Airtable's Usefulness for Osteological Work
Disciplines
Archaeological Anthropology | Biological and Physical Anthropology
Abstract (300 words maximum)
Airtable is an application that is used for individual or collaborative data entry. It allows you to easily name and add categories that you can use to sort data. The tag feature gives you the ability to have more specified data points, in which you can assign to the data being entered. Through Airtable, a resource called STARC OSTEOARCH was created for researchers to share data on archaeological human skeletal remains. I will answer the question of whether STARC OSTEOARCH through Airtable is a useful data entry application for Osteological research. I categorized data of individuals from three different archeological sites in Irapetra on the southeast coast of Crete, Greece. This data was categorized by demographics, presence of pathologies, and dentition analyses from each site. Using the filtering features of Airtable, I was able to determine how easy or difficult it was to parse out this data based on additional parameters. Airtable offers a free version as well as a paid version. The version that I used for this study was the free version. I hypothesized that Airtable would be a good application for scientific data entry, and that STARC OSTEOARCH would be a sufficient application for Osteological research. I found that Airtable is largely a good application with easy-to-use features such as the filter and tag systems. A minor issue I found is that only the original commenter can delete a comment on a data entry. I also found that the major difference between the free and paid version is that the free version limits the number of collaborators you can have on one database, and the paid version does not. From this, I found that Airtable is a good application for scientific data entry, and that STARC OSTEOARCH is a useful tool for Osteological research.
Academic department under which the project should be listed
RCHSS - Geography & Anthropology
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Susan Smith
Airtable's Usefulness for Osteological Work
Airtable is an application that is used for individual or collaborative data entry. It allows you to easily name and add categories that you can use to sort data. The tag feature gives you the ability to have more specified data points, in which you can assign to the data being entered. Through Airtable, a resource called STARC OSTEOARCH was created for researchers to share data on archaeological human skeletal remains. I will answer the question of whether STARC OSTEOARCH through Airtable is a useful data entry application for Osteological research. I categorized data of individuals from three different archeological sites in Irapetra on the southeast coast of Crete, Greece. This data was categorized by demographics, presence of pathologies, and dentition analyses from each site. Using the filtering features of Airtable, I was able to determine how easy or difficult it was to parse out this data based on additional parameters. Airtable offers a free version as well as a paid version. The version that I used for this study was the free version. I hypothesized that Airtable would be a good application for scientific data entry, and that STARC OSTEOARCH would be a sufficient application for Osteological research. I found that Airtable is largely a good application with easy-to-use features such as the filter and tag systems. A minor issue I found is that only the original commenter can delete a comment on a data entry. I also found that the major difference between the free and paid version is that the free version limits the number of collaborators you can have on one database, and the paid version does not. From this, I found that Airtable is a good application for scientific data entry, and that STARC OSTEOARCH is a useful tool for Osteological research.