Shawn Graham
Biographic Data
| ID | 3782961 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shawn Graham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shawn |
| FAMILY NAME | Graham |
| SIGNATURE | GRAHAM S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Carleton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2887-3554 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 69 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Behind Closed Doors: The Human Remains Trade within Private Facebook Groups
The existence of a thriving trade in human remains online is facilitated by social media platforms. While much of this trade is conducted in fully public forums such as e-commerce platforms, the retail website of bricks-and-mortar stores, public personal and business pages on social media, etc., there also exist numerous private groups using the affordances of various social media platforms to buy, sell, and share photographs of human remains. Th…
A Protocol for When Social Media Goes Private: Studying archaeological or heritage discourses in closed Facebook groups
Our major project explores the discourses that surround the buying and selling of human remains over social media. We discuss the research ethics framework established in Canada by the 'Tri-Council' research agencies as it pertains to studying social media in general. Issues of privacy and consent are paramount. Human remains trading happens in both public and private social media. We detail the process we went through, and the protocol that we e…
Reputation laundering and museum collections: Patterns, Priorities, Provenance, and Hidden Crime
Provenance research in museums has traditionally been reactive and focused on singular objects with dubious histories, such as colonial-era acquisitions, Nazi-looted art, and objects with active ownership claims; the ‘crimes’ we expect to see. But what if what we think we know prevents us from seeing the bigger picture within and across museum collections? We argue that a machine-learning approach to provenance could allow the detection of broade…
These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains and Why It Matters
These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains, and Why It Matters
People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade. The answers speak to how the 21st century understands and constructs ‘heritage’ more gene…
Relationship Prediction in a Knowledge Graph Embedding Model of the Illicit Antiquities Trade
The transnational networks of the illicit and illegal antiquities trade are hard to perceive. We suggest representing the trade as a knowledge graph with multiple kinds of relationships that can be transformed by a neural architecture into a “knowledge graph embedding model.” The result is that the vectorization of the knowledge represented in the graph can be queried for missing “knowledge” of the trade by virtue of the various entities’ proximi…
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope
When TikTok Discovered the Human Remains Trade: A Case Study
In the summer of 2021, a video on TikTok was heavily reposted across a variety of social media platforms (attracting conventional media attention too). Unusually (for TikTok), it was about the trade in human remains. Thus, we were presented with the opportunity to watch how knowledge of the trade exploded into broader public consciousness on a comparatively newer platform. In this article, we scrape TikTok for reactions to that moment. In our pre…
Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification
We present an experiment in sonifying archival archaeological imagery to make the act of looking at photography strange and weird. The sounds produced will then arrest us and slow us down, and make apparent to us the different ways that archaeological vision is constructed to particular effect/affect. It makes us alive to what is hidden or elided in the image itself; in slowing down, listening/looking/moving at one, we are moved towards enchantme…
Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification
We present an experiment in sonifying archival archaeological imagery to make the act of looking at photography strange and weird. The sounds produced will then arrest us and slow us down, and make apparent to us the different ways that archaeological vision is constructed to particular effect/affect. It makes us alive to what is hidden or elided in the image itself; in slowing down, listening/looking/moving at one, we are moved towards enchantme…
Towards a Method for Discerning Sources of Supply within the Human Remains Trade via Patterns of Visual Dissimilarity and Computer Vision
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 ‘referen…
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram
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 co…
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade
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
An Approach to the Ethics of Archaeogaming
Virtual worlds are human worlds thus ethical places/spaces. Through an authethnography of play, I try to surface and contextualize some of what I see as the ethical issues that archaeogaming presents, which I frame as provocations for further discussion. What defines 'archaeogaming' is our identity as archaeologists, and so the ethics of archaeogaming must be the ethics of archaeology; ethics are not integral to a game but emerge at the intersect…
What the Machine Saw: Some questions on the ethics of computer vision and machine learning to investigate human remains trafficking
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
What the Machine Saw: Some questions on the ethics of computer vision and machine learning to investigate human remains trafficking
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
Fleshing Out the Bones: Studying the Human Remains Trade with Tensorflow and Inception
There is an active trade in human remains facilitated by social media sites. In this paper we ask: can machine learning detect visual signals in photographs indicating that the human remains depicted are for sale? Do such signals even exist? This paper describes an experiment in using Tensorflow and the Google Inception-v3 model against a corpus of publicly available photographs collected from Instagram. Previous examination of the associated met…
The Insta-Dead: The rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram
There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand something about the function of this community, what they value and how they trade, buy, and sell, human rem…
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope
"The Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This pioneering book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding th…
Mapping the Structure of the Archaeological Web
What is the context of our archaeological blogging? When we blog, are we merely shouting into the void? Do archaeological bloggers link only to one another, and do we shout only to each other (which, it must be admitted, is what our journals and conferences do, too, albeit at a slower pace)? Assume a person knows nothing about archaeology: would that person find your blog? Your project website? Your department's website? Does academic blogging ma…
On Connecting Stamps – Network Analysis and Epigraphy
L’analyse des réseaux, qui est à la fois une méthode et une théorie, vise à explorer les relations inhérentes aux données archéologiques. Dans cet article, je m'intéresse aux sources épigraphiques qui sont porteuses de liens sociaux manifestes et qui permettent, si on les envisage du point de vue archéologique, de discerner de nouvelles relations. J'en donne l'exemple à travers deux courtes études de cas traitant de briques romaines estampillées …
The Equifinality of Archaeological Networks: An Agent-Based Exploratory Lab Approach
Counting bricks and stacking wood: Providing the physical fabric
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome
Rome was the largest city in the ancient world. As the capital of the Roman Empire, it was clearly an exceptional city in terms of size, diversity and complexity. While the Colosseum, imperial palaces and Pantheon are among its most famous features, this volume explores Rome primarily as a city in which many thousands of men and women were born, lived and died. The thirty-one chapters by leading historians, classicists and archaeologists discuss …
Bricks and brick making, Roman
Prestige building projects in Rome and Italy, coupled with increasing urbanization throughout the western Mediterranean, provided the impetus for the development of brick‐faced concrete at the end of the Late Republic and during the Augustan period.
