Date: Mercredi 18 mars 2020
Heure: 11h30-13h
Lieu: 3150 rue Jean Brillant - Université de Montréal
Carrefour des Arts et des Sciences, C-8132
Dans le cadre de la deuxième édition du séminaire virtuel organisé avec le ThincLab (Université de Guelph) et le Humanities Data Lab (Université d’Ottawa), Shawn Graham fera une conférence intitulée « They Sell What? Studying the Trade in Human Remains on Social Media » :
In the early days of both fields for instance researchers often collected the human remains of ‘the other’ in attempts to bolster claims to European superiority. With time, many of these human remains found their way onto the market, into the hands of collectors and ‘enthusiasts’. With the advent of social media and platform capitalism, there has been an explosion in this trade. In this talk, I discuss our research using computer vision techniques, ‘distant viewing’ and ‘distant reading’ to try to understand why people buy and sell human remains, how they do this, the extent of this trade, and what seeing like a machine implies for how we view the humanity of these peoples whose remains are commodified this way. The results have implications for both the living and the dead.
Shawn Graham trained in Roman archaeology but has become over the years a digital archaeologist and digital humanist. In 2016 he won a Provost’s Fellowship in Teaching Award and was designated a Carleton University Teaching Fellow. He recently won a SSHRC Insight Grant for a project called ‘The Bone Trade: Studying the Online Trade in Human Remains with Machine Learning and Neural Networks’. He is part of the multi-institution SSHRC Partnership Grant funded project, ‘CRANE: Computational Research in the Ancient Near East’ led by Tim Harrison of the University of Toronto. He is also part of the SSHRC Insight Development Grant funded project ‘Nanohistory‘, led by Dr. Matt Milner of Memorial University, exploring graph-theoretic representations of historical events. (Source de la bio: https://carleton.ca/history/people/shawn-graham/).
