Inglämnlagare - a tool for restructuring Swedish site data for statistical analysis

Abstract

Background: This paper presents a new software tool, Inglämnlagare, developed to be open-source, that restructures information about ancient remains in Sweden for analysis. The background is a new version of the ancient sites database, the Historic Environment Record, curated by the Swedish National Heritage Board, that was launched in 2018 with a new database model that structures the information differently compared to previous versions. Methods: The program, written in Python programming language, has multicore support in order to improve performance for large files and uses regular expressions to extract information about individual features of composite sites. Such features, together with their summed amount, are written as new individual fields to a comma-separated value file. The program is delivered as a source script file that can be executed in any Python environment. Use cases: As an example of use, a case study of exploring graves of rectangular shape found within Sweden is provided. The use case also describes the different steps involved in preparing the data in QGIS to run the program, as well as some methods to efficiently analyse and visualize the output. Conclusions: Inglämnlagare will make more information from the Swedish record of ancient sites accessible for research and can be used to explore different content of the record more efficiently than previously possible. While the tool is written specifically for this dataset it also provides an example of how open-source tools can be used for data wrangling making information designed for a specific purpose, such as online dissemination, appropriate for analysis.