CRAN Task View for Archaeology

[Ben Marwick]

Hi everyone,

The CRAN Task View Editors will soon be accepting proposals for new Task Views (see their announcement here: https://github.com/cran-task-views/ctv). 

I've started drafting a proposal, following their instructions (https://github.com/cran-task-views/ctv) here: https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology/blob/master/proposal.md. A draft of the CTV itself is here: https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology/blob/master/Archaeology.md If you have feedback or would like to be included as a co-maintainer, please let me know by email or discussion on GitHub (https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology/issues)

As for most demarcation problems, defining the scope of this CTV is challenging. For now, the list is quite narrow in scope, my perspective is that if the scope is too broad (e.g. any package used only once by an archaeologist) then we might end up listing much of CRAN there and it would be rather generic, and perhaps less useful. I will keep my longer list which many of you contributed to (thank you! it's here: https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology/blob/master/README.md, see the discussion here: https://groups.google.com/g/antiquist/c/mVY_DX0jVt8/m/9TEf5Lk4z1MJ). But I will rename it to something more descriptive.

Some of the work presented at CAA2021 was very useful for thinking about this, including Sébastien Plutniak's survey of R packages used in archaeology (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03287121/file/plutniak2021rconference.pdf).

warmly,

Ben