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A look back at eight years of ArchaeoTech - Ep 200
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Take a walk down memory lane with this episode of the ArchaeoTech Podcast. Hear clips from the different hosts and eras of the show over the past eight years. Also, discover many of the topics we’ve discussed and the variety of guests we’ve had. Here’s to another 200 episodes.
Episodes Featured in this Compilation
- Stu Eve and L-P Archaeology - Episode 1
- Digital Public Archaeology - Episode 2
- Field Technologies Inc - Episode 8
- iPads in the Field - Episode 13
- Field Power - Episode 16
- Dr. Michael Ashley and Digital Archaeology - Episode 24
- Peter Wigand and Climate Change, Erosion, and Impacts to People - Episode 39
- Holiday Gift Guide - Episode 42
- What's New With Apple - WWDC17 - Episode 56
- Digital Field Recording with Wildnote - Episode 58
- New People and Old Apps - Episode 61
- Remote Working in Archaeology? - Episode 64
- Heritage Chat Bots (To Bot or Not?) - Ep94
- Reconstructing a Lost Town with Edward Gonzalez-Tennant - Ep 104
- LithodomosVR and a Virtual Reality Update - Ep 108
- Jamaican Archaeology with Zach Beier - Ep 113
- Working Remotely During The Zombie Apocalypse - Ep 124
See the rest at https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/200
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
ArchPodNet
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- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
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Transcript
200th Episode Celebration
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 200. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today's a compilation episode where we look back at the past eight years and 200 episodes. Enjoy this trip down memory lane with Archaeotech. Let's get to it. You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 1. On today's
Introducing ARK: The Web-Based System
00:00:37
Speaker
show, Doug and Russell talked to Stu Eve of LP Archaeology. Visit the show's website at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeotech. Now on to the show. Good morning, everyone. I'm here with Russell.
00:00:55
Speaker
And we are talking with Stu Eve, who is from LP Archaeology, and he's going to be talking to us about ARK. Just to kick this off, Stu, can you tell us what ARK is? Sure. Well, ARK stands for the Archaeological Recording Kit. So I guess at its heart, it's really a database system, which has a web-based front end, which allows archaeologists to record information. Suppose that's the sort of system there is actually quite an important thing.
00:01:23
Speaker
And have you had people take Arc, modify it, make plugins or anything, or put back into it? We haven't directly had that in terms of people saying, I've got a piece of code that I want to commit back. But we have had a lot of projects where they've said, hey, we want this particular thing. And,
The Evolution of ARK
00:01:42
Speaker
you know, we've had a go at coding it and then, you know, we would come in and basically take that code and just clean it up a little bit before we put it back in. There's been a...
00:01:50
Speaker
Have fun. That's amazing. I take it when you guys were learning to code, you had a goal in mind or was this completely just play? You decided you wanted to play around with this stuff and then eventually started developing stuff like Arc or when you started learning, did you say, all right, we need to do this database platform and what do we need to learn? How was that process?
00:02:15
Speaker
If you want the honest answer, I did some stuff on Access back in the day. And then we got a server and we thought, oh, well, what would be great is if we could do this on the web, because then we would be able to share this stuff with everyone and all the collaborators on the project could log in and it would be cool. How do we do that? We kind of looked around a bit at some stuff, started just typing some HTML. And then Guy came up one day and said, oh, I found this thing called PHP.
00:02:45
Speaker
I've been playing around with it. What do you think? I had a look and I was like, oh, okay, that sounds quite cool. And that was basically completely no planning whatsoever. Just, um, just, you know, went from there and, and which is why it's taken whatever 14 years to get to where it is.
ARK's Business Model
00:03:01
Speaker
Wow. So you kind of run a bit like red hat. And so for listeners, you might not know red hat is sort of a development or in butu, which are Linux. So similar to windows or.
00:03:15
Speaker
Mac but they're basically companies that give away all their software for free but then charge for development or sort of other services.
