Introduction

to Digital Archaeology

HIST 3000a CLCV 3000a DIGH 3700b

Prof. Shawn Graham

shawn.graham@carleton.ca

with

Kavita Mistry & Cierra Venable

Part One

• some brief biographical sketches:

• who I am, what makes me a 'digital archaeologist'

• introducing your TAs

• who you are and what you're hoping to get out of this course

• course structure

• assessment structure

• overview of course schedule

Part Two

• Bite-sized Unconference:

• Setting up your personal digital archaeology 'lab' space

• A Personal Dataset exercise

Today's Agenda

Project	Research Question(s)	Main Analytical Methods
Ex Figlinis	How do social relationships translate into exploitation of Rome's hinterland?	Social Network Analysis; XRD & XRF
BehaviourSpace	What do we see if we reanimate Roman social networks? Hypothesis: social network shapes can enhance or dampen the sources of civil violence	Agent Based Modelling, Social Network Analysis
Computational Creativity	Where can computational creativity techniques enhance legacy archaeological knowledge?	Sonification, artificial neural networks, computer vision, archaeogaming
The Bone Trade Project	Why do people buy and sell human remains on social media?	Image analysis: similarity, composition, influence; Social Network Analysis; Word Vectors; NLP; Text Analysis
The Organigram Project	Uncovering latent antiquities crime	Natural language processing; Knowledge graph embedding models
The International Space Station Archaeology Project	How do humans make a micro-society in space? What methods can we use?	Image analysis: composition, tagging; assemblage similarity
The Archaeology Impossible Project	What methods can we use to study human societies that are not self-sustaining?	Image analysis; OSINT; object detection models; assemblage similarities; network analysis; knowledge graph embeddings

1998

2026

for books, publications, and other outputs, see shawngraham.github.io

office: pa406

XLab: pa435-439

student coffee hours: mornings, 9 - 11 ish, Page Break in the library

a variety of digital archaeologies... what unites these?

Ex Figlinis

Behaviourspace

Computational Creativity

Bone Trade

Kavita Mistry

Cierra Venable

We don't have a BA in Archaeology, so here's who you are ....

program distribution of students.

Course Structure

3 modules:
- Capturing data
- Considering / Critiquing data
- Communicating
2 consolidation documents (20% each)
Personal Digital Archaeology Project (30%)
- includes weekly exercises
Final Exam (30%)

https://shawngraham.github.io/hist3000-f26/

2. Use these weekly exercises to help you design and implement your own personal digital archaeology project

1. Weekly exercises to build skills

3. Two consolidation exercises where you put what you've been doing into context

4. Weekly exercises are done/not done; PDAP eventually submitted with repo

5. Final exam functions as a final consolidation document.

Formal assessment builds on top of practice.

Part Two Photo by https://unsplash.com/@harlynkingm

Bite-Size- Unconference

- what do you want out of this course

- who has similar interests

- things you want to know about?

- setting up your digital space

- the dataset of you

Pretend this

is our class.

Divide in 3.

Go to the

area most

interested in.

You can change your

mind

Github Instructions

Google Colab Instructions

Personal Data Story

pay attention to the decisions you make, and why you make them

Identify your data: Who are you?
Describe your data: What are you interested in describing as a part of your dataset? What are you not?
Collect: Gather your data in one place.
Clean: Edit the dataset so that it’s in a presentable, consistent format. What tools do you use? Why?
Analyze: What stories are in your dataset?
Distribute: How would you share it back to me?