Social network analysis as a distinct field of study had its genesis in the anthropological
revolt against structural-functionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was born through
an awareness among a new generation of scholars that structural- functional models failed
to make adequate space for human agency. Attention to personal…[Read more]

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 hinterland eventually extended 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…[Read more]

An appendix to my MA thesis, ‘Satisfied with a Knowledge of the Totals: Labouring to Build the Claudian Aqueducts’, Reading, 1998. In this appendix, I tried to match Ashby’s descriptions of the remains of the aqueducts with Van Deman’s descriptions. From these descriptions, I crafted a volumetric model of the quantities of materials used in the…[Read more]

Agent-based modeling presents the opportunity to study phenomena such as the emergence of territories from the perspective of individuals. We present a tool for growing networks of socially-connected settlement structures from distribution map data, using an agent based model authored in the Netlogo programming language, version 3.1.2. The…[Read more]

For historians, agent-based modeling (ABM) methodologies allow us to formalise our thinking about how the past worked and explore those assumptions in a way previously limited to thought-experiments. In ABM, numerous autonomous, heterogeneous agents are allowed to interact in a digital environment according to rules of behaviour directly drawn…[Read more]

A tutorial on using open source photogrammetry tools with archival video footage

This course is an exploratory studio for guerilla digital public history. It involves a whole lot of experimentation and making. Things will break, and will go in directions that you didn’t expect. Part of the learning will involve documenting your practice. I will get you started with three expressive digital media that you can use to explore…[Read more]

Syllabus for HIST3812, Winter 2018 at Carleton University, Department of History, on ‘Critical Digital Making’. “What happens to history as it gets digitized? That is, what does history look like, what happens to our materials, and the stories we tell or the questions we ask, as we abstract further and further away from ‘In Real Life’? What doe…[Read more]

This piece is a response to Colleen Morgan’s Truth and Beauty Bombs: The personal/political/poetics of online communication in #archaeology. Morgan’s piece was a cri-de-coeur, for the web we lost, a manifesto for something better.

A syllabus for the core course in the MA Digital Humanities at Carleton University, Fall 2017, led by Shawn Graham.

This paper presents a way of looking at Roman space from a Roman perspective, and suggests ways in which this point of view might open up new approaches in Roman archaeology. It turns on one conception of Roman space in particular, preserved for us in the Antonine Itineraries. Working from a position that considers the context of the itineraries…[Read more]