Archives: News

Monday, October 21, 2024

Homebrewed Software: A Handwriting Transcription App

By Shawn Graham Continuing from the last experiment and ruminating on Drew Breunig's taxonomy of use cases for AI (in short: gods, interns, cogs, and toys) as well as 'homecooked software' I undertook to use Anthrophic's 'Claude' model to see what I could do. I'm building a cog via Claude's 'artifacts' feature which allows... More

Friday, October 18, 2024

Transcribing Handwriting with a Multimodal Model

by Shawn Graham Legacy archaeological data is often trapped in handwritten context sheets, site diaries, and scraps of paper. Transcribing such materials so that one can work with them is time consuming and difficult. If you're an English speaker, trained in North American cursive you're probably better off that the average undergrad today who... More

Monday, June 3, 2024

Using a Large Language Model and Pydantic to Extract Structured Data for Cultural Heritage Crime

A few weeks ago Vianney Mixtur published a blog post and related code repository showing how he used the Mixtral model to pull together recipe data from semi-structured cookery information. We have been experimenting here for some time using a variety of approaches to create knowledge graphs from academic articles, newspaper articles, auction... More

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

The Behaviour Space(s) of Large Language Models

By Shawn Graham. For many years, I built agent based models of various phenomena based on archaeological data. These are models of interacting software agents in a simulated environment, with many different parameters; the first step in understanding what your model implies for the culture under study is to understand how your model behaves.... More

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

XLab Confab Agenda

XLab Confab Agenda Location: Richcraft Hall (River Building), 2nd floor atrium & conference rooms. Location Map Here. We will email participants attending virtually a zoom link - watch your inboxes! Day 1: Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024 8:30 am: Grab a name tag and have a coffee! 9:00 am - 9:10 am: Welcome, Land Acknowledgement... More

Friday, March 15, 2024

XLab Confab Keynote – Building the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive

Dr. Ethan Watrall will be delivering our keynote address: Building the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive - A Practical Discussion of a Community Engaged Digital Heritage Project. In 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. Nearly overnight, 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and shipped off to incarceration and... More

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

XLab Confab Workshops

In a month's time, we'll be hosting the XLab Confab and we really hope you'll join us! The workshops can be counted towards the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities. And what are the workshops about? We're glad you asked! Dr. Ethan Watrall will be taking us through issues around building and sustaining digitization projects... More

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Maps and Annotations

Michael Carrier is an MA History with Digital Humanities Student, with a focus on archaeological research The Thomas Ashby photographic archive is now in the public domain. Ashby was the first student (and later, the third Director) of the British School at Rome, and pioneered landscape archaeology in Italy through a number of ground... More

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

LLM as a discovery bridge for an API

...in which I discuss the logic and functioning of two jupyter notebooks that use Simon Willison's LLM to act as a kind of discovery agent for a history api and an archaeology api. Both notebooks are available for copying and improving and use! Crossposted from ElectricArchaeology by Shawn Graham I have been playing with... More

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Call For Papers – Speculative Futures in Cultural Heritage Informatics

Speculative Futures in Cultural Heritage Informatics An open-access volume edited by Katherine Davidson, Kavita Mistry, and Scott Coleman, to be published by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota With a foreword by Shawn Graham and an Afterword by Ethan Watrall You are a graduate student or early career researcher working at... More

Friday, December 15, 2023

Qualitative Analysis of Social Media Posts – A Workflow from OCR to Obsidian

In the past, we have applied many different distant reading techniques to social media posts related to the human remains trade. As part of a new analysis, we are exploring a computer-facilitated close reading of social media posts. Here we detail a workflow that assumes one already has a collection of images that capture... More

Friday, December 8, 2023

Trawling Data: The Panama Papers and our Knowledge Graph

The dataset for the Panama Papers is available here. Wouldn't it be great to examine it for people connected to the antiquities trade? In this post I try to do that, using our knowledge graph generated from the Trafficking Culture Encyclopedia. Behind that link you will find: Offshore Leaks (2013) Panama Papers (2016) Bahamas... More

Load More →