Show notes:
0:00 Dr. Fiona Greenland discussing collabarative work with Curia co-founder Dr. Michelle Fabiana
2:00 Dr. Michelle Fabiani's background
3:40 Dr. Greenland’s background
5:40 collaboration between Greenland and Fabiani
7:10 overview of Curia Lab
9:40 Informatics, the science of information
11:30 Syrian project - how robust and reliable data on scope of Syrian looting was with a review of remote sensing imagery
15:10 participants in Syrian project
17:20 Syrian project – evidence on whether there is a connection between Syrian civilian fatalities/casualties and cultural heritage looting
22:45 prelude hypothesis
27:50 war in Ukraine and its effects on Ukrainian culture
32:00 how the data is used to inform accountability
34:30 Greenland’s work with Conflict Observatory Ukraine
36:00 Ukrainians’ current restitution, reparations and accountability efforts
37:50 user guides for each area
42:30 Fabiani’s PhD project on Egyptian archeological looting
44:00 current project that builds on PhD project
46:00 impact of technology on their approach, including disinformation
50:00 complications created by AI, including generative AI
54:00 perspective of skepticism required
56:30 online risks and need for mitigation
58:15 how their work speaks to justice
58:30 Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing
1:02:30 questions of justice for whom
1:05:30 Lauren Stein: question on the role of universities in Curia Lab
1:07:50 hope for their work to establish frameworks of cooperation and collaboration that cherish equal access to knowledge/information that would then lead to equal access to accountability
1:09:10 hope for their work to facilitate a shift to a multi-disciplinary approach
Please share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com
Music by Toulme.
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Thanks so much for listening!
© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When we started this collaboration, it was as two
social scientists who werefocused on cultural heritage
questions.
I now understand that we havefound other collaborators within
cultural heritage who share ourinterest in and commitment to
(00:23):
questions about the social, thepolitical, the economic.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that
focuses on how justice does ordoesn't play out when art and
law overlap.
Hi everyone, it's Stephanie,and that was Dr Fiona Greenland
discussing CurioLab, which sheco-directs with Dr Michelle
Fabiani.
What follows is a conversationwith Dr Greenland and Dr Fabiani
(00:54):
, during which they share abouthow they came to found CurioLab,
of their various projects thathave brought to life the vision
of Curia Lab to provide aflexible platform for the
collection, analysis anddissemination of research on
cultural heritage, dynamics andcommunity impacts, particularly
(01:15):
in the aftermath of loss, and wealso look at how they define
justice and the mark they hopeto be leaving with their work
through Curia Lab.
Dr Michelle Fabiani and DrFiona Greenland.
Welcome to Warfare of Art andLaw.
And Second Saturday Thank youso much for being here.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Thrilled to be here.
Thanks for having us, Thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Tiffany.
So I would love to begin ifeach of you would kind of share
a bit about your background andthen how you came to collaborate
together to create Curia Lab.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Sure, fiona, I'll go first, if that's all right.
I come from a background incultural anthropology and
archaeology.
Before moving into criminologyand criminal justice, I was
trying to find my way in termsof where's an area where I felt
(02:13):
like I could make a difference,and, through a lot of
experimentation, working incollections and working within
the legal framework of museumsand a very interdisciplinary
education, I settled oncriminology and criminal justice
, as it gave a solid foundationand a very holistic
(02:35):
methodological framework that Icould use to look at this
international intersection ofart and antiquities and illicit
economies, behavioral patterns,as well as novel approaches to
data collection, and so my focushas always been on the illicit
(02:55):
antiquities realm and illicitart area.
But how I have approached it haschanged, and I try to come at
my work from as broad aperspective as possible.
So if there's a field that youcan think of, I have probably at
least done some studying in it.
I do data science.
(03:16):
I've studied cultural heritagelaw, domestically and
internationally, economics,sociology and internationally.
Economics, sociology, politicalscience, terrorism,
environmental science.
I try to bring as much as I canto the table, while recognizing
that I don't have to be theexpert in everything that's very
(03:36):
true about Michelle.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
She is the Swiss army knife of cultural heritage
studies, where every blade issharp.
I trained first in classicalarchaeology and my focus was on
the Western Roman Empire, and Itrained in the formal features
(03:58):
of imperial sculpture and didexcavations in Italy and in
Spain, and I was a classicalarchaeologist for 10 years.
