Sarah Parcak: recommendation

Transcript context

…So, it’s important for something? Incredible. Yes, it’s really important for some things. Calculus — no. No, no, no, no, no, not for the work that I do. Also, a lot of the computer programs I use — it’s like plug and play. You put in your numbers, and it spits out all the stats, so I don’t need to calculate them, but I do need to understand what they mean. This is really important. I think every archaeologist should take stats classes to understand median, mode, regression. What does it all mean? We’ve all seen the funny memes online of the charts that look fancy but don’t mean anything, and anyone can interpret anything. Just because there’s data and there’s numbers, doesn’t mean that there’s a conclusion. [laughs] Sometimes there’s data, and it’s a mess. It’s important to know stats really, really well for the work that I do and my colleagues do. For all the measuring that we do, for all of the angles for measuring when we’re measuring in points. Yes, of course, there’s all these wonderful GPSs where you just ping it in the ground and it measures it for you, but we do a lot of things the old-school way, and sometimes your batteries run out, so you have to know geometry and trigonometry to be able to calculate things. Here’s something that struck me studying your work. Give me your reaction. It seems to me your job is almost becoming impossible. You have to know stats. You have to know trigonometry. You have to know geometry. In your case, you need to know Egyptian Arabic, possibly some dialect, possibly some classical Arabic, maybe some other languages. You have to know archaeology, right? You have to know history. You must have to know all kinds of physical techniques for unearthing materials without damaging them too much. You need to know about data storage, and I could go on, and on, and on. Hasn’t your job evolved to the point where you’re almost . . . You need to know about technologies, right? For finding data from space — we talked about this before. That’s also not easy. Isn’t your job evolving to the point where, literally, no human can do it, and you’re the last in the line?…

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