or smartphone could do for your business? Wonder what GPS to pair with your device? Just trying to figure out how to go digital in the field without breaking the bank and or making a bad investment? Or did you find a technology company to work with but just aren't sure the questions you need to ask during the initial conversation? Well, you're not alone. There are literally thousands of tech combinations out there and it can be really tough finding the right one for your business and your workflow.
00:58:45
Speaker
My name is Chris Webster and I've been working in CRM since 2005 and I've been a tech enthusiast my entire life. I spend my time trying to figure out how to make archaeology more efficient both technologically and financially. No one is going to give you a big pile of money to do whatever you want with, so you have to make the most of what you have. The right gear can mean the difference between zero margins on that next project
00:59:03
Speaker
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00:59:24
Speaker
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App of the Day Segment
00:59:45
Speaker
That's digtech dash LLC dot com slash tech dash concierge.
00:59:50
Speaker
and concierge is C-O-N-C-I-E-R-G-E to get going and go digital today. Call us before you make any decisions. We've been there before.
01:00:10
Speaker
Okay, so I've got one that I just downloaded last week. I was looking around to see if there's something that was interesting to me and this one actually I could see having some archaeological use. It's called sea level visual clinometer. Sea level, it's upon S-E-E level.
01:00:26
Speaker
All one word. It's made by App Maker, which is a one man shop from Sweden. It's 99 cents. It's iOS only. Basically, what it is, it's a handheld site level.
01:00:43
Speaker
Nice. In the field, I've actually used real sight levels, physical with a spirit level inside and some mirrors and a low-level telescope.
01:00:58
Speaker
I used them in Yemen when I was doing my dissertation research to try to get a sense. Where we were doing research, where I was doing my survey, is basically a canyon. Most of the sites are down on the bottom of the canyon, but there's some that are up on a ledge partway up. I'd go up and I'd use it to see if the ledge across the way was the same height.
01:01:18
Speaker
I can also take a protractor, literally a plastic protractor and take that site level and measure an angle from when I was standing up on top of a site on that ledge down to the ground to get
01:01:34
Speaker
an estimate of the height. I'd do a little bit of trig, pull out my pocket calculator because that's what we had at the time. We didn't have the cell phones. I'd do a little bit of trig quickly to find out what the elevation was of the site above the canyon floor. This is interesting to me in that it basically does the same stuff without having to pull out your calculator.
01:01:56
Speaker
I'm opening up the app right now. It's got a couple different modes. You can use it to tell, for example, the angle obviously of the inclination or declination from horizontal.
01:02:11
Speaker
of whatever it is that you're measuring which is how exactly I use the site level when I was in the field. But you can also use it. So you open it up and there are clinometer level, distance meter and height meter. So basically it's offering to help you do that little bit of mathematics that you would do on the, that I used to do on the handheld calculator. Clinometer will just give me the angle.
01:02:40
Speaker
level will give me something that's level. Basically, it's like a bullseye spirit level. You can lay it on the surface. It'll tell you if something's level or not. That's not particularly useful to me, not in an archaeological sense. Distance meter. If I have something off in the distance that's a known height,
01:03:00
Speaker
I can measure it here in the app and it uses the camera and so I can measure across and I can freeze it and put in the height of the object. Say I know my buddy is six foot tall and he's standing across there and I can use that then to get the distance between me and him. So that's potentially useful.
01:03:21
Speaker
and height meter does the opposite. Say I know the distance, I can use it to get the height of something. And so that would have been very much like I was using the kleminometer in the field too. If I want to know how high that little fortress was up on the scree slope of the canyon walls,
01:03:40
Speaker
I can guesstimate it or I can maybe guesstimate it with a little more accuracy using a tool like this. It's not the most intuitive interface. It has a guide. That's what it's called here on the menu, a guide explain how to use it, but it's not a whole lot of help.
01:04:02
Speaker
So it's really one of those things I think that you have to play with a bit just to see how you use it. It's not a very deep app. It doesn't try to do a whole million different things. It does again, you know, the clinometer, which is just basically measuring the angle between horizontal and whatever up or down.
01:04:18
Speaker
the level which is just spirit level like any of the millions of other spirit levels you've seen on iOS devices and then the distance meter and height meter which are the opposite of each other but those two again are potentially useful if you don't have other tools. The last time I was in the field actually when I did the majority of my dissertation field work was in 99 and I did have GPS but it took a long time to lock on and we still had the
01:04:49
Speaker
What was it? Differential. What's it called? No, not differential. Um, selective variability, uh, selective. Yeah. Was that the name of it? I don't know. Something like that.