In fact I got my first doctoraldegree in that field and along
the way I got curious aboutbigger contemporary system
(04:21):
questions.
So that included questionsabout museums and collecting
practices as well as the globalcirculation of archaeological
materials, and these questionsstarted to be of interest to me
in the late 90s, which was aperiod before we could say
(04:44):
established university interestin these.
There weren't the range ofmuseum studies programs yet I
found it necessary to retrain.
So I did a second doctorate,and this one was in public
policy and sociology doctorateand this one was in public
(05:08):
policy and sociology, and it wasthrough that program that I
developed many of the skills andframeworks that I bring to bear
now in the work with Michelleand that Michelle touched on as
well.
So I would say at core we aresocial scientists with deep
training in archaeology andanthropology.
And you asked another question,Stephanie, that I want to pick
(05:30):
up on, and that is when westarted working together.
We met in 2015 at a conferencein Chicago, and I remember this
conversation because Michellewas a PhD student, I was a
postdoc.
She told me about this projectshe was doing.
I thought this project was wildand what she was doing was more
(05:50):
ambitious than anything I'dseen in studies of looting.
She was working with a largeset of satellite images to
understand the relationshipbetween political and economic
instability and looting in Egyptuncharted territory and I
thought, if this woman knows howto do this, this is somebody I
(06:12):
want to work with.
And in 2021, we formallyestablished the lab after many
years of collaborating projectsand different methods.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Yeah, and that that initial conversation, I think I
cracked Fiona down because of areally fantastic article she
wrote um bashing the 5 million,6 million value of the art
market.
That comes from nowhere, and Ijust so appreciated how nuanced
her framing of it seems likeanything she wrote was, and so I
(06:46):
just found my way to theconference specifically so that
I could sit down with thisfantastic researcher and pick
her brain about really anythingthat I could, and we never
looked back.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, what a powerhouse collaboration you two
create.
So Curia Lab, let's dive intothat.
And so we've talked about kindof the seed of it, so would you
take it from there?
Speaker 3 (07:14):
So Curia Lab has this idea behind it that there's so
much we can do when we try to,when we have first of all data
to do it with, and so a lot ofwhat we started with in the lab
is working on how can we andwhere can we find and coalesce
(07:39):
data that are relevant forpolicymakers and for scholars
and that are importantly,accessible to these communities.
There are a lot of data sourcesthat are protected, either
because they were produced byfederal government or that are
part of the intelligenceapparatus of any nation, and so
(08:01):
there may be very nuanced viewsof art and antiquities, crimes
that we can't actually validateor replicate and therefore we
can't build off of repository ofdata.
(08:28):
In the criminal justice area,there's the really large open
access data set or data systemcalled ICPSR, where you can find
data on pretty much any topicyou want and as you create data
you can house it.
That was sort of one.
Inspiration is if we couldbecome this clearinghouse, but
we also really wanted toincorporate the idea of
resilience and how data can helpinform ideas about what
(08:52):
resilience are, and so Curia ina large extent focuses on this
nexus of new technologies, onstate government participation
in protection and destruction,as well as grassroots efforts.
We try to have a very highlyethical, high ethical standard
(09:12):
for how we collect and storedata, for consideration about
how we should be trainingourselves and others and how,
then, what we produce can helptrain others to contribute to
this work.
And I'll pause here to letFiona also add in I'll tackle
the I in our lab name.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
From the beginning, stephanie, we thought about
information, the heterogeneoussources of information that go
into understanding culturalheritage, archaeological
materials, artworks, sites ofimportance and, of course,
intangible heritage.
Informatics is the science ofinformation and we recognize in
(10:00):
each other a deep found respectfor the ways in which librarians
organize information, preserveinformation, preserve the traces
of the provenance ofinformation, where does it come
from, and making it availableand useful for users.
So, information scienceshouldn't be confused with data
(10:20):
science.
These things, of course, speakto each other.
But informatics is the focus onstoring and making useful in an
organized and transparentlylogical way for a range of users
, and I want to home in on thispoint for just a moment.
(10:42):
Is we think collectively aboutthe ways in which museums,
libraries and librarians findthemselves facing significant
funding cuts at this moment inthe United States?
And just to say, there's a lotthat we will be missing if
(11:04):
libraries and librarians are notable to do their job of
preserving and organizing andpresenting information.