Networks, Agent-Based Models and the Antonine Itineraries: Implications for Roman Archaeology
This paper presents a way of looking at Roman space from a Roman perspective, and suggests ways in which this point of view might open up new approaches in Roman archaeology. It turns on one conception of Roman space in particular, preserved for us in the Antonine Itineraries. Working from a position that considers the context of the itineraries as movement-through-space, this paper presents an investigation using social network analysis and agen…
The Insta-Dead: The rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram
There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand something about the function of this community, what they value and how they trade, buy, and sell, human rem…
The Equifinality of Archaeological Networks: An Agent-Based Exploratory Lab Approach
What the Machine Saw: Some questions on the ethics of computer vision and machine learning to investigate human remains trafficking
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
When TikTok Discovered the Human Remains Trade: A Case Study
In the summer of 2021, a video on TikTok was heavily reposted across a variety of social media platforms (attracting conventional media attention too). Unusually (for TikTok), it was about the trade in human remains. Thus, we were presented with the opportunity to watch how knowledge of the trade exploded into broader public consciousness on a comparatively newer platform. In this article, we scrape TikTok for reactions to that moment. In our pre…
Relationship Prediction in a Knowledge Graph Embedding Model of the Illicit Antiquities Trade
The transnational networks of the illicit and illegal antiquities trade are hard to perceive. We suggest representing the trade as a knowledge graph with multiple kinds of relationships that can be transformed by a neural architecture into a “knowledge graph embedding model.” The result is that the vectorization of the knowledge represented in the graph can be queried for missing “knowledge” of the trade by virtue of the various entities’ proximi…
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade
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
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram
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 co…
An Approach to the Ethics of Archaeogaming
Virtual worlds are human worlds thus ethical places/spaces. Through an authethnography of play, I try to surface and contextualize some of what I see as the ethical issues that archaeogaming presents, which I frame as provocations for further discussion. What defines 'archaeogaming' is our identity as archaeologists, and so the ethics of archaeogaming must be the ethics of archaeology; ethics are not integral to a game but emerge at the intersect…
A Protocol for When Social Media Goes Private: Studying archaeological or heritage discourses in closed Facebook groups
Our major project explores the discourses that surround the buying and selling of human remains over social media. We discuss the research ethics framework established in Canada by the 'Tri-Council' research agencies as it pertains to studying social media in general. Issues of privacy and consent are paramount. Human remains trading happens in both public and private social media. We detail the process we went through, and the protocol that we e…
Reputation laundering and museum collections: Patterns, Priorities, Provenance, and Hidden Crime
Provenance research in museums has traditionally been reactive and focused on singular objects with dubious histories, such as colonial-era acquisitions, Nazi-looted art, and objects with active ownership claims; the ‘crimes’ we expect to see. But what if what we think we know prevents us from seeing the bigger picture within and across museum collections? We argue that a machine-learning approach to provenance could allow the detection of broade…
Mapping the Structure of the Archaeological Web
What is the context of our archaeological blogging? When we blog, are we merely shouting into the void? Do archaeological bloggers link only to one another, and do we shout only to each other (which, it must be admitted, is what our journals and conferences do, too, albeit at a slower pace)? Assume a person knows nothing about archaeology: would that person find your blog? Your project website? Your department's website? Does academic blogging ma…
The Eyes Have it: CCTV as the ‘Fifth Utility
The Eyes Have it: CCTV as the ‘Fifth Utility
Networks, Agent-Based Models and the Antonine Itineraries: Implications for Roman Archaeology
This paper presents a way of looking at Roman space from a Roman perspective, and suggests ways in which this point of view might open up new approaches in Roman archaeology. It turns on one conception of Roman space in particular, preserved for us in the Antonine Itineraries. Working from a position that considers the context of the itineraries as movement-through-space, this paper presents an investigation using social network analysis and agen…
Special Reviews Section: Second lives: online worlds for archaeological teaching and research: Linden Labs, Second Life, www.secondlife.com
Towards a Theory of Good History Through Gaming
History computer games have become an economic and cultural phenomenon, and historians should seize the opportunity to participate in their development. Players of history games are interested in the past and in the big questions that drive historical scholarship. In this way, games have the potential to draw players into the discipline if we can discover the best way to express history though simulation. But what research do we draw on as we stu…
Bricks and brick making, Roman
Prestige building projects in Rome and Italy, coupled with increasing urbanization throughout the western Mediterranean, provided the impetus for the development of brick‐faced concrete at the end of the Late Republic and during the Augustan period.
