Articles by Pascal Ruby

The author presents the project NiKita (Navigation interactive - Kit pour l'archéologie), established with the aim of creating a tool for the interactive processing of archaeological bibliographical documentation. NiKita is a database of easy and intuitive utilisation, developed for Macintosh using the program Hypercard. The principal characteristics of this program are: availability of an “object oriented” programming language; possibility of organizing data in files or stacks, autonomous but correlated; capacity of processing eterogeneous data and different types of graphical formats; availability of a transparent and intuitive interface. The different stacks contemplate: graphical and textual documents related to sites, contexts and objects; Greek and Latin sources related to archaeological units considered; bibliographical references. At present, the file “Bibal” contains about 4500 titles.

The article describes the transformation of a number of procedures for archaeological data processing into Excel (Macintosh and MS Dos versions) macro-programming language. Automatic seriation is dealt with first. The general principles of the two best known algorithms - the reciprocal averaging method and P. Ihm’s correspondence analysis - are discussed. The Excel programme text is then presented and commented. After detailed analysis of the comparative merits of the two algorithms, a number of general remarks of a methodological nature are made about problems posed by seriation and particularly by automatic seriation techniques. The article then turns to the construction of incidence (presence/absence) tables and co-occurrence matrices. Here again, general principles are discussed before presentation of the programme text and comments on the macro. The last macro presented carries out replacements of cell contents. The conclusion contains some general methodological remarks about Excel and the writing of macro-programmes in Excel’s macro-programming language.