Updates

2019-04-25 A Memo To Self on A Blogdown Breakdown Out of Cheese Error At Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, Ponder Stibbons and his students have built Hex, a thinking machine. Sometimes, something crucial goes ‘sproing!’ and Hex will report the helpful error message, ‘out of cheese error’. I felt a strong affinity this morning when I went to update this site with the slides from next week’s presentation in Stockholm. The command to build the site is blogdown::build_site(). »

2019-04-25 Skeleton Keys & Popular Science Podcast Our work was referenced and discussed in a new popular science book by author Brian Switek, ‘Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone’. The book is discussed at https://www.popsci.com/skeleton-keys-excerpt/ . You can also listen to the ‘Weirdest Thing’ podcast talk about our work at https://www.popsci.com/weirdest-thing-falcon-sex-instagram-bones-sleep-twitch/ Archaeologists such as Damien Huffer track how human remains are marketed and sold over people’s smartphones, and, with colleague Shawn Graham, he dug into the mechanics of the trade in a 2017 paper called “The Insta‑Dead: The Rhetoric of the Human Remains Trade on Instagram. »

2019-02-2 It’s been steep We’ve been pretty quiet in terms of updates because, well, it’s been a helluva learning curve this year. Our other project - the Open Digital Archaeology Textbook Environment - won the AIA Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology, which was very gratifying as we could use some of what we were learning for this project to help expand that one. We also hosted a fantastic line up of speakers at Carleton University for the Shannon Lectures in History, on the theme of ‘Bad Archaeology’ - all five lectures were videotaped and can be viewed at the History Department Youtube Channel. »

2018-07-29 Learning about GANs Melvin Wevers has been using neural networks to understand visual patterns in the evolution of newspaper advertisements in Holland. He and his team developed a tool for visually searching the newspaper corpus. Melvin presented some of his research at #dh2018; he shared his poster and slides so I was able to have a look. Afterwards, I reached out to Melvin and we had a long conversation about using computer vision in historical research. »

2018-06-14 In our recent paper, ‘Fleshing Out the Bones’ we used the trained ‘Inception 3’ model as a way of determining clusters of images that we then studied for clues and hints: why did the machine cluster them this way? What are the common features? Unsupervised learning: It’s not unlike reading entrails. An alternate approach is to take an existing model, and add new training data to it. Pete Warden put together a tutorial a few years ago called Tensorflow for Poets that has since been formalized as a Google CodeLabs tutorial. »

2018-04-30 The Literature Review How do you start a literature review on a new project? We’re not starting from scratch, of course - we’ve got the pages of bibliography that we generated when we first starting scratching out what this project could be about. We started that step by considering the bibliography we had to hand as we wrote our first paper. Nothing is ever truly from scratch, in academia. »

2018-04-16 We’re underway! We received word at the end of March that this project has been funded. Since then, we’ve been doing the administrative work to get the project up and running - figuring out how to advertise for students, how to enable those students to study at Stockholm for a term or two, setting up the public face of this project, figuring out the internals of the research accounting system. »