Studied up for the GIS class tonight... and then the professor postponed it a week (because of popular demand). That's most annoying.

But I think I've found a suitably interesting project to work on, that won't be like the other 99% of the class who will use data sets for LA census tracts in order to make some correlation about race or income level (as is typically done, according to the prof.).

I'm going to get the locations of all known pre-Christian and early Christian sites in Ireland, and map them out after converting Ireland's grid system locations to latitude and longitude so that the mapping program we use knows where to plot them.

Then I'm going to look at various classes of ancient monuments in relation to their proximity to Christian sites and see what geographical situations can project some meaning, either positive, negative, or neutral.

For example, if Christian sites don't seem to have any relation to the location of standing stones, but do have a correlation to ancient burial sites, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the Christian sites are thusly located because of pagan religious beliefs regarding burial sites, and that Christian sites aren't concerned with standing stones because standing stones were not religious in nature.

Should be a project good enough for this level of class. Who knows, something unexpected might even turn up? I do expect to find what I just wrote above, because it's established that early Christian sites are located near pagan ones, but I don't know that they're NOT near standing stones (which seem pretty random, but maybe aren't).

At least it will be a break from all the other presentations that will cover local modern concerns.