So informatics of course speaksto broader fields of work.
For us in the Currie Lab, it'sabout how we can capture,
preserve, store, organize andmake available information about
(11:24):
cultural heritage.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
When you were talking about your first meeting
together, I believe youmentioned the project that
related to Egypt.
Would that be one of the firstprojects that Curia Lab started
on?
I'd seen a list of projects.
One of them related toarchaeological looting in Egypt.
I believe One of them relatedto archaeological looting in
Egypt, I believe, so I wonderedif that was it or if you could
expand on that.
(11:47):
That was Michelle's.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
PhD project and she should tell you about it because
(12:10):
it has continued to analyze theways in which satellite images
shaped the field of thendeveloping knowledge about
looting in Syria and in theSyrian civil war.
Of course, for many years, butespecially in the 2010s,
archaeological sites andarchaeological materials were
(12:31):
significantly damaged, dispersedor destroyed by the war.
We knew that the question oflooting finance coming out of
the sale of archaeologicalmaterials was a significant
interest to policymakers in theUnited States, so that study
(12:55):
looked at how archaeologists andpolicymakers and satellite
image scientists were usingremote sensing imagery to
generate knowledge about thisset of activities.
We really were together,interdisciplinary, multi-methods
(13:21):
in the work and asked ourparticipants a range of
questions about culturalheritage damage in Syria,
arrived at estimates of damageand how that might have been
influential in some of theestimates that were then coming
out.
Michelle mentioned that beforeshe met me, she was aware of my
(13:45):
article.
It appeared in a couple ofdifferent online platforms
questioning the figures that hadbeen discussed widely in the
press and in policy circlesabout how much the Islamic State
in particular was earning.
I saw figures of $6 billion US$7 billion US.
(14:09):
This seemed unlikely, but Iwanted to understand, with rigor
and better data how thesefigures could have been
sustained.
So that was a separate projectthat was built out at the
University of Chicago, but justto say, our first project
(14:32):
together, I would say, was anextension of that set of
questions about what washappening with cultural heritage
in Syria and the Civil War, andwhat that NSF grant allowed us
to do was go deep into oneparticularly important source of
information that was then inuse in some pretty novel and
(14:54):
untested ways.
We wanted to know how robustand reliable the new forms of
information were for assessingthe scope of the looting trade,
and I'll pass it to Michelle andeither of you.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Michelle, certainly you pick up from there, but I,
just before we move on, youreferenced participants and I
just wondered if you couldexpand on who they were and this
novel information that you'rereferencing.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Our participants range from a wide swath.
We sort of broke them intothose three categories of the
technicians who work withsatellite imagery and produce
satellite and other open sourcesof data.
Then the researchers, who thentake any data that they have
access to.
(15:42):
The specifics of theparticipants.
But we tried to intersectional agroup as we could, so that
means we had people who werereally familiar with the
algorithms that are used to, forexample, do orthorectification,
which is the process of pinningsatellite imagery or other
(16:04):
types of aerial imagery to thesurface of the earth so that
they can be geolocated anduseful analytically.
We also had terrorism andcounterterrorism specialists.
We had people within thegovernment, within policy
offices of the government, atdifferent levels.
We tried to incorporatearchaeologists.
(16:25):
We incorporated somecriminologists, really as much
as we could, to look at thissort of briefly
interdisciplinary area that wasfocusing on archaeological
looting in this terrorism andconflict space of an active
conflict and understand howthings like validity and
(16:48):
reliability were beingconsidered in the production of
data and what it means toproduce data in the context of
urgent science.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I had seen your presentation.
I mentioned before we got onthe call and you had referenced
in it, talking about this Syriaproject, that Aleppo was the
exception.
Could you kind of describe abit about what that means, what
your kind of an overview of theinformation that you had from
the other areas and what was itabout Aleppo that made it the
(17:19):
exception?
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yeah, so that's actually a second project we
have on Syria, where we werereally.
That project started with thisgoal of wanting to look at the
intersection between civilianfatalities and civilian
(17:42):
casualties in Syria and attacksagainst cultural heritage,
trying and this was also fundedby the National Science
Foundation trying to ask againwith high rigor and formal
methods to what degree can wesay that these two things are
(18:04):
related?
There have been historicalclaims that they're related,
that some are much clearer thanothers, but it's an empirical
question and in the context ofSyria, there have been a lot of
calls for action based on thesupposed relationship.
