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The fourth edition of the Winter School “R 4 Archeologists” (R4R) will be held both online and in person (can be joined online or in person, equivalently) from January 30th to February 10th, 2023, organized by the Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge of the University of Pisa, Italy.

R4R will enable participants to conduct statistical analysis and visualization of Archaeological data. It is built around a new paradigm, which takes into consideration archaeologists as both producers and users of digital archaeological data.

The over 50 attendees of the R4R editions learnt the concepts and methods of univariate and multivariate analysis, spatial analysis and data visualization through an integrated use of R ecosystem software packages, statistical and practical principles. R4R lasts 60 hours.

TARGET ATTENDEES

Students, graduates, PhD candidates, and post-docs in archaeology or related to Cultural Heritage. The course is open to EU (including University of Pisa students) and non-EU applicants. For an effective learning environment, the number of participants will be limited to 20.

BACKGROUND

In Humanities, the exponential increase in digital documentation requires us to question its management, its use, its availability to the scientific community and its sustainability. In archaeology, these issues are even more crucial because they relate to non-reproducible primary data. In order to effectively retrieve, store, manage, prepare for analysis, and communicate the information and the scientific range of such amount of data, modern archaeologists should be able to deal with concepts and tools related to new technologies. Such digital competencies are not present in a standard archaeology background, though they are fundamental in order to effectively interact with ICT experts. The “R for Archaeologists” winter school aims for a fruitful combination of archaeology and statistics through the teaching of Data analysis, Data mining, and Data visualization techniques. It is conducted through R, programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The large amount of data that are produced through archaeological work show a wide degree of heterogeneity, complexity, and interconnection, making the use of algorithmic methods unavoidable. R is one of the main programming languages of Data Science, and includes a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques, including linear and nonlinear modelling, statistical tests, spatial statistics, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, and others.

Bibliography
– David R. Carlson, Quantitative methods in archaeology using R, Cambridge University Press (2017)
– Nakoinz O. & Knitter D., Modelling Human Behaviour in Landscapes, Springer (2016)

• ECTS: 6
• Fees: 500 Euros (accommodation and food not included)
• Deadline for application: December 30-th, 2022
• One scholarship available (awarded on the basis of the CV, on request)
  
• Further Info: please email (both)
  Professor Gattiglia: gabriele.gattiglia@unipi.it (Scientific Manager)
  Dr. Dubbini: nevio.dubbini@gmail.com (Operations Manager)