00:03:25
Speaker
So that's a somewhat similar to how you guys run. Is that correct? That's exactly right. Yeah. So, I mean, basically you should be able to download it and just use it. If you've got someone who knows how to install things on a server, basically, I'm not saying that anyone can do it. You do need someone who knows how to install Apache and install MySQL, which is very easy to follow the instructions to do that. Yeah. And then, and then if you've got something a bit more, a bit more fancy, you want, I mean, there's lots of documentation online about Arc. There's
Using ARK in Projects
00:03:53
Speaker
a.
00:03:53
Speaker
how to guides and there's how to do this, how to fill in these particular things, how to configure these files and everything. But if you wanted to do something beyond that, or if you're not really completely tech savvy, then we can come and help. You can choose to buy as much or as little of that as you want. Brilliant. Well, with that, I think we'll probably end this part of the podcast. Stuart, thank you for being on. It was a pleasure and great to hear about Arc.
00:04:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast.
Journey into Digital Public Archaeology
00:04:29
Speaker
I'm your host, Russell Ali Williams. Today on the show, my co-host, Doug Rocks McQueen, and I will talk to Lorna Richardson, a digital public archaeologist from the United Kingdom, about her research and work with outreach projects like the Day of Archaeology blogging event and much, much more.
00:04:48
Speaker
My background originally for my undergraduate degree many, many years ago, bearing in mind I'm very old, was in archaeology. I then went into community work in the charitable sector, never touched or was interested in computers whatsoever until the mid 2000s.
00:05:07
Speaker
and started to get into website stuff then, but it was only when I started working for LP Archaeology who are a digitally focused archaeological, commercial archaeological organisation in East London that I actually got completely and utterly obsessed by public archaeology and the internet really. So I'm looking at public archaeology being a huge, all-embracing umbrella term for how archaeologists communicate with the public.
00:05:37
Speaker
by whatever means. So looking at public archaeology in the UK specifically. And within that, my research focused on four sort of broad brush organisational areas where archaeologists communicate online with the public, the amorphous general public in universities, HLF projects. So I was looking at these four areas. So looking at community archaeology groups.
00:06:05
Speaker
universities, commercial archaeology organizations and HLF projects, and looking at the sort of formats of communications that they were using and sharing online, why they were doing it, how they were doing it, and then looking at more nuanced things that they were doing, like were organizations subject to social media use policies within their organizations? Did this prevent
Impact of Online Communication in Archaeology
00:06:30
Speaker
them communicating with the public any information about the work that they were doing?
00:06:35
Speaker
looking at concepts of things like archaeological expertise and how that's presented online, looking at how you would promote yourself as an archaeologist and how the anonymity of the internet supplies identity or not for you as a professional archaeologist and how you can up or down that and how that works with the concept of authority and archaeological authority. I looked at crowdsourcing, crowdfunding,
00:07:04
Speaker
how we were using internet technologies to do things like the day of archeology. So looking at large crowdsourced projects. Welcome to the Arqutech podcast, episode eight for January 29th, 2014. I'm your host, Russell Allie Willems. Today on the show, Chris Webster and I talk with Chris Cameron of Field Technologies Incorporated. Hi, good to be here. Hey, me too, good to be here.
00:07:31
Speaker
We're a technology company. We were founded by archaeologists for archaeologists. We provide technical solutions to situations in the field. And the whole idea is to let archaeologists do more digging and less paperwork. Our main product is a phase one shovel testing app called Archeogen. Basically what it does is it replaces your shovel test form on the front end. It's really designed to be productivity neutral in the field, though we have had positive feedback from people so far.
