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MA/PhD Student Cyrus Hulen Featured in Center for Geospatial Analysis Panel Discussion
On February 13th, MA/PhD student Cyrus Hulen participated in a panel discussion hosted by 91心頭利’s Center for Geospatial Analysis (CGA). The panel discussion, titled “Messy Data Panel: A Love-Hate Relationship with Spatial Data” was organized in collaboration with Earl Gregg Swem Library as part of International Love Data Week.
Cyrus Hulen—alongside panelists Dr. Katy Rossiter (CGA Assistant Teaching Professor) and Harrison Williams (Williamsburg GIS Administrator)—discussed his experiences working with difficult and disorganized spatial data. He discussed his archaeological research in French Polynesia, highlighted his data collection and organization practices, and detailed the importance of documentation when working with potentially messy data sets. Such data collection, organization, and documentation strategies are all the more important when undertaking archaeological research due to the irreversible nature of excavation. In his words, “Our data isn’t replicable; you can’t dig the same hole twice. If we don’t have really good data collection practice, information gets lost and the analysis becomes much more challenging.”