archeoViz is an R Shiny application for the visualisation, interactive exploration, and web communication of archaeological spatial data. It generates interactive 3D plots, 2D cross sections and 2D maps of archaeological objects and their refitting relationships, computes basic spatial analysis methods, and displays excavation timelines. This application is designed as the building block of a decentralised web edition network for archaeological data:
- users can deploy archeoViz instances specific to their datasets on the server of their choice;
- the archeoViz portal, a companion online application, references and documents with metadata these archeoViz instances, increasing their discoverability and audience on the web, both for scientists and the general audience interested in archaeology.
It can also be used as an educational resource to introduce learners to spatial analysis, data formats, reproducible workflow, open science, and computational archaeology.
Principles
- An incentive to publish: a workaround to archaeologists’ reluctance to publish data: archeoViz as a tool to promote data sets, emphasizing data reuse as an incentive to publish data.
- A decentralized approach: archeoViz as the building block of a decentralized web edition network for archaeological data, made of as many archeoViz instances as there are datasets (instead of using a central repository).
- A federative perspective: using the archeoViz portal to gather the multiple archeoViz static instances and describes them with metadata aligned on standards and authorities.
