# EAA 2024 "RSE"

CfC: https://eaa.klinkhamergroup.com/eaa2024/

## Title (max. 20 words)

Archaeological Research Software Engineering: Little Minions, Scripting in Digital Archaeology and Software as Research Data using FAIR4RS

## Type

* Regular Session

## Theme

* 2. Archaeological Sciences, Humanities and the Digital era: Bridging the Gaps

## main session organiser

* Florian Thiery (LEIZA) #62091

## Co-organiser(s)

* Agnes Schneider (Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology, Digital Archaeology Research Group, Netherlands) #63326
* Fabian Fricke (DAI, Germany) #72294
* Jim Allison (USA) #66767
* Daria Stefan (TU Wien) #72286

## Abstract (150-300 words)

Computational Archaeology, or Archaeoinformatics, plays an important role in up-to-date FAIR and FAIR4RS (F- Findable, A- Accessible, I-Interoperable, R- Reusable), reproducible and replicable archaeological research. The increasing number of topics and papers at the international and national chapters of the CAA shows manifold applications but also implications. Special Interest Groups (SIG) such as the "Scientific Scripting Languages in Archaeology" (SSLA) or "Little Minions" also deal with Computational Archaeology but from different aspects. 'Small' helper scripts ("little minions") and research software (e.g. implementation of statistic algorithms in R or Python) are both FAIRification tools and, on top of it, also research data itself.

Several initiatives, such as the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) or the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), engage with this topic to strengthen the position of Computational Archaeologists and Research Software Engineers, highlight the scientific merit of their work, and ensure researchers receive credit for software development, as well as for writing papers.

To support this, this session invites contributions dealing with various aspects of Computational Archaeology and Research Software Engineering, but not limited to:

* treating source code/software as research data
* presenting a "Little Minion"
* discussing problems in Computational Archaeology
* advancing new algorithms and statistical analysis methods
* (critical) use of AI, discussing pitfalls and complications
* addressing the divide between FAIR(4RS) principles and FAIR(4RS) practices
* incorporating FAIR(4RS) principles into the teaching curriculum (top-down vs. bottom-up approach)
* discussing approaches concerning problems and solutions concerning legacy data and software
* making complex statistical and computational methods accessible to main-stream archaeology

## Ideas

* Session connected to CAA and NFDI (German National Research Data Infrastructure)
* Research Software as Research Data
* FAIR4RS - thiking FAIR vs. acting FAIR
* RDM in Research Software
* Presentation of "Little Minions"
* SIG SSLA Topics => reproducibility
* application of Scripting Languages in archaeological research, e.g. R, Python
* how to deal with legacy data and software (Jim's idea and I also really welcome it! (Agnes))