00:08:01
Speaker
And the real, real values on the backend, because all of your data will be compiled together from everybody. You get nightly updates and all of your data comes in a spreadsheet format in Excel, which means that it's searchable, sortable, whatever. But Excel also plays really well with other software. So you can import it to ArcGIS or, you know, just plopping into Google maps, whatever you feel like. You're kind of using the digital advantage to remove kind of the
00:08:30
Speaker
transcription back in that a lot of us have to do and get back from the field with, you know, a big sheaf of grubby shovel test forms. Yes. So Chris, I had a question for you about a little bit of the design process with your application. Is this something that you went and just kind of said, what's my dream application being an archaeologist out in the field? Or did you test it out with users? Have you gotten feedback on people using it across the different places you mean and you've sold the app to? I and another guy who had
00:09:01
Speaker
originally been in archaeology but then ended up going back to graduate school for database management was my original co-founder. He unfortunately decided to go a different way so we have a different pool of ownership now but the the original idea was some years ago when we had worked together we had said this would be great if we had uh back then a PDA or whatnot this was you know back in the days before tablets.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, one around here somewhere. Yeah, maybe in a museum. The technology caught up and the fact that the GPS in the Apple products because it uses both GLONASS, which is the Russian constellation of satellites and the US GPS satellites, which Android devices don't. It's one of the reasons. Yeah, well, there were a number of reasons why we went iOS only. That was one of them is that it meant that we have a GPS that we can
00:09:57
Speaker
Consistently get five meter accuracy, sometimes 10 under bad cover. Though with RQG, every single point, every single shovel test has its own accuracy, horizontal accuracy. So if you get seven points that are out in 10 bucks too, and the rest aren't, you can determine if the person dug it in the wrong place or if it was bad data. If you get trash data, we want you to know. So that's one of the fail-saves we put in. Another reason we use iOS, it's encrypted on the device. The NSA was recently not very happy about that.
00:10:26
Speaker
We do secure connection to our server, which is secure. And then we use an encrypted file encryption for getting the data to our clients. So at every step of the way.
00:10:39
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 13 of the archaeotech podcast, iPads in the field. I'm your host, Chris Webster. We're going to talk about using iPads in the hot northern Mojave desert on an actual project with the people that are using them. They've never used them this way and they've never used
Digital Tools in Field Archaeology
00:10:53
Speaker
the software we're going to talk about either. It's a candid discussion of the technology and where it's going right and where it can improve. Let's get to the show.
00:11:04
Speaker
We're using Apple iPad Mini 3s with the retina display and fingerprint security that should help identify the model. They're in a life-proof case and the app or apps that we're using are for site recording and for forms using an app called TapForms for iOS. It's only available for iOS. The nice thing is you can create template forms which I have stored on my computer and I can just send those via email or message or whatever to the tablet
00:11:28
Speaker
and then click on that and it opens and tap forms and creates everything. So it's kind of amazing that way. I'm also using, the other guys aren't so much, an app called iAnnotate and I've got all my project maps. We've got a 30,000 acre project and all of the little parcels are split up into one by one mile sections and so each one of those I've got overview maps and then I've got a little section map for each different section that we're in that shows our particular project area.
00:11:52
Speaker
for that section so I'm using that like normally crew shapes would write on their maps with pencils and things like that and every few days out here it'd probably be every few hours you'd sweat through that map and have to get another one so yeah this is an advantage definitely having that so I can draw on it and do all of my transects and stuff like that
00:12:08
Speaker
Well, one of the biggest issues is because, and I mean, this isn't going to be the case everywhere you walk in the United States, but out here where it's like 110 degrees, like it overheats as you're standing in the sun. And you got to actually worry pretty heavily about your shade and how you keep it out of the sun. Because the thing would just shut down. You're in the middle of forming like, okay, awesome. Back to paper, Chris.
00:12:30
Speaker
Any tablet with a glass screen is going to overheat quickly in just about any amount of sunlight regardless of the ambient temperature. It doesn't help if it's 110 degrees out, but even just sunlight on the glass at 85 degrees, it'll eventually overheat because of the way you hear radiation in the glass. One of the things though is when a new technology, I don't see it as something that's going to replace every piece of paper.
