This week, Penny Crook reflects on her experiences designing data structures for her own archaeological research and implementing FAIMS3 notebooks on behalf of other archaeologists and researchers. Off to record industrial heritage in the Blue Mountains in December 2020, with the old FAIMS tablets in tow. (P. Crook CC-BY) As we take a breather from focus groups and demos, catch up on some pro...
A shorter longer update this fortnight because Penny and Brian just finished running focus groups at UNSW! Also a short reflection on participatory design in 2022… FAIMS3 Focus Group participants using the Campus Survey notebook to record Landscape Elements. CC-BY-SA Brian Ballsun-Stanton 2022 “I’m a bit of a numpty, but even I can do this [designing a notebook]” —...
Brian gives a dev update for mid April, and descends further into the philosophy of technology and archaeology. (Madness intensifies…) Lego Archaeologist by Grianghraf (Unsplash license) Dev update We have just begun a new tranche of development work for CSIRO, focusing on notebook authentication, row visibility controls, new work on the exporter, and attachment sync management. We’...
Shawn Ross recently was interviewed by Rory Mcneill, for his Fair Data Podcast about FAIMS, digital field data collection, and his professional journey from history to archaeology, open science, and research technology. Rory is the founder of Research Space (an open-source electronic lab notebooks developer and service provider). Petra Hermankova in the field using the FAIMS module to record a...
This week, Brian reports on a successful launch to production and thinks about the “colours of bits” applied not to a financial framing, but from the perspective of academic paradigms.1 The panopticon/logo of Friend Computer, of the Paranoia tabletop RPG. Image Copyright Mongoose Publishing, used with kind permission. Are you happy, citizen? Happiness is mandatory. This blog post i...
In our first update of 2022, Brian is deeply confused about time, offers hints of an unexpectedly manic development period due to a secret project, and thinks about the pragmatics of technical debt. Brian taking a “core sample” in an abandoned field in Canberra. Photo Copyright Liz Stower CC-BY-SA 4.0 Int 2021 The problem with manic deadlines in lieu of leave is that they leav...
As we end this development cycle, and we look at how well we’ve done at achieving our goals, our Technical Director, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, reflects on the year. While my first dev diary has our expensive sentence, the way I framed our goals when talking about feature priority was, “the thinnest possible bridge between notebook creation and export.” We need to be able to run ...
While we are watching FAIMS3 emerge, a number of old 2.6 modules are still being created. As the developing team has little capacity to support new projects, project directors follow a do-it-yourself approach from design to deployment. Adela, who has used and administered FAIMS before for landscape archaeology, has never developed a module from scratch but used her software-carpentry-level skil...
Moving into “feature freeze” offers an interesting opportunity for a developer diary. Our Technical Director, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, ponders the state of all the various components that are working together in our project. XKCD #303 I’m writing this watching a timer count past 5 minutes while building FAIMS3 using Github Actions. Our Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery...
As we get to the end of this development cycle, and closer to achieving our Expensive Sentence, our Technical Director, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, ponders the state of all the various components that are working together in our project. Status Update Our Expensive Sentence for private beta is: To support CSIRO Geochem for in-field testing in November 2021 by allowing minimal module design through w...
There are some beautiful examples of field notebooks in the archives of national libraries and natural history collections like the notebooks of Giovanni Arduino (Italian Apennine Mountains) or Charles D. Walcott (Grand Canyon). But as much as we may aspire to produce these magnificent works of science and art, the reality for most of us looks much more scrappy. Example of a field notebook with...
Hot off the e-press, field reports for a FAIMS-supported archaeological survey on the Perachora Peninsula, Greece, have just been released by Journal of Field Archaeology. The paper by FAIMS 3.0 leadership team members Adela Sobotkova, Shawn A. Ross, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, FAIMS 2.6 alumni Petra Hermankova and Christian Nassif-Haynes, and archaeologists Susan Lupack and Panagiota Kasimi is...
The Process of Design Squiggle by Damien Newman, thedesignsquiggle.com This post is part 3 of a series inspired by the presentation we gave to the ARDC Platforms Community of Practice about the generation and management of user requirements. Our first posts considered the perspective of the Product Owner and the Subject-Matter Expert. This post will consider the view of the end ...
Some folks visiting this post will be interested in the high-level overview of FAIMS by Shawn Ross and Penny Crook as part of the AAO Seminar Series. This post, however, is not about a high level overview of FAIMS. Instead, it’s about responsible academic research, slides as FAIR academic outputs via GitHub Releases, and automation of said releases using LaTeX, Overleaf, our new LaTeX Sl...
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” Carl Sagan, Cosmos This post is part 2 of a series inspired by the presentation we gave to the ARDC Platforms Community of Practice. Future posts in this series will look at the other roles that academics need to play in order to deliver functioning software that other people...
'Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.'Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy This post is part 1 of a series inspired by the presentation we gave to the ARDC Platforms Community of Practice. Future posts in thi...
CSIRO researchers with FAIMS in the field. CC-BY-SA Nathan Reid 2021 On 15 June 2021 the FAIMS3 Alpha prototype passed its first major development milestone: user-acceptance testing (UAT). The intention of this round of UAT was to explore, discuss and confirm accomplishment of the goals of Alpha phase of development: To demonstrate the foundational capabilities of FAIMS3. Specifically, loading...
An early screenshot from FAIMS3 on Chrome on Android. CC-BY 2021 FAIMS Project at Macquarie University. As part of getting ready for our Alpha release and initial round of User Acceptance Testing, I took our FAIMS3 repository public just now. FAIMS3 is built in Typescript and we’re designing it to be multi-platform from the get-go. Our Alpha release aims to accomplish the following expe...
FAIMS 3.0 will re-engineer Field Acquired Information Management Systems (FAIMS) Mobile, a mature and stable, but dated, system for producing custom electronic notebooks for data collection in diverse field situations. This project will make quality, comprehensive datasets the norm, and the platform will integrate with existing virtual environments for data analysis and repositories, including ...
