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Basic Quantitative Visualizations of Data from iDAI.field / Field Desktop for Find Processing

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milQuant -- Quantitative Analysis with Data from Field Desktop

The milQuant-Shiny Dashboard provides quick quantitative overviews of the data in a Field Desktop-project. It can connect to any database Client in the same Local Area Network and can plot various graphs to provide quantitative visualizations for the project focused on find-resources. See also the standalone app version at lsteinmann/milQuant-dist.

The dashboard has been developed and is meant to be used with the milet-configuration and within the framework of the Miletus Excavation Project. Some functionality and general overviews may also work with other project-configurations, but I cannot guarantee that other configurations will even load, as it has not been tested in a long time. But: This App could absolutely be adapted to work for different configurations! Feel free to copy and modify it according to your needs.

Screenshot from the Dashboard: Finds Screenshot from the Dashboard: Pottery Quantification B Screenshot from the Dashboard: Loomweights

Current Status

The dashboard is currently operational, though the vocabulary used in all plots comes from the background of the database, and may not always be as expected. On load, a login screen asks the user to input the address for synchronization and the password. Projects can be switched while the app is running.

The app can handle most errors. It may crash in rare cases - if so, just restart it and try again, and ideally notify me of what exactly lead to the crash so that I can fix it.

Dependencies

This app uses the idaifieldR package (not on CRAN) to import data from Field Desktop. For more info about the package, see this article.

Apart from that, there is a variety of other packages used in the dashboard, all of which can be found on CRAN and should be installed alongside this app. You can install milQuant as an R-package using:

remotes::install_github("lsteinmann/milQuant", dependencies = TRUE)

and then run the app with:

library(milQuant)
run_milQuant_app()

Adaptation

If you wish to try the app, you only need to clone the repository, open the project in R-Studio and click on "Run App" with "app.R" from the main directory open. You could also install the standalone app version at lsteinmann/milQuant-dist. Make sure to enter your local IP address (or leave the default, if Field Desktop is running on the same computer) and the password your client uses for synchronization. You can find this info in the settings of your Field Desktop Client.

As stated, this app will not be very useful with configurations other than the one used in milet-project. I would be more than happy if you wanted to adapt this for other configurations, and am willing to help and advise, as the code can sometimes be a bit messy and the documentation is not great (yet!). Feel free to fork this repo and change the App to your own needs or contact me if you want to discuss about it.