01:05:00
Speaker
Yeah, I'm drawing a blank at the moment. But basically, what it meant was that the military was consciously degrading the signal in a random way. Oh, right. So we couldn't, selective availability, that was it. So the military was degrading the signal. So it was reasonably good for horizontal differences, but it was terrible for height. And even for horizontal, it wasn't all that great. But if you average the measurement over a long time,
01:05:27
Speaker
Anyhow, I was using the handheld clinometer because I didn't have any other good tools for telling elevation. Nowadays, I probably would, even with the GPS in my phone. But if I were stuck in a situation that I didn't have good GPS reception or I wanted another check on the GPS for $0.99, it's worth a look, I think.
01:05:52
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, I could see, especially for the clinometer, I mean a lot of us have this on our compass, but I could see in the age of digital information like we just talked, a lot of times when you're like shovel testing or something, you'll write off a shovel test for various reasons. One of those could be slope. And if you wanted to add
01:06:11
Speaker
a visual thing, like if you're recording digitally, like in that shovel test form that I created for that company that I mentioned in the last segment, I always include on my forms because photographs are cheap these days. You can take them and not use them. You don't have to write down every single photograph in the photograph log like we do, you know, with like film and things like that.
01:06:30
Speaker
But if you use this app to show, to prove visually that the slope is too high, and that's why you're writing this off, you can screenshot that once you have that in the picture and then add that to the record. And then that can be like, oh, visually, yeah, that slope was too high. You know, I can see that rather than just writing it down. And if somebody wanted to verify that, they'd have to go to a topo map or something.
01:06:52
Speaker
and find that. And in similar vein, a lot of times we talk about the slope on a site recording out here in Nevada. I mean, it's called the Basin and Range System for a reason, because there's a lot of mountain ranges. And sometimes we want to represent that. And showing
01:07:08
Speaker
Just taking a picture doesn't often show you what the slope is, because maybe it's not at the right angle to really get that perspective down. But if you had something that not only has that picture in the background, but then has the visual clinometer on the front, and then screenshot that by using on an iPad, it's the hold button.
01:07:26
Speaker
Yeah, do the screenshot and then this is pretty simple. It's got, you know, across the top, it'll tell you the the angle and there's a little grid down the reticle down the right hand side and a bullseye in the middle. So you could absolutely take a level it out, take a screenshot while you're aiming down that hill up that hill. And it'll tell you right at the top what the what the angle of the slope is. And, you know, you've got your documentation right there set.
01:07:53
Speaker
It's pretty cool. Yeah, I like it. So, okay. Well, uh, that's pretty awesome. The link to that will be in the show notes. Um, so I've got one that's also one 99, although I think I got it for free on like a deal sometime. Um, but, uh, cause I do not remember paying for this. However, and, and coincidentally enough, I don't know who's doing the, who, why this is Paul and I didn't coordinate this, but mine is from like an independent app developer as well.
01:08:17
Speaker
named Dennis Donner, and he's out of Germany. He just makes apps. You go to the website page, and it's basically his resume, and you click on the app on that page, and it takes you right back to the app store. So not a lot of information. However, the app I've got is called Pinpoints, and if you're looking for it on the app store, it's just Pinpoints, one word. And then it says flight driving distance calculator. Now,
01:08:40
Speaker
At first I saw this and I'm like, what the hell would I use this for when I'm just going to use like maps or ways or something like that? And then I really saw the, I guess, a utility of it for the driving directions. For the flying one, I mean, any real pilot is going to use ForeFlight or something else that's a little more sophisticated. They're probably not going to use this for flying distance calculators unless you're really curious what the bird's eye distance is from one point to the next. It will tell you that.
01:09:06
Speaker
But where I see this coming in handy is as serum archaeologists, we drive across the country a disturbingly high amount of times. Like one year I drove all the way across the country from Florida to Seattle three times. And that was ridiculous. And often what I'll do, so I can tell someone when I'm going to be there, and this changes the longer your drive, the more time you really have to add to the realistic estimation of time because you're going to stop for gas, you're going to stop for food, whatever.
01:09:36
Speaker
I'll tell somebody if I'm driving a long distance, you know, well, it says I'll be there at this time. Now, if it's going to be a multi-day trip, I might actually want to know the individual steps in between. So with pinpoints, you can enter in an entire route and the really neat kind of
01:09:51
Speaker
thing that I notice that this does that not anything else does like if I enter in a whole route in say Waze and I tell Waze or Apple Maps or Google Maps that I'm going from here to New York City and it's gonna give me that distance and then tomorrow when I wake up I punch in okay now I'm gonna be from this new here to New York City and then the next day I'm gonna do it again and I have to do the route over again every single time.
