https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/ Recent content on Computational Creativity and Archaeological Data Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/year-in-review-2021-2022/ Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/year-in-review-2021-2022/ General Thrust of Our Group This Year Last year, we moved to more of a skunkworks approach, where I provided some overall direction, but allowed the team to follow their nose where’er it leads. In general terms, we’re taking an approach to using computer vision to archaeological imagery, for both research, outreach, and as a lens through which we deform the past, to bring new elements into view Graduates Completed MA for Jeff Blackadar, History with Data Science. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/year-in-review-2020-2021/ Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/year-in-review-2020-2021/ I’m… I’m not entirely sure. We were all busy, but it was the kind of busy that doesn’t really translate into immediate products. The problem with working with legacy datasets is finding legacy datasets you can work with. But really… the world’s been on fire. Things slipped down the cracks. Some of the team graduated. Emma Gillies has moved on, after using what she learned here to visually analyze the evolution of Canadian craft beer labels (! https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/fall-term-recap/ Thu, 09 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/fall-term-recap/ I’ve done not a particularly good job of keeping this website up to date. But we have been busy. In the fall, we arranged for some more data science training for Jeff, and he’s been working hard on learning Keras and other packages and approaches for the various tasks we have in mind for this project. I’ve been reposting some of his open research notes here, but since I’ve fallen behind, I’ll just link over to his notes here. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/chatbots/ Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/chatbots/ I’ve made a number of twitterbots, and one or two facebook messenger bots. In my lesson on making twitterbots for the Programming Historian I wrote: I believe also that there is space in digital history and the digital humanities more generally for creative, expressive, artistic work. I belive that there is space for programming historians to use the affordances of digital media to create things that could not otherwise exist to move us, to inspire us, to challenge us. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/creating-a-set-of-images-for-image-recognition/ Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/creating-a-set-of-images-for-image-recognition/ crossposted from Jeff’s blog. Jeff is an MA History and Data Science student @CarletonU. I would like to train an image recognition model with my own images to see how well it works. Here I want to use the obverse of coins to make a model to recognize the portraits of Elizabeth II (younger), Elizabeth II (more mature), George VI and Abraham Lincoln. Initially I used 5 cent coins but I found they reflected too much light to take a good photograph so I switched to 1 cent coins. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/jeff-getting-started/ Fri, 09 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/jeff-getting-started/ crossposted from Jeff’s blog. Jeff is an MA History and Data Science student @CarletonU. I am doing research for the Computational Creativity and Archaeological Data project. My current challenge has been to use techniques from Computer Vision to analyse images relevant to Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (CRANE) with the goal to provide additional understanding of these images. Computer Vision and machine learning could identify and classify elements in images or provide a possible reconstruction of a partial artifact using an image of it combined with a model of images of related artifacts. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/introducing-jeff-blackadar/ Thu, 08 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/introducing-jeff-blackadar/ Jeff Blackadar is a part-time MA student in the Department of History, pursuing an MA in History with Data Science. As an undergrad, he published a lesson on MySQL with R in The Programming Historian. His work on the CCAD project will explore techniques of in-painting and image completion on archaeological photography, and the ways these images can be used for photogrammetry and the exploration of ‘fuzziness’ in computational imagination / archaeological reconstruction. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/meshroom/ Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/meshroom/ Meshroom ~ “Meshroom is a free, open-source 3D Reconstruction Software based on the AliceVision Photogrammetric Computer Vision framework.” The software runs with a GUI for Windows or Mac; but it can be run in the cloud and can take advantage of Google’s GPU-enabled collaborative notebooks. Have your images zipped up, and then run this notebook: Google Colab Upload the zip file, run each code block in turn. The code was first posted to Gist by donmahallem. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/semantic-similarity-chatbot/ Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/semantic-similarity-chatbot/ The EMOTIVE project is using chatbots to foster archaeological empathy. I’m wondering, can I use a chatbot as a way of exploring the latent idea space of published archeological knowledge? Allison Parrish’s bot demonstrates how to build a chatbot trained on the Cornell Movie Dialogue Database. My ambition here is to train the bot on the written outputs of the CRANE project: an informed archaeological chatbot. The chatbot learns the archaeological words and via word embeddings the universe of related concepts. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/gan-images/ Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/gan-images/ Generative adversarial networks can ‘paint’ images or retrieve ‘photographs’ of things that never existed. We are training a GAN on a series of site photographs as part of a 3d photogrammetry workflow, to computationally hallucinate the site. Below are some examples of other GAN projects GAN Gogh A project by Kenny Jones and Derrick Bonafilia, training a GAN on European Masters. Their code repo is on Github. Write-up on Towards Data Science. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/what-is-computational-creativity/ Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/what-is-computational-creativity/ It’s late at night, and I’m trying to pound out some words so that I have it on the screen what, roughly, I think is the/an answer to this question. I will come back to this over and over again during this project, I’m sure. Expect non-sequiturs. In their introduction to the issue of Internet Archaeology devoted to digital creativity, Gareth Beale and Paul Reilly point out how archaeologists tend to downplay the ‘theoretical implications [of digital tools] and to characterise methodological transformation in terms of technological innovation’. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/getting-underway/ Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/getting-underway/ I have spent a lot of time this afternoon getting this website up and running. But success! I’ve also got some generative and siamese network experiments underway some blurry computer hallucinations of a cleaned excavation trench https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/jeff-first-book-mnist/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/jeff-first-book-mnist/ Jeff’s initial experiment with a Google Colab notebook, on the mnist dataset. <a href="https://colab.research.google.com/github/jeffblackadar/image_work/blob/master/deep_learning_with_python_appendix_a.ipynb" target="_parent"><img src="https://colab.research.google.com/assets/colab-badge.svg" alt="Open In Colab"/> https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/jeff-photos/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/notebooks/jeff-photos/ A notebook within which you may control your device’s camera to take photos. A notebook for taking photos and removing backgrounds. https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://shawngraham.github.io/CCAD/about/ Through the machines we employ, we are able to stretch our imaginations into new worlds, to ask new questions and find new solutions to old problems" - Rose Ferraby, ‘Geophysics: Creativity and the Archaeological Imagination’ This project is my contribution to the larger CRANE - Computational Research in the Ancient Near East project. With my research students, we are exploring ways we can creatively reuse legacy archaeological data (whether from the Ancient Near East or elsewhere) to generate new insights, new inspirations, new enchantments.