Final project: Proposal

The overall goal of this final project is for you to explore your interests in archaeological data science on a topic that is relevant to you personally, and demonstrate the skills and understanding that you have acquired over the quarter. 

The purpose of this step is to help you get started on the final project. It is a piece of scaffolding to support you to do an excellent job in the final project. 

Please note that this final project is optional. If you want a 4.0 for this class, you need to submit a final project. If you will be satisfied with a lower grade, you do not need to do this final project. 

For this project you will work in a group of 2-4 people (FAQ: how to work well in a group). To find group members I recommend to post in the #questions-final-project channel in our Discord workspace. A great way to find suitable collaborators is to post (1) the times you are free during the week to work on this project, and (2) the data set you are interested to work on. Then you can look through posts from other students to find people who are free at the same time and share a similar interest, and follow up with them. That will help you to find collaborators who make the work efficient and satisfying. Before you get started, take a look at the requirements for the self-reflection assignment that is part of this project, so you can be ready to complete that when the time comes. 

A list of data sets to consider for this project is online here. You are warmly welcome to suggest others that are not on that list. You do not need to use all the data in a dataset. For example, if you are looking at one of the isotope datasets, you might want to focus on one type of animal, and compare just two locations. You don't need to analyse every data point that the authors collected, you should filter the data to work on a small subset that is relevant to your question and easy to manage. You should explore a few options with different datasets to ensure you decide to work on one that is interesting to you and suitable to achieve all the requirements of this final project. Read through all the steps of this assignment to learn about the requirements. 

Your group must create a google doc that all members of the group can edit, and you should keep notes your discussions, decision-making process, and resources you collect in there. This will ensure everyone in your group has access to what they need to do an excellent final report. 

To work together on your R code, log into your RStudio session and look in the Files pane where you will see a folder called "Shared'". You can create a project for your group in that Shared folder and work on writing code together in there. Then you have all your code saved in one place while you work. Please note that in this Shared folder everyone in the class can access every file, including deleting files. So please take extreme care not to interfere with work from another group. Don't delete anything other than files in your project. Please your project with the surnames of your group members, for example if Cele and I were a group, our project name would be: marwick-wolman. 

You need to submit for this assignment:

• the names of your group members
• your weekly group meeting time that you have agreed on to work on the final project
• the citation for the dataset that you will be working on
• the link to the google doc that your group is taking notes in; ensure you have adjusting the sharing properties so that we can view it. 

Each member of your group needs to make their own submission to this assignment.