Lecture -- Dig Day 8

I attended most of the lectures. By 7 pm, though it was really hard to concentrate on what most of the speakers were saying. They tossed around terms like "late Bronze Age" as if everyone (and most probably did) know what they were talking about. They also name dropped places worked at or people they know as if everyone (as in, or so it felt, but me) knew.

When I heard the next lecture was going to be about technology, that was a subject I could grasp!

Sandy talked about OCHRE -- the Online Culture and Historical Research Environment she designed because she realized nothing like it existed, and yet it was needed. Sounds like where I am with work -- I need a database that combines all of what I do for development with what happens in admissions and with the business office and with teachers. Unlike OCHRE, what exists in my world is expensive. Sandy tries to make OCHRE affordable.

It is a program for scholars, by scholars. It is designed to be comprehensive, yet flexible. 

It is not a web browser application, meaning you do not have to be connected to the internet to use it -- this is key since often in the field you do not have access to reliable internet. It is not a relational database, it only deals with items (and lots of them). It is not hard to use.

Later in the project I was asked to upload pottery pictures. I'll agree it was not hard to use, but photos take up a lot of data, which is hard to upload on the ancient internet connections where we were staying. Sounds like it is nominally faster in Chicago. 

OCHRE keeps track of items, time periods, and events. She demonstrated taht this one particular item has over 700 attributes -- it is that comprehensive. It is a "graph database" ahead of its time.

The goals are to:
* Get data once
* Get it early
* Get it right

Alex then talked about the drone videos he takes every few days. they are a series of photos that are stitched together. Individual markers are put in the field to help stitch the photos together later.

Finally something I could understand and care about.