Archaeology’s two most favorite things; Beer and Data.  Put them together with the world’s most useful scientific data modeling and analysis language (of course I mean R) and it could have loads of fun!  To that end, I am putting this out there to propose a time and place for an unofficial R + Beers get together at the the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Orlando, FL.

Update 4/20: Zachary Cofran and David Pappano put on a great R-stats work shop at the American Physical Anthropologists meeting in Atlanta the week following #Rchaeology.  Here is a link to a post about their code/instruction

Update 4/8: Location!  There is a indoor/outdoor court yard at the north end of the Swan hotel.  If is just in from the boardwalk that separates the Swan and the Dolphin.  If it is too dark or noisy (fountain) we will move inside where there are couches & chairs.  See map below

Update 3/24: Open Context has graciously stepped in to support Rchaeology and provide refreshments (and some credibility!) to this little event.  A little bit about this organization:

“Open Context reviews, edits, annotates, publishes and archives research data and digital documentation.

We publish your data and preserve it with leading digital libraries. We take steps beyond archiving to richly annotate and integrate your analyses, maps and media. This links your data to the wider world and broadens the impact of your ideas.”

Keep an eye here for details as they emerge.  I will tweet with #Rchaeology2016  #Rchaeo2016

The Knows

• Sponsored by Open Context!
• In or about the indoor/outdoor courtyard in Swan hotel (see map below)
• Saturday evening around 8pm to 10pm (early flight Sunday)
• No R/Data/Stats experience necessary!
• Unstructured, BYOData, hack & nerd-out
• Will certainly conflict with many other happening; sorry.
• Great show of interest so far!
• Liquid refreshements courtesy of Open Context!
• Guest appearances
  • Jesse Wolfhagen et al. to show off their Zooarchaeology package and talk Bayes Mixed Models.
  • Amy Fox may swing by to demonstrates some morphometrics

Be Prepared!

Ok, there is actually nothing for anyone to prepare; it’s just the Boy Scout motto.  But, if you are interested in preparing for things, here are some things to try.

• Bring whatever data you are currently working on and we can take it for a spin.
• If you want to bring you laptop and play along, the following are all you need to get started:
  • Latest version of R
  • R Studio

• I assume if anyone shows up, they may be at a pretty introductory level or just R-curious; and that is totally encouraged!  Here are some quick resources to browse that may give you an introduction to the concepts of R and statistical programming.
  • Software Carpentry Into to R
  • UCLA RStudio Tutorial
  • Slides with good visual nuts & bolts of R
  • Amazing ggplot2 tutorial (making nice plots)
  • VIDEOS: Roger Peng’s video series on Intro to Data Analysis
• If I had more time I would post stuff to Github and we could all be cool doing commits and PRs, but this is off the cuff…
• David Pappano’s details on #Ranthro2016

Disclaimer:

This is a bit of a crazy and impromptu idea that may fail go in any number of directions… by which I mean me sitting with a beer and a laptop running code; so pretty much a normal night.  If it does work and a few people can get together to talk R and data that it will be well worth it.  Collaboration, serendipity, and learning are guaranteed. I’ll update this post as new details come to light.  Feel free to comment, tweet, or DM if you are interested or have ideas!