Lab report module 9

The purpose of this assignment is for you to demonstrate basic familiarity with importing, inspecting, cleaning, manipulating, visualising, and interpreting archaeological data.

We are investigating data from excavations at the New River Estate on the island of Nevis in the eastern Caribbean to understand what life was like for enslaved people, and why slavery ended. Please review the lecture slides from Thursday Download lecture slides from Thursday to see the specific questions that your report needs to answer. 

Here's what you need to do:

1. Create a new RStudio project (New Project -> New Directory -> New Project), and
   • save it as archy-208-module-9-bmarwick (replace my UW ID with yours).
   • You should get a new, empty folder, ready to work in
2. Download the two datasets we need for this lab: new_river_artefacts_ceramics_type_freq.csv Download new_river_artefacts_ceramics_type_freq.csv and new_river_mcd.csv Download new_river_mcd.csv, these come from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) Links to an external site. 
   • use your desktop folders to move these files into your RStudio project directory that you just created.
   • File names are vital here: do not rename the data files. We can't grade your assignment if the file names are not exactly as specified here (check for numbers magically appearing at the end of the filename, that means you've downloaded it multiple times, you should delete the other copies).
3. In your new project, create a new Quarto file (File -> New file -> Quarto Document -> click "Create"), and
   • save your qmd file as archy-208-module-9-bmarwick.qmd (replace my UW ID with yours),
   • delete all the template content
   • Ensure your YAML front matter has:
     • an effective title (how?), e.g. in the form of a question or statement
     • your name, hint: author: "Ben Marwick"
     • the date automatically inserted, hint: date: now
     • the output format set as html, hint: format: html: self-contained: true
     • warnings and messages suppressed in the output, hint: execute: warning: false
     • increase the image quality of the plots, hint: fig-dpi: 600
     • customize the date label, hint: title-block-published: "Last updated"  
4. In your qmd file, use these headings, and write a total 8-12 fully-formed sentences  containing specific details and concrete nouns that answers these questions: 

• • Introduction: What is the aim of your report? (1-2 sentence)
    • you need to mention the questions that we discuss in the lecture
  • Data: What type of data are you analysing and where does it come from? (2-3 sentences)
    • use at least one example of inline R code to get a meaningful summary value for the data, e.g. how many sites are in our sample (do not hard-code any values, e.g. 'two')
    • your text must cite the source of the data, because the data come from a website rather than a journal article, we will show you how to cite this in the lecture 
  • Exploratory data visualisation: What do you observe when you visualise the data? (3-4 sentences)
    • you need to write R code that joins two tables of the data together 
    • you need to write R code that produces one seriation plot
    • you need to write R code that produces one plot showing how the proportion of Afro-Caribbean ceramics in the assemblages changed over time
    • you need a captions and cross-references for each figure or panel of figures
    • Each visualisation needs at least one complete sentence describing your observations of what you see in the plot, and how it relates to the questions you need to answer in this lab report.
  • Conclusion: What is your conclusion about the cause of the end of slavery? (3-4 sentences) 
    • you need a statement that directly and clearly answers the questions presented in the lecture Download lecture,
    • you need to include a cross-reference to at least one of your plots

5. Render your qmd file to output a HTML document.

• • Check that in your qmd file your data file names are exactly the same as ours.

6. Upload to Canvas your two files (please do not zip them):

• • your qmd file, correctly named, with correct YAML, with code and text, and
  • your HTML file, containing the output of your code and text, with no warnings or messages from the code visible

Additional resources: 

• DAACS: History and Background of the New River Sites Links to an external site. 
• Galle, J. et al. 2009. Sugar, Slaves, and Shovel Test Pits: Preliminary Results from Nevis. Poster presented at the Society of American Archaeology Annual Meeting. https://www.daacs.org/research/papers-manuscripts Links to an external site. 
• R for Data Science: 12 Tidy data Links to an external site. 
• R for Data Science: 13 Relational data Links to an external site.