opencontext: An R API client for the Open Context archaeological data repository
This packages enables browsing and downloading data from Open Context using R. Open Context reviews, edits, and publishes archaeological research data and archives data with university-backed repositories, including the California Digital Library.
Installation
Install opencontext
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ropensci/opencontext")
library("opencontext")
Browse countries
To browse the countries that Open Context has data on:
countries <- oc_browse("countries")
The result is a data frame that include the names of the countries in countries$label
. URLs that we can use to get more information about what projects, etc. are available for each country in countries$id
Browse locations
To browse the locations for one country, for example, Turkey:
library("dplyr", warn.conflicts = FALSE)
locations <- oc_browse(type = "countries") %>%
filter(label == "Turkey") %>%
oc_get_countries(type = "location")
#> Getting data for Turkey
To browse the names of locations that have archaeological data in Turkey, run locations$label
. We can see that the first location in this example is Çatalhöyük.
Browse projects
To inspect the projects available for a location in a country, for example, for Çatalhöyük in Turkey:
projects_at_Çatalhöyük_Turkey <- oc_get_locations("Turkey", "Çatalhöyük")
#> Getting data for Turkey
#> Getting data for Çatalhöyük
Once again, the label
column has the names of the projects: projects_at_Çatalhöyük_Turkey$label
.
With a little further effort we can browse excavation/survey areas within the project, and get datasets of measurements of objects collected from these areas (along with chronological and spatial data for these objects).
Get data from a specific project
Now that we've identified a specific project, we can ingest data from that project into our R session.