Dr. Shawn M. Graham
Shawn Graham, Carleton University Damien Huffer, Stockholm University
There is a thriving online trade in anatomical, ethnographic and archaeological human remains that makes ready use of new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and until recently, eBay. The “fetishization” of the ‘exotic’ dead that underpins this trade by its very nature transforms pieces of the body into material culture: curios, commodities or objets d’art. This practice has deep Colonial-era roots, but today’s e-commerce and social media platforms have only expanded collectors’ reach and made p
Can we teach machines to identify from photographs alone patterns in the ‘visual rhetoric’ that signal materials for sale? Can ‘licit’ materials be discerned from ‘illicit’? Are there geographical patterns? Can we trace materials back to a source?
Dr. Shawn M. Graham