Professor Shawn Graham has co-authored a new publication with grad student Jaime Simmons. The piece, “Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification“, has just been published in Internet Archaeology (a leading open access journal for digital archaeology, computational archaeology).
The work that led to this publication was via their partnership grant with the University of Toronto’s ‘Computational Research on the Ancient Near East CRANE Project’. Their sub project is on ‘computational creativity and archaeological data’.
Summary of the Article
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 enchantment, and engage in a kind of digital hermeneutics that reveals more than what the lens may have captured.
The full text of the article is available online.