00:12:53
Speaker
Because I think I kind of see like a middle ground on this perspective in the way because I get just even sitting at this coffee table here Christmas I see like, you know six books in front of me and it's not like Digital information gets rid of every, you know piece of paper that exists or the old form of technology I mean like just the way that like, you know, we all have mp3 players but sometimes we still get CDs and put them in our CD player, you know, like and though they phase out
00:13:19
Speaker
Well, you're an early adapter, but, you know, I mean, it's going to be a slow process. Well, let's go down to somewhat of the convenience, too. Andrew was a big skeptic of the tablet early on, and I saw him just last week. Finally, did you stop carrying your massive binder? I had a beautiful little file box, really. It was a clipboard that had a file box attached to it, and I had that all set up with little tabs for every single form.
00:13:47
Speaker
It was a great system and I've learned it and kind of developed it over the years of doing this and it was a system that worked really, really well for me and I was skeptical.
00:13:59
Speaker
for a few days that we actually would never carry paper into the field. And I carried this five pound object with me for 10 weeks. I had stubbornness. The client finally gave it up. And when you think about that, there's less weight you have to carry with you. More water you can carry with you. More water you can carry. More cinnamon toast crunching. I think that's a bigger conversation to share.
00:14:27
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Chris Webster here to talk about one of the latest supporters to the Archeology Podcast Network, The Motley Fool. Now, I've been investing in the stock market through various applications for a few years now, and everybody who's listening to this can benefit from that sort of investment for the long-term financial planning. Also, I know the host of these podcasts can benefit because, as archeologists, none of us get retirement. We all have to fend for ourselves, so investing in the stock market is a good idea.
00:14:52
Speaker
But not everybody can do it. And look, we get it. The market is complicated and confusing. And to many of us, it simply doesn't make sense. In fact, where do you even start? Take all of the guesswork out
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:16:10
Speaker
Welcome to episode 16 of the archaeotech podcast for November 2nd, 2015. And I'll be joined by a new co-host, Chris Sims. We're resurrecting this show from the dead just days after Halloween and we're kicking it off with a gear review show. Let's get to the show. We've got Chris Sims. Yep. I'm also the, uh, one of the co-hosts of a forthcoming podcast called the go dig a hole podcast. And you can also check it out on our blog, go dig a hole.com.
00:16:37
Speaker
feel power is the first thing we're going to discuss. This first one, I don't know if you're going to want to go and buy it or not. It's the ZagSpark and it's Z-A-G-G-S-P-A-R-Q. I think they took a page out of Ikea's handbook there. Anyway, it's the ZagSpark 6000. 6000 stands for 6000 milliamps. And let's talk about milliamps real quick. Think of milliamps as the size of the gas tank in your car. Okay, that being said,
00:16:59
Speaker
The reason I hate this battery is my very first real battery, my very first external battery that I had. It's got good ports on it. They work well. I always forgot to shut it off, which was irritating. I like the newer ones that just shut off automatically and they turn on when you plug them in. But the biggest thing I hate about this is the flip out plugs. And if you look at the website, go to our show notes page and look at the picture of it, they're so ridiculous. They don't work. You try to plug this into the wall and the charging lights never light up. And then you have to like.
00:17:23
Speaker
set it down on a power strip and then put some weight on it and put some other stuff on it or find a nice tight plug that it'll take because the contacts inside just never work. Yeah, so Shutterfly, I don't know how important it is for you to customize an external battery pack, but as a caveat, my mom got this for me because she was tired of me
00:17:44
Speaker
getting back from international trips and giving her a quick phone call and saying, hey, mom, I'm back in the States. I'm alive. I still have, you know, like eight hours to go before I'm home. My phone's about to die. That's all I have time up. But phone's dead. Got to go. So she got me this battery pack that has a picture of me and my lovely partner, Andy. So it's disgusting. He means adorable. But you could go to Shutterfly and get probably this same picture on your battery pack.
