00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome to the show. Everybody Paul is still playing around in the desert in Saudi Arabia hopefully he's doing well over there haven't heard a ton from him just like last time but that's okay, he's he's working hard and and hopefully having a good time and hopefully finding a lot of good stuff at the same time really looking forward to talking to him. When he gets back about this project that he's been on. But for now we have back on Ed Gonzalez tenant again as a guest co-host. How's it going ed. 00:27.15 Ed Great! Thanks for having me yet again. 00:30.39 archpodnet Yeah, no worries. Well last time and I can't remember if we talked about it on the show or if we talked about it just in planning for the show but you have some resources around q Js and teaching people how to use Q Js and and you teach your students that. Again, you have some resources that we will link to in the show notes so you can kind of follow along there if you want to by by just looking down at your device and and clicking into the show notes you can see that stuff and we're also going to keep this episode a little bit shorter than normal just because it's ah it's very it's going to be. You know I say very technical I want to make this sound like it's hard. But this is kind of a guide and I want people to be able to see this episode as something they can follow if they want to start using qgis and how to get started with that. So why don't you give us ah a quick start about just like briefly. What qgis is you know, maybe maybe kind of as ah as a. As a piece of software not like a Js but just like not really an origin story but you know a little bit about q Js. 01:30.13 Ed Um, well a qgis saw a movie in Queens New York with its parents and then when they walked down the alley after now I'm kidding. Um, there's your origin story for qgi it's the batman of gis software. 01:41.32 archpodnet Ah, nice, Nice, nice. Nice there you go. 01:48.28 Ed Um, no yeah, um so yeah quegis I would say ah and some folks may have heard of it years ago when it was called Quantum Gis So that's where the queue comes from but it is basically I would say. 02:00.39 archpodnet Ah. 02:06.44 Ed At this point it is the most popular free and open source Geographic information system available and it's very easy to get right? like um, any other like most open source software. In this case, you go to the. 02:20.20 archpodnet Oh. 02:23.33 Ed The main website which is http://qgis.org very easy to remember and right on that main page you're going to see a button that says download now and what's I think really cool about qgis um is that you know when you when you click that download now button. 02:32.18 archpodnet Ah. 02:43.40 Ed It doesn't matter what ah operating system you're using, you're going to be able to install qgis natively on that operating system. Whether that's ah Macintosh or windows or even one of the many flavors of unix. Ah. Or linux sorry that's out there like ah ubuntu that I think a lot of people use. So um, it's it's really kind of an effortless install. Um, you click that download button and then it's going to usually auto detect what operating system you have and it's going to present. Um the instructions. 03:02.47 archpodnet Um. 03:17.97 Ed About how to install it and it's usually like a 1 click installer that you download or interact with and then it just adds it into your system. 03:26.32 archpodnet Okay, now before we get too far. You mentioned that this was one of the most popular open source gis tools out there. You know what? I don't think I know because I'm not in this space. Really I use q js and it works so I don't really like seek around for other alternatives and I don't really I don't use as re projects projects. Esri products in my small company just because you know they're too expensive and and they're not really that necessary to be honest with you for what I need to do now just so people know what else is out there. Can you think of any other open source gis products on the market off the top of your head. 04:01.64 Ed So yeah, there are a couple um and actually many of them get integrated into qgis so when I was an undergrad many many years ago at the University Of Arkansas this would be the early 2000. They actually had a course in grass. Gis. Um, and so grass grass it stands for something like geographic resources analysis support system I think um and that's another open source. Um I don't know that it always was. 04:29.47 archpodnet Brother. 04:38.24 archpodnet Ah. 04:39.89 Ed But um, it certainly is now. Ah, the cool thing is you know a lot of people who may have learned gis back in the 90 s or even the early aughts might have encountered coursework with this. Um, it certainly was used by like academics and and like government agencies. Um. You know the cool thing is if if you're familiar with those tools or that system. It's actually been integrated into qgis. Um I would say the the other one that springs to mind for me is and I hope I pronounce this correct. It's saga or saga s aga that's another open source. 05:05.14 archpodnet Nice. 05:12.91 archpodnet Okay. 05:17.86 Ed Believe it's open source I mean you can download it and install it anyway. Um, geographic information system and well actually that's more like a Geo Spatial analysis suite of tools. But again that. 05:29.73 archpodnet No. 05:33.78 Ed Can be integrated into qgis so you know I don't want to I mean I'm going to sound like I'm on a soapbox for qgis probably this whole episode and I guess some ways I am I I believe in it a lot and I do I do pretty much all my gis work with it now. Um. 05:44.58 archpodnet Yeah. 05:50.91 Ed But this is one of the cool things about open source software. Um, you know we've we've talked about 3 now but they all integrate with each other and so um, you know you can sort of if you've learned or worked with one. You can move into you know qgis pretty easily and the other one I should mention. 05:57.93 archpodnet Um. 06:10.49 Ed Although I will confess I have not yet started to work with it is R which you know people know as the statistics package but it also has very robust ah geographic and spatial analysis tools built into it as well. 06:15.86 archpodnet Oh yeah. 06:29.47 Ed Um, now r and qgis I don't think they they integrate in any direct way. Um, and of course r is much more of a you know you've got a kind of code to make that work I'm hoping to and you've already mentioned you know I have ah a Youtube. 