But in a complex geopoliticalenvironment, calls for action
(18:26):
ideally should be evidence-basedand we were hoping that we
could provide some evidenceeither for or against calls to
action.
That particular line ofinvestigation ultimately, if you
watch the presentation, didn'twork because there are always
(18:48):
trade-offs when you collect dataand when you are collecting
data on an active conflict,which any conflict data source
is doing at any given time, youare just processing thousands
and thousands of pieces ofinformation constantly and, as
it turns out, every worthwhileconflict data set that we found
(19:13):
does not provide the actualgeolocation, the actual location
of where an incident that hasassociated civilian casualties
happened.
They instead sort of cap it atthe town, which makes perfect
sense.
It also makes any statisticalanalysis of the relationship
between where civilians have hadcasualties and where cultural
(19:36):
heritage sites have beenattacked virtually impossible.
So we have this evaluation hasevolved to then consider other
relevant factors, specifically,for example, the relevant the
the effectiveness of no strikelist designations for cultural
(19:57):
heritage.
There are a lot of really goodreasons to put cultural heritage
sites as no strike locations,reasons to put cultural heritage
sites as no-strike locationsand, assuming that those
designations work, we should seea protective effect, meaning
that if there is a church thatis designated as no-strike, then
it is more likely for attacksto also avoid the immediate
(20:21):
surrounding area, sort ofcreating these buffer zones of
safety for civilians and alsothe heritage itself.
However, conflict is messy andthere are also strategic reasons
then to try to target sitesthat are known to be on lists
(20:41):
that you know protected locationlists, and so there's also a
risk that being on a list of nostrike would make a church more
of a target than it otherwisewould have been.
You might see this if anadversary ends up saying well,
(21:03):
we know, this church is likelyon a no-strike list, which means
they can't hit us here, sowe're going to harbor here and
then the heritage ends upgetting damaged or destroyed
through other means or throughthis sort of microdynamics of
conflict and operations.
So you asked about why focus onAleppo.
(21:24):
Well, Aleppo had really intenseterritorial control battles
during the course of the heightof the Syrian conflict.
It also has very clearneighborhoods.
It has a lot of really detailedfocus because of the intense
(21:48):
territorial control changeelements, and so it has both a
majority of incidents forcultural heritage attacks.
It has a high number ofno-strike locations compared to
the rest of the country, andthen it has really good coverage
in terms of data availability.
So it's considered special inthe context of Syria because so
(22:11):
much focus was there.
It means that it's a little bitdifferent than the surrounding
areas from an analyticalperspective, but that makes it a
really fantastic case study atthe same time, if we're only
looking at Aleppo.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
And because of the nuance there, there's just a lot
that we can unpack.
There's one more piece I'll addto that Stephanie, the second
project.
As Michelle has just described,it started with curiosity about
what's been called the preludehypothesis.
This is the notion that attackson culture sometimes precede
(22:57):
attacks on people, and there'sthis idea that somehow, by
registering moments when anaggressor party is attacking
culture, writ large can takedifferent forms, that we can use
this to predict when and whereattacks on human communities
(23:19):
might follow.
This is a really importanthypothesis to analyze because it
has been, as Michelle said, ithas been presented as the reason
for pretext I should saypretext for military action.
(23:39):
And so, if it's true, this is areally valuable observation and
(24:08):
one that we ought to anchor indata.
But if it's not true, this isalso important because then
probably military action as apretext isn't going to help.
It might even inflictunnecessary damage.
Studied Syria because of theavailability of a few different
data sets, and our contributionwas to bring together different
kinds of data that hadn't yetbeen connected or put into a
quantitative space-time methodsframework.
So we worked with the UppsalaData Conflict Program in Sweden,
one of the world's best sourcesof information about civilian
(24:31):
casualties in war, and then wealso worked with publicly
available reports from theCultural Heritage Initiative of
ASOR, and this was a projectthat was done with funding from
the United States government totry to document damage to
(24:52):
cultural heritage sites in Syria.
So what Michelle just said Idon't need to say again, but
this has been a reallycomplicated, multi-year study.
We cannot prove the preludehypothesis.
That itself is an importantfinding, but nor can we tell you
what exactly is thisrelationship.
So how is it that in Aleppo, ahigh number of mosques have been
(25:17):
killed, and so have civilians.
