Phew
This year has been challenging, to say the least. At the same time, a virtual lab should be well positioned to handle the challenges of working remotely, right?
Nevertheless, many of our projects moved to the back burner, while our undergraduate members dealt with the transition to fully online education and taking care of themselves and their families. Other things that had been in the process of becoming for some time finally saw the light of day. One thing that I’m particularly pleased about is the way we started using Discord as a virtual space just to touch base, share materials, shoot the breeze, and otherwise provide some kind of community and connection.
So, on with our wins:
- Alex Lane started his MA in Information Technology and Data Science. He was also co-author on a new paper that came out from the BoneTrade Project
- Chantal Brousseau won a place in the Students as Partners program helping to design HIST491a DH + Musems
- Jeff Blackadar was a co-author on a new paper related to the BoneTrade project using code he developed for CCAD
- Jennifer Evans won a SSHRC Insight Grant for “Hate 3.0: Memory, Populism, and Misinformation in the Canadian Social Mediascape”. See story here. She also won gold and bronze medals at the National Powerlifing Championships!
- Laura Madokoro was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists
New Publications
The BoneTrade project had a few papers that had been in development for quite some time get published in 2020:
Towards a Method for Discerning Sources of Supply within the Human Remains Trade via Patterns of Visual Dissimilarity and Computer Vision, by Shawn Graham, Alex Lane, Damien Huffer, and Andreas Angourakis, in the Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology:
While traders of human remains on Instagram will give some indication, their best estimate, or repeat hearsay, regarding the geographic origin or provenance of the remains, how can we assess the veracity of these claims when we cannot physically examine the remains? A novel image analysis using convolutional neural networks in a one-shot learning architecture with a triplet loss function is used to develop a range of ‘distances’ to known ‘reference’ images for a group of skulls with known provenances and a group of images of skulls from social media posts. Comparing the two groups enables us to predict a broad geographic ‘ancestry’ for any given skull depicted, using a mixture discriminant analysis, as well as a machine-learning model, on the image dissimilarity scores. It thus seems possible to assign, in broad strokes, that a particular skull has a particular geographic ancestry.
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram, by Shawn Graham, Damien Huffer, and Jeff Blackadar, in Heritage:
It is possible to purchase human remains via Instagram. We present an experiment using computer vision and automated annotation of over ten thousand photographs from Instagram, connected with the buying and selling of human remains, in order to develop a distant view of the sensory affect of these photos: What macroscopic patterns exist, and how do these relate to the self-presentation of these individual vendors? Using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing and machine learning services, we annotate and then visualize the co-occurrence of tags as a series of networks, giving us that macroscopic view. Vendors are clearly trying to mimic ‘museum’-like experiences, with differing degrees of effectiveness. This approach may therefore be useful for even larger-scale investigations of this trade beyond this single social media platform
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade by Shawn Graham and Damien Huffer, in Internet Archaeology:
The trade in human remains on social media happens in an ever-changing field of digital media technologies. We attempt to replicate our earlier study, exploring the differences in what we can observe now in the trade on Instagram versus our first foray in 2016 (published in Huffer and Graham 2017). While the previous study cannot be reproduced, it can be replicated, and we find that the trade is accelerating.
Finally, Shawn Graham’s book, An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent-Based Models, Archaeogaming and Artificial Intelligence was published by Berghahn Books, New York, in July
Things that Could’ve Been
Many of the things that we had planned on doing this year failed. Some things - like HeritageJam North - failed because we simply did not have the energy to rejig planned in-person events into an online format. We did have a series of small workshops planned for February to April - hopefully now that we all have much more experience in how online workshops can be put on, we’ll revisit these in the winter 2021 term.
The biggest thing on deck for 2020 - the DH2020 ADHO Conference - was projected to bring around 800 people to Ottawa in July. I’m glad that ADHO made the call relatively early on to cancel that event; it was the right call. Here’s hoping that the 2021 event can happen in some format.
New Members
We were joined this fall by Jaime Simons, Emma Gillies, and Katherine Davidson.
Moving Forward
My goal for the Winter 2021 semester, for the X-Lab, is to keep on being a place where outrageous ideas can be entertained, a place that supports its students, and even a place that puts on a few learning events for the wider community. Long term, I’d like to secure funding from the University to support a wider variety and number of undergraduate students. See you in the New Year!
