It’s been a great year for our student research colleagues in 2024 at the XLab! Here are some highlights in rough chronological order:
Spring:
- Katherine Davidson, Kavita Mistry, and Scott Coleman put on the successful ‘XLab Confab’
- Katherine, Kavita, and Scott began the process for an edited volume on ‘Speculative Futures for Cultural Heritage Informatics’ that emerged from the Confab
- Michael Carrier presented on his research at the 30th annual Underhill Graduate Colloquium
- Kavita presented at the Ingenium Institute Research Roundtable Conference on “Seeking the Digital: An Inventory of Born-Digital and Reliant Artifacts in the National Collection”
- Katherine co-authored two pieces on the online human remains trade and was first-author for one of them:
- Davidson, K., Graham, S. and Huffer, D. 2024 A Protocol for When Social Media Goes Private: Studying archaeological or heritage discourses in closed Facebook groups, Internet Archaeology 67. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.67.11
- Graham, S., Davidson, K. and Huffer. D. 2024 Behind Closed Doors: The Human Remains Trade within Private Facebook Groups, Internet Archaeology 67. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.67.14
- Kavita published on her work as an intern within the Canadian Science and Technology Museum’s collections (Ingenium) on “Exploring the Born-Digital: An Archaeological Approach to Collections Research“,
Summer:
- Scott spent time in Athens data-munging,wrangling, and analyzing for the ‘Inhabiting Byzantine Athens’ project led by Dr. Fotini Konyli of UVa and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
- A new project on data publishing began with Scott and Prof. Laura Banducci
- Kavita started developing a virtual museum of the archaeology of Gabii (where Prof. Banducci conducts field work)
- Michael Carrier was part of the team that put together and launched the Norval Morriseau Storylines project exhibit
- Former XLabber Chantal Brousseau was part of the team that published the first archaeological work ever done in space:
- Walsh JSP, Graham S, Gorman AC, Brousseau C, Abdullah S (2024) Archaeology in space: The Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) on the International Space Station. Report 1: Squares 03 and 05. PLoS ONE 19(8): e0304229. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304229
- Former XLabbers Cassandra Crane & Jaime Simons were the first authors on a piece in the Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and the Media in the 21st Century, on Digital Identities: Memes and Engagements with Human Remains on Instagram
Fall:
- Katherine is part of the team that has put together the ‘Museum of Looted Antiquities‘ project
- Scott and Kavita have submitted their thesis proposals
- Scott presented on his research and teaching at ASOR (on using personal knowledge management tools as pedagogical scaffolding for teaching ancient history)
- Kavita is co-organizing the Underhill Graduate Colloquium for February 2025
- Kavita has a piece about to come out with Ingenium on ‘Shaping Sounds: Innovative Designs for Sound Capture’
- Kavita participated in the ‘@risk north 3‘ conference to learn about digital preservation strategies
- Michael Carrier and Liran Assaf have moved into the thesis & major research essay portion of their studies; Michael is using language embeddings to study the ancient Roman historians’ conceptions of space, while Liran is investigating an episode of art crime in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
- Liran is also assisting Dr. Amanda Montague in the supporting research for the Studio DH project.
- Former XLabber Noah Chapman started his PhD at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL
- Former XLabber Chantal Brousseau continues to refine and teach a graduate workshop on coding for humanists via MacOdrum Library’s DH support
And for the XLab more generally, 2024 was the year where our CFI grant was finally sorted out and we began to accumulate equipment and space! By this time next year, we should be fully up and operational.