{"id":20,"date":"2021-04-23T09:06:51","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T13:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/xlab\/?page_id=20"},"modified":"2021-12-06T13:30:19","modified_gmt":"2021-12-06T18:30:19","slug":"news","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/xlab\/news\/","title":{"rendered":"News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday, March 5, 2026<\/p>

Equipment How-To: The THREE Matter and Form Scanner<\/h3>

Sophie Drache is an undergraduate Research Fellow of the XLab The Basics What\u2019s in the case? Wired turntable (which can turn up to 20lbs) Multi-regional power adapter plugs A large and small calibration card with a holder Power brick with cable (10ft) Mini tripod The 3D scanner itself Getting Started The THREE 3D scanner... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, March 7, 2025<\/p>

Updating PixPlot to use Python 3.10; also, image network visualization tool<\/h3>

We use PixPlot a lot around here, both in our teaching and in projects like the BoneTrade project. It is an excellent tool for visualizing image similarity over thousands of images. It achieves this by measuring how each image perturbs a trained image network (in this case, Inception3). We end up with a vectorized... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, February 26, 2025<\/p>

Carleton’s First Archaeology Lab<\/h3>

As part of the CFI-JELF grant we received, we have been converting three small rooms in Paterson Hall into our Cultural Heritage Informatics Colaboratory spaces. It's been a long process, but today we started examining the archaeological materials recovered from the homestead of Philemon Wright near Leamy Lake in Hull (Gatineau), courtesy of the... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, January 22, 2025<\/p>

Virtual Visiting Scholar: Pedro Traper Fern\u00e1ndez<\/h3>

We're pleased to welcome Dr. Pedro Trapero Fern\u00e1ndez of the University of Cadiz who is visiting with us virtually this term! (Carleton has a program for welcoming visiting scholars to collaborate on projects. This program can work for both on-site and virtual visits). Dr. Fern\u00e1ndez is a Roman archaeologist with an interest in agricultural... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Monday, December 9, 2024<\/p>

Our Student Researchers in 2024<\/h3>

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... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Monday, October 21, 2024<\/p>

Homebrewed Software: A Handwriting Transcription App<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, October 18, 2024<\/p>

Transcribing Handwriting with a Multimodal Model<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Monday, June 3, 2024<\/p>

Using a Large Language Model and Pydantic to Extract Structured Data for Cultural Heritage Crime<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, April 9, 2024<\/p>

The Behaviour Space(s) of Large Language Models<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, March 27, 2024<\/p>

XLab Confab Agenda<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, March 15, 2024<\/p>

XLab Confab Keynote – Building the Internment Archaeology Digital Archive<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, March 5, 2024<\/p>

XLab Confab Workshops<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Thursday, February 22, 2024<\/p>

Maps and Annotations<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, February 6, 2024<\/p>

LLM as a discovery bridge for an API<\/h3>

...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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Thursday, January 25, 2024<\/p>

Call For Papers \u2013 Speculative Futures in Cultural Heritage Informatics<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, December 15, 2023<\/p>

Qualitative Analysis of Social Media Posts – A Workflow from OCR to Obsidian<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, December 8, 2023<\/p>

Trawling Data: The Panama Papers and our Knowledge Graph<\/h3>

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<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, November 15, 2023<\/p>

Notes on Building a GPT Agent with OpenAI<\/h3>

OpenAI has recently unveiled a new feature, where you can customize an underlying GPT model to become a kind of agent for you. To do this, you have to have the $20 a month subscription, or have paid access to the API. If you only have API access, you can build in the sandbox... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, October 25, 2023<\/p>

Further Adventures with LLM-GPT4All and Templates<\/h3>

Yesterday Simon Willison updated the LLM-GPT4All plugin which has permitted me to download several large language models to explore how they work and how we could work with the LLM package to use templates to guide our knowledge graph extraction. For instance, using GPT4, we could pipe a text file with information in it... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, October 24, 2023<\/p>

Using Simon Willison’s LLM Package to Extract a Knowledge Graph<\/h3>

Simon Willison's LLM package is a lovely little command line utility that allows you to work with many different large language models. In this post, we use LLM to extract a knowledge graph from a mermaid diagram sketch. 1. Sketch out the basics of your knowledge graph. On paper - yes, on paper! It's... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, October 10, 2023<\/p>

archaeCLIP: or building a visual search engine for archaeology<\/h3>

If you take a bunch of text, and drop it through a large language model, you can get what is called an 'embedding' - a mathematical representation of where that text, that idea you wrote, is located within what the model 'knows'. Other texts that get embedded get a location, too, and once you... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, September 20, 2023<\/p>

Congratulations to the 2023 XLab graduates!<\/h3>

Covid played merry hell with our schedules, but we're pleased to say 'congratulations' to our student RAs who have made it to the finish line in 2023! Chantal Brousseau wrote Metadata in the Margins: Reshaping Archives as Data through Early Modern Marginalia . In this major research essay, Chantal rebuilds an open source image... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, September 13, 2023<\/p>