00:18:14
Speaker
iMac, take us out with a binary solo.
00:18:27
Speaker
All right, we're back and after a sip of brandy and Benedictine, which I highly recommend in the gold fall days. This last segment of the show, we'll be covering our favorite apps. So I'll go ahead and get this one started off with an app that I've used in the field and in my everyday life. It's really changed the way I deal with weather.
00:18:45
Speaker
which is one of our, you know, constantly changing variables. This thing's called Radar Cast Elite, and it's available on the iTunes Store, the App Store, for $3.299. It is the most hands-down accurate weather you can possibly get your hands on.
00:19:02
Speaker
it'll make weather underground and the weather.com apps just look like total garbage. I'm going to talk about one that I use a lot. It has radar and stuff, but really what I use it for is the push notifications. And this is called Dark Sky because it knows where you're at and it will give me a push notification on my watch and on my phone that says rain starting soon or drizzle starting soon. It'll even tell me that it's ended. You know, if I'm like sitting in the house and I want to know.
00:19:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the archaeotech podcast, episode 24. Today I interview Michael Ashley of the Center for Digital Archaeology and we talk all things digital site recording.
00:19:35
Speaker
Episode 24 is featuring Mr. Michael Ashley, co-founder of the Center for Digital Archaeology. Michael, how's it going? It's going really well. We started the Center for Digital Archaeology back in 2011. We specifically were trying to help all of us who are in the realm of archaeology and
Managing Archaeological Data
00:19:53
Speaker
CRM and cultural heritage take advantage of digital tools. The core things that we have been doing over the past five years have been about actually developing technologies, specifically a
00:20:05
Speaker
content management system that's open source called Mukudu CMS, which principally helps indigenous communities save, preserve and share their digital culture and heritage. And we have a web service that helps with that. And something called Codify,
00:20:21
Speaker
which is our paperless collection curate and web platform with surveys. Why do I need to get some big, complicated database? Why do I need to collect my data any differently than I've been doing it for the last 40 years? What's the big deal? I'm an archeologist. Why do I need to do that?
00:20:37
Speaker
So if we all think about the kinds of archaeology we do worldwide, so not to just focus on CRM. So let's talk about, quote unquote, as I say, academic archaeology or research based archaeology. The main job that I do, Chris, all the time is what we have now lovingly called data therapy.
00:20:53
Speaker
So data therapy, as we sit down and people say, okay, well, this is what we're trying to, this is what we've been doing for five years, 50 years, literally 150 years, like back in when Chicago was digging a site and say, Israel, this is what we've been doing forever.
00:21:09
Speaker
and we're still trying to find records that were done at the turn of the century to turn that into knowledge now in 2017, say. That's the idea. What we want to be able to do is have everything that's ever been said about this site, not just the site, because the site boundaries change over time, but the area, the place, the survey, ceramics, human remains, whatever it might be, at our fingertips in real time so that we can actually make better decisions in the field and we can tell better stories down the line.
00:21:39
Speaker
Okay, I'm here with the, I think, first ever live interview for the Archaeotech podcast, aside from some small conference stuff we've done. And I'm here with Peter Wigand. As a kid, I used to look for arrowheads. Interest developed into wanting to go do it as a career, potentially. I went up to the University of Washington as a undergraduate and started out in anthropology. I was going to do Middle Eastern archaeology.
00:22:09
Speaker
the person who was teaching Middle Eastern archaeology actually left and I ended up doing Mesoamerican archaeology. I have a feeling that a lot of CRM archaeologists in particular might think that pollen analysis is simply just counting things and determining what plants were there. But there's a lot that you can tell from exactly what plants were there at a certain level and certain quantities and things like that. So in that respect, tell us about some of the work you've done in Italy.
