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Since I am trying to work myself into the use of programming with R and accomplishing my data analysis with this tool, I have struggled more than one time with the way of thinking "programmer-style". As trained archaeologist I have practically no idea of the thoughts and ways to work with code.You may know that really old joke when a programmer gets to do the food shopping and you tell him "Bring one package of milk, if they have eggs, bring 10." So, the happy noob will head to the market and get one package of milk and 10 eggs. Programmers are used to a different kind of thinking - so they will bring you 10 packages of milk, because they see the condition for it: They have eggs in the store.I am so grateful that there are no loops necessary in R programming. I tried it once for a course in C++ and it was... well, a decent catastrophe, but still, a catastrophe. I gave up in the end, after hearing most of my tech colleagues saying that an archaeologist has no need for programming. I might have answered that tech people have no need for history, and guess what, some of them really believe that. Because computer science is a modern thing. I did not tell them about the long history of cumputer science - that maths actually was a subject for women, because all man had to be philosophers. History is full of fun facts, my dear hardcore-tech-people, maybe you would like to try it sometime. (Forgive me the bitterness).I still have to work and think hard on the analysis I want to do. I am not just heading for a simple quantitative analysis, I want to discover certain patterns of motiv combinations, considering the different samples of different temples and other finding spots - just naming one example of the questions I have for my data.But, again, I had to start at the beginning, meaning cleaning my data. I had to think about naming my categories, about the facts I want to analyse. So, I once again found myself cursing my ex-computer science teacher at school, because we were girls and all he explained to us is not considered necessary knowledge for compter science at all. Well, if you call powerpoint and MS Word computer science, yes, we did that. It was back in the year 2005 and I am a victim of gender-biased teaching, I am afraid to say so. I am a girl, I am so talented in languages, and so interested in Latin, ergo I do not need any kind of technical knowledge. Or stuff like computer science, chemistry, physics, etc. Actually, I always thought, I am too dumb to do stuff like programming scripts for data analysis. Guess what - they made me believe that I am more talented to do other stuff like history and Latin. Maybe that is even true, but how can anybody be too dumb to use certain tools and methods for his or her work? It took me a  long time to figure this out.I cannot imagine doing anything different than I am doing now - I love my job. I am used to people looking at me in a very bewildered wax, because I tend to say things like "I am not interested in people as long as they have not been dead for at least a 1500 years" and stuff like that. They are wondering why I am working with things like GIS and SFM and now programming languages, because old and dead stuff means... I don't know, maybe they think, we are still using stone tablets to write on. A lot of people are very fast to ask questions like "Why would you need to learn computer science stuff? Why do you need geoinformation systems, I thought, you are analysing stones?"I have stopped being angry about these kinds of questions. If some poeple cannot understand your way of working, then you have to do it anyway and maybe in the end they will get your intention when seeing the results. I figured out how to use R for an analysis of two categorial variables - meaning, I can show you now the distribution of motifs on the right and left side of stone altars in my geographical area of investigation.[caption id="attachment_550" align="aligncenter" width="468"] Well, for a first try it does not look that bad... And there is more to come.[/caption]I have not found out everything yet - there is still a lot to do with the layout etc., but I have now found a way of basic understanding my data and a basic way of working with it.I will present charts like that in my thesis and I love doing so. I will work on my 3D-skills and I will keep on trying new things with GIS software, no matter what.I am doing all that stuff in my own way: When I have time, when I have my head free for this kind of task. Individualism is one great challenge when you are an archaeologist. Idealism is one mightier challenge and it is hitting me hard sometimes. But hey, I guess, I like it. More than I used to do.R you ready for something new?Stay fierce, dear fighters of academia - yours, Astrid :)