clas299

Juypter Notebook for Ancient Lycia Necropoleis

This notebook contains scala scripts that determine the total count of tombs are represented in the data set.

There’s a Jupyter notebook to execute the following blocks of scala code.

Ancient Lycia Necropoleis

Southwestern Turkey Cemetery Site

In ancient Lycia, rock-cut tombs often clustered together in cemetery sites, or necropoleis, like ancient Myra (modern Demre), illustrated above. This data set contains data about Lycian necropoleis including the number of tombs at each site. You will figure out how many total tombs are represented in the data set. The records describe for each site its name, a typological classification by the Danish scholar Jan Zahle, the number of tombs, an English-language summary, and an identifier in a geographic data set.

The Data Set

The dataset is available as a delimited-text file here. The format is one record per row, and columns are delimited by the pound sign (hash tag) #. The file includes a header row:

sitename#ztype#tombcount#comments#ztypetext#rageid

The records describe for each site its name, a typological classification by the Danish scholar Jan Zahle, the number of tombs, an English-language summary, and an identifier in a geographic data set.

Retrieve the data set

To download the data set, you can use the Scala Source object. We need to import its class:

import scala.io.Source

import scala.io.Source
val lycianNecropoleis = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/michaeldahlquist/clas299/master/ancient-lycia-tombs/lycianNecropoleis.cex"

We then extract a sequence of lines from the URL source, and convert them to a vector.

val lines = Source.fromURL(lycianNecropoleis).getLines.toVector

Extract the numeric count of tombs

You should now have a Vector of Strings. You want to split up each String on the # character, to create a new Vector – this time, a Vector of Vectors. You’ll be mapping each line of the source data to a Vector of strings, one per column.

We also will take the tail of the vector as the header is not part of the data.

val data = lines.tail.map(ln => ln.split("#").toVector)

The tombcount is in the third column (index number 2) of each record. Now we need to create a new Vector that contains only the tomb count.

val tombData = data.map(columns => columns(2))

But the result is a Vector of Strings and we need a Vector of integer values. We can use the String class’s toInt method to create an Int from a String.

val tombCounts = tombData.map(s => s.toInt)

Now we can use the sum method that will handily sum up a Vector of numeric values.

tombInts.sum

There are 1085 tombs