00:22:35
Speaker
Italian work I started was about five years ago. I was invited by one of my graduate students to join a group of Canadian and British archaeologists in southern Italy who were doing work on a Augustan villa, believe it or not, that was owned by a slave, one of his slaves during the lifetime of the slave, and then reverted back to Augustus after the death of the slave. What's fascinating about this area is that it's always been a crossover area between many cultures.
00:23:03
Speaker
2,500 years ago as the Iron Age peoples were moving south into the heel and toe of Italy, we had Oskins who were italic-speaking peoples coming down the coast and the west, and then we had people coming across from the Balkans who were Albanian speakers. There sounds like a reservation there, but I thought it would be really nice to put the villa into a regional pollen context, a vegetation context, because we're talking about an area that
00:23:32
Speaker
Some people have suggested the region was in foul in the words that had it been abandoned, the agricultural lands, other people say no, it hadn't been and so forth.
00:23:42
Speaker
So we were interested in trying to decide what was going on. We were looking at the correlation that we found between the alluvial record and the erosion model that I've done with climate and the fact that we could actually put human impact into the model as well by doing a GIS overlay of this archaeological survey data within the region, showing where people were living and what they were doing.
00:24:08
Speaker
and literally putting that, superimposing that on the geology. And when people moved into sensitive areas off of areas that are resistant, then what we can show is that there's an increase in the erosion rate as well. So we can use that as sort of a transfer function to, let's say, make the model more precise to predict erosion rates.
00:24:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the archaeotech podcast, episode 42. I'm your host, Chris Webster, my co-host Chris Simms. On today's show, we get into the annual holiday episode and talk about gifts for archaeologists. But then they've got like the Suunto MC2G compass, which is an orienteering compass. It's awesome, but it's a hundred dollars at REI. And I was like trusty standby, Silva Ranger. That's like 35 bucks.
00:24:57
Speaker
the books, the e-books and stuff like that. Well, first off, you get a certain number of e-books from Amazon. I think it's probably like one a month or something. And they had a display for a thing called the Chill Out Buddy. Honestly, they look like huge hot dog cars. But they're these. That's what they look like. Definitely like gift cards are always a good idea. Things like hammocks are usually popular. But then also there's like camping equipment.
00:25:23
Speaker
especially like cook sets are super useful. I've had a cook set, it's from Snow Peak. It's titanium, so it's super lightweight, incredibly strong. You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Thanks for supporting us.
00:25:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 56. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my special co-host today, Richie Cruz. On today's show, we talk about the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and what it means or what it doesn't mean for archaeology. Let's get to it.
00:25:57
Speaker
Richie's a longtime field tech, worked all over the country, a lot in the West here. He worked with me a couple of years ago in California. We're recording this on Friday, June 9th. I think that's part of the problem with Apple, though. I feel like in the olden days, they used to be known as like if you were a graphic artist or a video editor. But now you can do that on any computer.
00:26:16
Speaker
What we're looking at here is what's the easiest, simplest solution for a CRM firm of any size to set up. I'd rather buy something right out of the gate that doesn't need a lot of maintenance for a number of years, just works and take that money and spend it on something else.
00:26:32
Speaker
to bring it back to WWDC, but they showed augmented reality. There was a big table sitting on the stage, and then they were using an iPad Pro with a new chip in it that you can buy now today. I've got an iPad Pro 12.1 inch, but it doesn't have the brand new chip in it. Yeah. Hello, and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, Episode 58. On today's show, I talk to the creators of Wild Note, a form generation and field data collecting application. Let's get to it.
00:27:01
Speaker
Kristin Hazzard and Nancy Douglas. Welcome to the show. So my name's Kristin Hazzard. I'm the founder and CEO of Wild Note. And Wild Note came out of my work at an environmental consulting firm, actually. Probably about five, six years ago, I had started a software consulting company and at the same time became a principal in a small environmental consulting company. So I was kind of doing two things. Through that, I actually ended up building a similar app for PG&E.
