Abraham Ulrikab

How many other Abrahams are out there?

Our project:

• seeks to map this trade
• uses tools of digital humanities to understand both text and visual materials

when people want to buy bones, where do they go?

when people want to sell bones, where do they go?

'I have a pile of teeny human skull scraps laying around. Due to etsys rules i cannot sell human bone or make a listing but id love to do custom orders for anyone interested in a pendant, ring, etc made from a human skull fragment. Dm me! #bone #bones #skull #humanbone #humanskull #fragment #skullfragment #oddities #oddity.' https://www.instagram.com/p/znHyR7AbXS/

digital archaeology

meets

digital humanities

so that's what we've done

here's where computer vision comes into it

• Yannick Asogba, 'Machine Visions'

• Yannick Asogba, 'Machine Visions'

• Tanz & Carter 2017

• Yale DH lab, code repo

Training our own classifier

Build Your Own Classifier Tutorial

Find a path through image-space

• Ryan Baumann Finding Near-Matches in the Rijksmuseum with Pastec

Ethically Troubling

It's still early days.

thank you

shawn.graham@carleton.ca

This research has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

bonetrade.github.io

for technical details, see our paper in
The Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, DOI: 10.5334/jcaa.8

Image Credits

• dramatization of Abraham Ulrikab - screenshot from CBC The Nature of Things, Trapped in a Human Zoo
• screenshot of museum exhibiting skeletons - screenshot from CBC The Nature of Things, Trapped in a Human Zoo
• Tanz& Carter, GumGum Neural Networks Made Easy
• sources for Instagram screenshots will not be shared in public

Credits for Code & Demos & Screenshots

• Finding Near-Matches in the Rijksmuseum with Pastec Ryan Baumann
• Identifying Similar Images with Tensorflow Douglas Duhaime
• Mechanical Kubler Matthew Lincoln
• Machine Visions Yannick Asogba
• PixPlot visualization Yale DH Lab
• Tensorflow for Poets Peter Warden/Google Codelabs