01:10:12
Speaker
But if I know where I'm gonna stay for the night, and let's say I've got my route set up and I know where I'm gonna stay, I can enter in all these major end of the day points and it will tell me the distance in time. Well, it'll tell me the distance and it'll show me the route for each one of those legs of the trip. And I can save that entire route as the whole thing. But the other really cool thing is, each one of those legs, it says open in maps.
01:10:37
Speaker
So if I just go to that route, and I know I'm on day two, because I know where the heck I'm at, I can just go to day two, click open in maps, and then it opens right up in Apple Maps, the route that I'm going to drive for the day. I don't have to program in the whole thing, I just have today's route programmed in.
01:10:54
Speaker
and it's done automatically. And I think that's pretty slick. I haven't seen another mapping program that does that as efficiently. Now I know with Google Maps, you can set up a route and that has multiple points. But if you get out of that and you don't save it or you can't save it, then it's gone. With this, it's saved in a completely different application. And then when you're ready to use the map,
01:11:14
Speaker
You just click on that segment and say, okay, I'm ready to drive this segment or walk this segment. And it opens in Apple maps and your route is still saved in, uh, in pinpoints with the total distance and all that stuff, plus the individual route distances. So, um, I thought that was pretty neat. Otherwise it's a pretty basic app and that's the only utility I can see using it for is doing multi-point routes that are probably multi-day. So you don't have to program it in every day and you can visually see every single day what you have to do. Like today's going to be a 700 mile day or something like that, you know?
01:11:44
Speaker
And you can just know that and go right to the map without programming it in. And it might save you some stress on what's usually stressful trip anyway. So that's why I said it was pretty quick. It's pretty basic. I'm not sure it's worth 199. If you drive a lot and you have multiple stops all the time, then this might be something that's good information for you. Especially serial archaeologists, like I said, that are constantly traveling from one job to the next might take several days to get there. This could be a good indication of what you have to do every day for driving.
Listener Engagement and Outro
01:12:13
Speaker
I've got a question for you then about this. Really more closely tied to archaeology. Would this be useful in any way if you're walking transects?
01:12:23
Speaker
Maybe, but I don't know if it's, because you can zoom in on the map and drop a pin rather than punch in an address. So it could be useful in showing you, like if you didn't have the GIS up for some reason or whatever, but you knew where the boundaries were of your sewer area, maybe if you're just curious on your own. I couldn't see the company or crew chief really using this because somebody's going to have like a tremble or something out there and they're going to know the exact numbers. But if you just wanted to know for your own edification, like, okay, I'm going to start here.
01:12:52
Speaker
And I think we're going to walk up to there and then back down to here, and then you can set in those waypoints. Yeah, in a planning sense, not necessarily in a recording sense. No, no, no, for sure. But it would sell you for your own peace of mind, oh, crap, we're going to walk like nine miles today. And we're probably going to walk this much before lunch, and this is probably where we'll stop. If you have those individual segments listed out, that'd be pretty cool, actually. So it's a good idea. Yeah, so that's it for that. That's all I have for that one.
01:13:20
Speaker
Uh, if you've got any app suggestions or things that you use, please let us know, chris at archaeology podcast network, uh, dot com, or you can tweet at art pod net or I'm at archaeo webby and Paul, you are at I'm at, uh, let's see. My Twitter handle is at Lugal L U G A L. And my email is Paul at Lugal dot com.
01:13:41
Speaker
There you go. So contact us. Let us know what you think about the apps we suggest and tell us about any apps that you love that you'd like to see us review on the app store so other people can use it, especially digital site recording apps and things that have to do with that. I'm curious to see what people are using out there and what their solutions are. So I think that's all I have. Thanks for joining us, Paul. Thanks, Chris. And we'll see you guys next time. See you. Bye.
01:14:10
Speaker
That's it for another episode of the archaeotech podcast. Links to some of the items mentioned on the show are in the show notes for this podcast, which can be found at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeotech. If you like the show and want to comment, please do. You can leave comments about this or any other episode on the website or on the iTunes page for this episode.
01:14:30
Speaker
You can also email us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com or use the contact form on the podcast webpage. If you'd like us to answer a question on a future episode, email us. Use the contact form on the website or tweet your questions with the hashtag archaeotech or tag at arcpodnet in your tweet. Please share the link to this show wherever you saw it. If you'd like to subscribe to this podcast, you can do so on iTunes or on Stitcher Radio. You can also type the name of the podcast into your favorite podcasting app and subscribe that way.
01:14:57
Speaker
Don't forget to go over to iTunes and leave a review of the show. It helps us get noticed so more people can find our podcast and benefit from the content. Also, send us show suggestions and interview suggestions. We want this to be a resource for field technicians everywhere and we want to know what you want to know about.
01:15:14
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle 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.
01:15:33
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to arcpotnet.com slash members for more info.