00:27:31
Speaker
for all of their compliance reporting. So my background is really varied. I have a mechanical engineering degree from Cal Poly. And then from there, I got a law degree. Nice. And then as I was waiting for my bar results, I got hired to be a programmer. All right. Well, Nancy, what's your story?
00:27:50
Speaker
What's my story? Well, it's nowhere near as exciting as Kristin's story. So what I bring to the table for Kristin, I'm the sales director for Wild Note, and I love connecting with people and learning about what they're doing. And I'm just always interested in learning something new. Yeah. And between hiking, drinking, and report writing, it's hard for archaeologists to get anything else done. So.
00:28:15
Speaker
What's your grand vision for this? We'd like to revolutionize environmental compliance, monitoring and reporting, basically. That's the big, big picture. And what we see is a lot of these paper based processes. So paper out in the field, then then bring it into word and then maybe turn it into PDF and then maybe email it to the appropriate stakeholders, all of it sort of, whether it's digital paper or real paper, these inefficient paper based processes.
00:28:43
Speaker
And we see that, wow, we could go electronic from beginning to end, right? So digital field data collection, back at the office, editing through the web app, it's still in a relational database and easy to edit and easy to have everything in one place.
00:29:00
Speaker
eventually exporting to these various agencies and stakeholders electronically as well, creating massive efficiencies, less hassle, headache, that sort of thing, and hopefully saving everybody money, which everybody can get behind, environmental compliance being more efficient and less expensive. Feel free to go on to wildnoteapp.com and try it out. We would love to welcome you into the Wild Note family and to get your feedback on how we can make this the very best tool for this particular group.
00:29:31
Speaker
Welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, the show where archaeology and technology come together. This is episode 61, and I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Wait, what? Who the hell is Paul Zimmerman? Find out on today's episode. We'll also talk about recent updates to Apple Maps and the note-taking app Notability in the App of the Day segment. Let's get to it.
00:29:51
Speaker
Okay. Welcome to the archaeotech podcast. We've got a new co-host today. Paul, how's it going? That's pretty good. How are you doing? Good. First off, how long have you been listening to the archaeotech podcast? I've been listening to it for about a year, year and a half, I think, as well as some of the other APN podcasts, but that's one that I really gravitated to. What brings you to this field? Let's say that I'm an interested amateur, but I'm an amateur with a PhD in the field.
00:30:15
Speaker
What I mean is I met up with one of my old buddies that I used to do field work with last Christmas time and he described himself as an ex-archaeologist and I thought, oh, I can't quite call myself that anymore. The ex part didn't sit right with me.
00:30:31
Speaker
You mentioned that when you were doing archaeology, that you were kind of on the tech side of things. What was tech like, Jesus, 17 years ago, when you were working in archaeology? What kind of stuff were you working with on that side? The main project that we had was at MASCA. Bill Fitz and I, he's a European archaeologist, he and I were in charge of programming something that we called Site Map, and it was a suite of programs
00:30:56
Speaker
that we used for surveying with Total Stations. Bill was on the data collection side of it, and I was on the data plotting side of it. So we had laptops, powerbooks at the time, I think, that we would run Minicad, then Vectorworks.
00:31:11
Speaker
for the plotting custom program that we wrote on Corvallis MC5 data collectors. Basically, we'd set up with these total stations and map in entire sites or map in objects found in trenches or whatever was necessary for the given site.
00:31:30
Speaker
On today's show, we explore the possibility of remote working in contract archaeology. Believe me, it's possible. So dump the office and let's get to it. Because I do a lot of network admin, I have to frequently stay up late at night when something goes kablooey and remote in and do my work on our servers as if I were physically at the space, but when I'm actually sitting up in the living room.
00:31:51
Speaker
The first question you have to ask yourself when you're thinking about telecommuting or you're thinking about if you're an office manager, you're running the office or running the company and you're thinking about setting this up for your employees is can you do it and can everybody do it? The thing I think about is what are the physical things I need to interact with at the office that would cause me to be at the office, right?