Setting Up Some Project Management Software<\/h3>

Shawn here. I've always found managing other people and projects to be a very challenging aspect of the job of being an academic. You work largely by yourself for so many years, and then one day, you find yourself trying to guide students, keep their projects on track. You end up with budgets, and... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, September 5, 2023<\/p>

XLab Awarded CFI-JELF Funding<\/h3>

Laura Banducci and Shawn Graham are pleased to report that the XLab is one of 13 Carleton recipients of a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation\u2019s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF) to develop and support the XLab! This includes funds for setting up laboratory space for some kinds of archaeological analysis, a... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Thursday, August 10, 2023<\/p>

A follow-up to ‘Mermaid Diagram to Ontology via GPT3 for the illicit antiquities trade’<\/h3>

  Using the ontology crafted in the previous post I fed 129 Trafficking Culture articles through GPT4. I used a script to pass the ontology, with You are an excellent assistant with deep knowledge of research in the field of illegal and illicit antiquities. Below is an ontology structuring knowledge about the field; using... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, July 28, 2023<\/p>

Mermaid Diagram to Ontology via GPT3 for the illicit antiquities trade<\/h3>

I believe chatgpt using GPT4 is only available to plus customers (July 2023 version) so what follows was developed using GPT3, though in my next experiment, I will be able to use GPT4 to process unstructured text in bulk using the results of today's experiment. In a blog post, Kingsley Uyi Idehen demonstrated his... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, June 28, 2023<\/p>

Writing An Ontology with ChatGPT3<\/h3>

So far in our experiments with knowledge graphs and large language models (see here,and here ) we've been content to work with the unstructured text and let the data model, such as it is, to percolate up from below, trying to impose a bit of structure on it afterwards by seeing what subject -... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, May 31, 2023<\/p>

Using GPT3 To Generate a Knowledge Graph<\/h3>

We talked a bit about using GPT3 to create a knowledge graph in an earlier post.\u00a0 In this one, we'll go into the weeds with a bit more detail. If you could take a long-distance, macroscopic, big-picture look at the antiquities trade, what might you see? This is the question animating our 'New Organigram... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, March 24, 2023<\/p>

Computer, Digital Archaeology Now!<\/h3>

A version of this post was originally put on Shawn Graham's Electric Archaeology What if you could do digital archaeology by simply describing what you wanted to happen? Or any kind of cultural heritage informatics work? Like the computer in Star Trek, what if you could just describe what you want to have happen,... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Tuesday, February 28, 2023<\/p>

Applying RTI Analysis To Byzantine Coin Wear Patterns: Who did What in Medieval Athens?<\/h3>

  Scott Coleman is a PhD candidate in the Department of History As discussed in my previous Xlab post, I am interested in applying Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and photogrammetry\/3D imaging to study Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire) coins. In particular, I want to explore how these methods can be implemented to create better... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Friday, February 17, 2023<\/p>

The \u201cCollector Psychology\u201d<\/h3>

Katherine Davidson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Many, many thanks to Tina Nichol for the conversation which led to this blog topic. I have been wrapping up my doctoral fieldwork over the last few months, where I am exploring the meaning that understudied collections have for First Nations... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Wednesday, February 8, 2023<\/p>

Unpacking AI\u2019s Problems with Physical Media<\/h3>

Katherine Davidson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology The AI debate is upon us in full swing; Getty Images is suing Stability AI over digital image copyright (Vincent 2023), OpenAI and others are releasing tools to help detect AI-written text (of particular interest to educators in the fight for... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Thursday, February 2, 2023<\/p>

Knowledge Graphs and GPT-3<\/h3>

One of the things we're working on in our group are ways to extract structured knowledge from lots of unstructured text. In an article coming out soon in Advances in Archaeological Practice, we demonstrate some of the things that we can accomplish when we have statements about a domain (in this case, the antiquities... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Monday, January 9, 2023<\/p>

Excavating Memes and the Bone Trade on Instagram<\/h3>

Cassandra McKenney is an MA student in the Department of History Part of Xlab\u2019s work is concerned with how people engage with cultural heritage artifacts and ideas in digital environments. This led us to a collaborative study of memes related to human remains trading, or the \u201cBone Trade\u201d on Instagram, including the accounts who... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div>

Thursday, November 17, 2022<\/p>

Digital Absences in Cultural Heritage: Who cares?<\/h3>

Sam Nicholls is an MA student in the Department of History I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in heritage institutions \u2013 as both visitor and employee. I\u2019m sure if you\u2019re reading this post, that you also have likely spent some time within these organizations, at either the local or national level. My experience in... More<\/span><\/p><\/a><\/div><\/div>

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