Machine Learning the Visual Rhetoric of the Trade in Human Remains

Summary

There is a thriving online trade, and collector community, that seeks specimens of numerous categories of human remains. This commerce is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay and operates within a complex ethical and legal landscape. This presentation will share key results of ongoing work to data mine these online markets on both new social media and multi-lingual e-commerce platforms. In particular, we are interested in the possibilities presented by machine learning and other ways to ‘train’ the machine to identify the illicit, the illegal, and the unethical. Can we design ethical archaeological machines? We will discuss the relevance of applying digital humanities tools, how to do so, key findings from previous research on the Instagram collecting community, and ongoing work expanding beyond Instagram. At the very least, we believe that machine learning does reveal important, otherwise hidden, aspects of the visual and textual rhetoric that underpins the sale, trade, auction (and sometimes forgery) of the dead.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20290