00:32:13
Speaker
Episode 94. Today we discuss chatbots as agents of cultural outreach. So Dr. Gonzales Tenet, thanks for coming out on Arkpod. Geez, Arkpod, I'm reading my name instead of... Episode 104. I get the joy of interviewing Dr. Edward Gonzales Tenet.
00:32:39
Speaker
episode 108. Today we talk to Simon Young of Lithodomos VR. Hello and welcome to the Arceotech Podcast, episode 113. Today we talk to Zach Beyer about his work in Jamaican archaeology. Hello and welcome to the Arceotech Podcast, episode 124. Today we discuss working remotely and the impacts of the coronavirus and the impending zombie apocalypse on archaeology. Let's get to it.
00:33:04
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 130. Today we talk Computational Archaeology with Dr. Isaac Eula. Let's get to it.
00:33:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 132. Today we discuss incorporating archeology into gaming with guest Amanda Gomez. Let's get to it. Hi there. Welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 149. This is your host, this episode, Paul Zimmerman. And today we have a special guest co-host, Eric Olson. We're going to drive this right off the tracks, I'm sure. But today's conversation
00:33:37
Speaker
If you're a regular listener, this is episode 149, the previous episode 148, Eric was our guest. How do you deal with actually starting on tech? Because so many of the different tech kind of projects that you see, what you see is something that somebody has gotten to a certain point at that they're very adept at. And so that barrier of entry, you look at it and you think, oh, I could never do that.
00:34:00
Speaker
It's done just thinking about technology and how we can get people to be less scared of it and more willing to learn how cool and efficient it can make your workflow and make research better.
00:34:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 168. Today we discuss Paul's recent trip to Iraq and his experiences doing drone photogrammetry while he was there. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 171. Today we discuss archaeological radiography with James Elliott. Let's get to it.
00:34:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 172. Today we talk to Dr. Cora Woolsey, the founder of Archaeosoft and creator of the field data collection application Stratum. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 175. Paul's in Iraq, so today I talk to Brian Fritz, inventor of a mechanized archaeological digging machine called Paleo Digger. Let's get to it.
00:35:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 181. Today we discuss the Gamification of Education with J.D. Calvelli. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 183. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my temporary co-host, Edward Gonzalez-Tennett. Today we talk about what Ed's been up to lately and where he's going next fall. Let's get to it.
00:35:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 186. Today, I bring on a guest to talk about field safety tech. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 197. Today, we talk to Chelsea Colwell-Posh about a mechanical auger for archaeological perspective that she invented. Let's get to it. All right, Chelsea, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Chris and Paul. I am so excited to be here.
00:35:50
Speaker
I expected you to say long time listener, first time interviewee, just cause you know.
00:35:56
Speaker
Absolutely. I am just fangirling here and really just really excited to be here. I listen to you guys all the time. I have a commercialized apparatus that uses in a cased auger using our committee screw that I apply for archaeological prospection for probabilistic sampling or test pinning on a grid. So if the sediments are deeper than 1.2 meters,
00:36:23
Speaker
I can't convert that for you. I am so sorry. I am metric all the way. But if we can't, I don't think it's 11 feet. It's not 11 feet. I didn't read the whole thing. Yeah.
00:36:46
Speaker
consistent. That's another wonderful thing about this is every test pit is literally the same size, every test pit. There's not going to be a variation between, you know, Jimmy and Bob who dig 50 centimeter test pits, but Bob's is 55 and Jimmy's is 37. But you know, we're going to get a really consistent, probabilistic sampling grid.
00:37:10
Speaker
Or the shapes where one's a bathtub and one's a point, right? And some people can take good holes and some people can't. That's right. And you always have that one tech that just takes so much pride in the work that you could literally put their test pit on the cover of your report. And then there's the other guys who are just like, you don't know if they were trying to bury a body over the weekend or like...
00:37:40
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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.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.
00:38:05
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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.