06:38.62 archpodnet Ah. 06:45.69 Ed Ah, series about working with Qgis for archaeology I hope to over the next year or 2 get more familiar with r and maybe try to provide um a series of tutorials for that. Obviously like our sort of sibling disciplines in anthropology like biological anthropology. Um, which obviously uses statistics a lot as does. Ah, you know a good number of archaeologists. Um, they I think have made further inroads into incorporating r as as a subdiscipline. Although again, there are lots of archeologists who make there are and qgis packages or plugins. You know what would kind of be extensions in the Esri universe or ecosystem they make them freely available out there. So I would say those are probably the or most common open source slash free gis programs that an archeologist would be likely to encounter I'm sure there are other ones. But. 07:31.80 archpodnet Darth. 07:41.43 archpodnet Sure yeah I think now that we're talking about this I remember grass and I'm pretty sure in my grad school I used and I might be getting this wrong because I'm pretty sure it's the only time I ever used it. What at the University Of Georgia back in what 2010 was surfer. 07:43.97 Ed Those are ones that spring to mind for me. 07:59.35 Ed Oh yes I mean so I think Surfer actually I I actually I downloaded that recently because I was working with um, some remotely sensed data I just kind of wanted to test its tools I do think surfer is paid software though. 08:01.25 archpodnet I Think that was yeah. 08:15.79 archpodnet Is it? Okay, okay got you? Yeah I wasn't sure they just had it on the lab computers. Okay, ok sure. 08:18.96 Ed So Um I think it's like Surfr 3 d but um, yeah I mean I think you get like a free trial and they're friendly to Academics. You know like they might have ah. Academic pricing or even free, but obviously not everybody is an academic and can do that. So. 08:35.87 archpodnet Indeed indeed. So you mentioned the operating systems that q Js can be downloaded on which is I mean for the most part all of them that people routinely use. Are there any other system requirements that you can think of for someone downloading this like they're on like a school laptop or something like that or or what have you um. Ah, there is there anything because people typically think of Js as a pretty resource intensive thing and in fact, I still think of you know offices that I've worked for serum companies where the most powerful computers in the entire building are in the Gis department. But. What about key Js's requirements as far as that goes. 09:13.49 Ed Well so you know this is yeah so yes, um I would say that the system requirements for qgis are going to be less than esri. Um, you know and I don't want to be I don't want this to be an anti http://esri/proqgis ah episode either. 09:22.66 archpodnet Um, sure. 09:31.56 Ed Think we'll talk later or at some point I think it's important to be familiar with both ecosystems particularly if you want a career doing gis and archeology. But um, obviously Esri you know is is shifting. You know a lot of us learned like Arcgis desktop. That's what I'm still most familiar with. 09:37.41 archpodnet Right. 09:50.11 Ed But in another two or three years that goes away and so ah, most students now I think are using arcgis pro and you know that's going to be a forced switch for any Esri users. Um, and you know. 09:51.36 archpodnet Ah. 10:04.86 Ed I Think you can find people on both sides of the fence as to whether or not that's a good or bad thing. Um, but certainly Arcgis desktop was a very resource intensive program I think a lot of us felt like it was a sort of program where they kept adding to but not necessarily streamlining. 10:22.81 archpodnet Um, yeah. 10:24.10 Ed And so it became increasingly clunky and I think everybody student ah somebody who teaches gis somebody who uses gis if you had you know any experience with Esri. You became very familiar with it crashing. Um. 10:40.70 archpodnet Ah. 10:42.60 Ed And you know I think it's It's probably spawned a whole I don't know like a whole comedic industry in geospatial circles about Ezu crashing. Um, so qgis is certainly in my experience far more stable. It is I think a much more lightweight program. 10:48.15 archpodnet Yeah. 10:54.35 archpodnet Um. 10:59.69 Ed You know like a lot of open source software. It's got an active developer community and I think in some ways that you know it's It's kind of like you know I guess like usually too many cooks in a kitchen is a bad thing but in this case I think having that many cooks in a sort of open source environment actually becomes a very good thing. 11:11.90 archpodnet Right. 11:18.27 archpodnet Okay. 11:19.39 Ed And um, so you know for instance, if you had an old computer you know and I think a lot of us have experimented with the idea of installing or have right installing linux like ambuntu on our systems particularly older computers. Um, you know. None of the reasons we go in that direction with an older machine is because it's far less resource intensive than say windows and I would say this name is kind of true for qgis versus ezri qgis is out of the box going to be far less um resource intensive and you know. 11:41.31 archpodnet Sure. 11:54.83 Ed That's at least 1 reason why it's going to be more stable. So ah, you know when I teach this you know I teach courses in like digital heritage and and and gis for archeology and I try to always include at least a section in qgis and what's really cool is that's a section where. 12:08.59 archpodnet Um. 12:14.43 Ed Everyone just works on stuff at home because it doesn't matter what computer they own personally maybe a Chromebook might not do it. But that's a different thing altogether but you know most students I think most students actually own macs at this point. Um, but most students have either a macro windows machine. 12:21.49 archpodnet Sure. 12:27.84 archpodnet Oh yeah. 12:33.10 Ed They install it they can do all the stuff anywhere they're they're taking their laptop and for the most part any laptop you buy off the-s shelf I would say is going to work for like 90% of the kind of like common archeological things you would do at Gis right? like. I'm always thinking like when I'm teaching students. What would you do? if you get a job in crm whether that's like a private agent or company or federal agency. You know what's the majority of what you're doing like inventory and map making and you know some basic analysis maybe but a lot of it's controlling data making sense of it and. 13:01.27 archpodnet Adna. 13:08.46 archpodnet Yeah. 13:10.26 Ed Qgis is going to work with that very robustly very easily on pretty much any system. 13:16.49 archpodnet Okay, well sounds good all right? Well I've got some some other initial startup steps after you've got it installed but I think we'll talk about that on the other side of the break back in a minute.