Counting bricks and stacking wood: Providing the physical fabric
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome
Rome was the largest city in the ancient world. As the capital of the Roman Empire, it was clearly an exceptional city in terms of size, diversity and complexity. While the Colosseum, imperial palaces and Pantheon are among its most famous features, this volume explores Rome primarily as a city in which many thousands of men and women were born, lived and died. The thirty-one chapters by leading historians, classicists and archaeologists discuss …
On Connecting Stamps – Network Analysis and Epigraphy
L’analyse des réseaux, qui est à la fois une méthode et une théorie, vise à explorer les relations inhérentes aux données archéologiques. Dans cet article, je m'intéresse aux sources épigraphiques qui sont porteuses de liens sociaux manifestes et qui permettent, si on les envisage du point de vue archéologique, de discerner de nouvelles relations. J'en donne l'exemple à travers deux courtes études de cas traitant de briques romaines estampillées …
The Equifinality of Archaeological Networks: An Agent-Based Exploratory Lab Approach
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope
"The Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This pioneering book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding th…
Mapping the Structure of the Archaeological Web
What is the context of our archaeological blogging? When we blog, are we merely shouting into the void? Do archaeological bloggers link only to one another, and do we shout only to each other (which, it must be admitted, is what our journals and conferences do, too, albeit at a slower pace)? Assume a person knows nothing about archaeology: would that person find your blog? Your project website? Your department's website? Does academic blogging ma…
The Insta-Dead: The rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram
There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand something about the function of this community, what they value and how they trade, buy, and sell, human rem…
Fleshing Out the Bones: Studying the Human Remains Trade with Tensorflow and Inception
There is an active trade in human remains facilitated by social media sites. In this paper we ask: can machine learning detect visual signals in photographs indicating that the human remains depicted are for sale? Do such signals even exist? This paper describes an experiment in using Tensorflow and the Google Inception-v3 model against a corpus of publicly available photographs collected from Instagram. Previous examination of the associated met…
What the Machine Saw: Some questions on the ethics of computer vision and machine learning to investigate human remains trafficking
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
What the Machine Saw: Some questions on the ethics of computer vision and machine learning to investigate human remains trafficking
This article represents the next step in our ongoing effort to understand the online human remains trade, how, why and where it exists on social media. It expands upon initial research to explore the 'rhetoric' and structure behind the use and manipulation of images and text by this collecting community, topics explored using Google Inception v.3, TensorFlow, etc. (Huffer and Graham 2017; 2018). This current research goes beyond that work to addr…
Towards a Method for Discerning Sources of Supply within the Human Remains Trade via Patterns of Visual Dissimilarity and Computer Vision
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 ‘referen…
Towards a Digital Sensorial Archaeology as an Experiment in Distant Viewing of the Trade in Human Remains on Instagram
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 co…
Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade
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
An Approach to the Ethics of Archaeogaming
Virtual worlds are human worlds thus ethical places/spaces. Through an authethnography of play, I try to surface and contextualize some of what I see as the ethical issues that archaeogaming presents, which I frame as provocations for further discussion. What defines 'archaeogaming' is our identity as archaeologists, and so the ethics of archaeogaming must be the ethics of archaeology; ethics are not integral to a game but emerge at the intersect…
Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification
We present an experiment in sonifying archival archaeological imagery to make the act of looking at photography strange and weird. The sounds produced will then arrest us and slow us down, and make apparent to us the different ways that archaeological vision is constructed to particular effect/affect. It makes us alive to what is hidden or elided in the image itself; in slowing down, listening/looking/moving at one, we are moved towards enchantme…
Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification
We present an experiment in sonifying archival archaeological imagery to make the act of looking at photography strange and weird. The sounds produced will then arrest us and slow us down, and make apparent to us the different ways that archaeological vision is constructed to particular effect/affect. It makes us alive to what is hidden or elided in the image itself; in slowing down, listening/looking/moving at one, we are moved towards enchantme…
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian's Macroscope
When TikTok Discovered the Human Remains Trade: A Case Study
In the summer of 2021, a video on TikTok was heavily reposted across a variety of social media platforms (attracting conventional media attention too). Unusually (for TikTok), it was about the trade in human remains. Thus, we were presented with the opportunity to watch how knowledge of the trade exploded into broader public consciousness on a comparatively newer platform. In this article, we scrape TikTok for reactions to that moment. In our pre…
These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains and Why It Matters
These Were People Once: The Online Trade in Human Remains, and Why It Matters
People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade. The answers speak to how the 21st century understands and constructs ‘heritage’ more gene…
Computer Science (23 works) · History (11 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Social media (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Geography (8 works) · World Wide Web (8 works) · Art (6 works)