The X-Lab

The XLab – The Cultural Heritage Informatics Collaboratory – represents both a space and a series of relationships within and without the University. It is a kind of transdisciplinary ‘skunkworks’ for fostering encounters with and between cultural heritage and digital media and computation. As a skunkworks, or a space for trying non-traditional or imaginative new solutions, it aims to bring together tenacious tinkerers, who are willing to experiment, to wonder, to try, and to iterate – to try, try again. The XLab is led by Graham and Laura Banducci.

The XLab is always interested in collaborators.

Ex Figlinis

The growth of the city of Rome was dependent on its ability to exploit successfully the human and natural resources of its hinterland. Although this eventually expanded to incorporate the entire Mediterranean seaboard, the resources of the Tiber Valley originally nourished the city and continued to do so despite the growth in imports from elswhere in the Roman world. This study examines the way the Tiber Valley functioned in terms of its economic and social geography, as evidenced by the organisation and dynamics of the brick industry. Available via Humanities Commons.

Exploring Big Historical Data

Written with Ian Milligan and Scott Weingart (1st edition) and Kim Martin (2nd edition)

The Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This pioneering book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines, or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information.Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what ‘digital’ does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Find your closest copy via WorldCat

Failing Gloriously

Please, you gotta help me. I’ve nuked the university.

Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university. At turns hilarious, depressing, and inspiring, Graham’s book presents a contemporary take on the academic memoir, but rather than celebrating the victories, he reflects on the failures and considers their impact on his intellectual and professional development. These aren’t heroic tales of overcoming odds or paeans to failure as evidence for a macho willingness to take risks. They’re honest lessons laced with a genuine humility that encourages us to think about making it safer for ourselves and others to fail.

A foreword from Eric Kansa and an afterword by Neha Gupta engage the lessons of Failing Gloriously and consider the role of failure in digital archaeology, the humanities, and social sciences. Full text Open Access download here

An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology

The use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the ‘just-so’ stories they tell about the past. It requires a formalization of the story so that it can be represented as a simulation; researchers are then able to explore the unintended consequences or emergent outcomes of stories about the past. Agent-based models are one end of a spectrum that, at the opposite side, ends with video games. This volume explores this spectrum in the context of Roman archaeology, addressing the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of a formalized approach to computation and archaeogaming. Find your closest copy via WorldCat.

These Were People Once

Written with Damien Huffer

People buy and sell human remains online. Most of this trade these days is over social media. In a study of this ‘bone trade’, how it works, and why it matters, the authors review and use a variety of methods drawn from the digital humanities to analyze the sheer volume of social media posts in search of answers to questions regarding this online bone trade. The answers speak to how the 21st century understands and constructs ‘heritage’ more generally: each person their own expert, yet seeking community and validation, and like the major encyclopedic museums, built on a kind of digital neocolonialist othering of the dead. Find your closest copy via WorldCat.

From the Organigram Project

Donna Yates and Shawn Graham (2024) “Reputation laundering and museum collections: patterns, priorities, provenance, and hidden crime”, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 30:2, 145-164. DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2023.2284740

Shawn Graham, Donna Yates, Ahmed El-Roby, Chantal Brousseau, Jonah Ellens, and Callum McDermott (2023) “Relationship prediction in a knowledge graph embedding model of the illicit antiquities trade”, Advances in Archaeological Practice, 11:2, 126-138. DOI: 10.1017/aap.2023.1.

From the Bone Trade Project

Shawn Graham and Damien Huffer (2020) “Reproducibility, Replicability, and REvisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade”, Internet Archaeology, 55. DOI: 10.11141/ia.55.11.

From the Computational Creativity Project

Shawn Graham and Jaime Simons. “Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification”, Internet Archaeology 56. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.56.

Listen to Dura Europos: Man standing in doorway of block B2 at Dura Europos. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection, z-90; corresponds with Baird 2011, fig. 5

International Space Station Archaeological Project

Walsh, J., Graham, S., Gorman, A. C., Brousseau, C., & Abdullah, S. (2024, February 19). The Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) on the International Space Station, Report 1: Squares 03 and 05. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/qmf73

Code Notebooks & Data

HIST1900c

The History of the Internet. A broad survey that takes in a lot of the prehistory of the Internet as well.

HIST3000a

Introduction to Digital Archaeology. An asynchronous online course wherein students are exposed to the stages of digital archaeological research through the study of a local cemetery’s gravestones.

HIST3812

Playful Engagement with History. What do videogames and theories of play teach us about writing history?

HIST3814o

Crafting Digital History. An asynchronous online course meant to equip the student with the necessary digital literacies to do digital research in history.

HIST4805a

Senior Seminar, connected to his latest research interests. In 2024/25 this is ‘History and/of Artificial Intelligence’. The 2018-19 exploration of Bad Archaeology is here.

HIST4916a

DH + Museums. An exploration of dh methods for small museums. Originally run just as the pandemic hit.

HIST5706a

Digital History for Public Historians, 2021 - a ‘digital history choose your own adventure’. Asynchronous online, with a choose your own adventure syllabus. Previous versions of this course have had an alternative focus on ‘guerrilla digital public history’, wherein students committed acts of public history in public spaces.