Is that simply explained bycollateral damage in a high
kinetic warfare environment, oris there something else going on
?
And so this is why we continueto study it and continue to be
really open to conversationswith other scholars who are also
assessing this really importantnexus of questions about
(25:42):
violence in different formsnexus is questions about
violence in different forms.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah, we can't say anything clearly like specific
about this relationship, but oneof the things that we have
found that's really, reallyfascinating is that you can
trace some of these territorialchanges through the different
patterns of attacks on culturalheritage.
(26:07):
So there are some clear.
There are specific neighborhoodsin Aleppo that are just
systematically bombarded, andthen there are other
neighborhoods that have justvery precise, almost looks like
someone took paint and did ascatter shot.
It's one month here, it's onemonth there, and that changes.
(26:29):
And we see that pattern changeby type of attack as well as by
reported actor, althoughattributing actor is challenging
in a conflict, and so we don'tgo any more specific than state
and non-state, which is, youknow, a very broad brush.
But you can see this whenterritory changes, the patterns
(26:55):
change and so there is somethingthere, there is a pattern,
there is a dynamic at play, apotential for understanding this
dynamic, to help us understandwhy heritage is attacked in
conflicts and when and by whom.
But the data are very messy.
We're working with basicallyopen source intelligence on
(27:19):
cultural heritage attacks fromat this point now, 10 years ago,
and so there's a lot ofmessiness there that we are very
thorough and diligent in tryingto account for and to let speak
for itself, without us tryingto impose any of our own
contemporary assumptions onto it.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Was there a similar hypothesis going into the work
you've been?
Speaker 1 (27:45):
culture then yes, and that's not a hypothesis that
(28:11):
needs testing, that is sothoroughly documented at this
point that we can move to deeperquestions, including what are
the effects of Russia's all-outassault on Ukrainian culture?
That all-out assault has takenmultiple forms.
(28:31):
Some of those forms includewhat we would identify with
traditional forms of culturalheritage museums, archives,
monuments, artworks.
We could think of the builtenvironment of culture and
history.
But what's been less discussedin mainstream media, but not
(28:56):
less discussed in Ukraine, amongUkrainians, is the more subtle
forms of Russia's attack onUkrainian culture.
One example is the assault onsources of knowledge and
libraries.
So before the full-scaleinvasion, ukraine had 14,351
(29:22):
functioning libraries.
As of December, that number hadgone down to just over 11,000.
There's been an almost 20% dropand there are communities now
across the country where thereis no functioning library.
Libraries matter.
They matter because in Ukrainethey are community spaces.
They often have events, oftenhave a safe, warm place, which,
(29:48):
in a country where there areoften power shortages to the
domestic utility supply, isreally important.
People can go be warm, findshelter and read a book or just
be with each other in safety.
And of course, along with theattack on libraries has come
deliberate attacks on Ukrainianlanguage books.
(30:08):
So there have been bookburnings, documented across the
country, done deliberately, andI mean bonfires of books taken
out of people's homes, out oflibraries, out of churches,
piled up and set on fire.
This is not collateral, this isabsolutely targeted.
Also, in the occupiedterritories, the removal of
(30:30):
Ukrainian language books fromschools, from universities, from
public facilities and theirreplacement with Russian
language books.
So this is important becausewhen we think about how cultural
heritage is supported andprotected, it's essential that
(30:52):
we understand the cognitiveunderpinnings that give us
knowledge about those culturalheritage sites and objects.
Other aspects of Russia'sassault on Ukrainian culture
have included the massappropriation of archaeological
materials and artworks frommuseums.
(31:13):
This is something that has beenwell underway since shortly
after the full-scale invasion,but then, sadly, in Crimea,
which has been under occupationsince 2014,.
This has been going on for evenlonger and there's much more to
say about that in thearchaeological area.
I would just underscore that wehave enough information and
(31:39):
Ukrainians are working reallyhard to try to document all of
this.
What we need to understand iswhat the effects are and what
are some of the pathways toaccountability.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
And that was a question that was coming to me
was the work that you do toinform accountability.
How do you use this informationand what does that look like?
Are there other examples whereyou've done that?
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I start by saying I'm not a lawyer, and Michelle and
I are equal in this in beingcommitted to thorough,
transparent and rigorousdescription and analysis, with
data made available forreplication studies data made
(32:29):
available for replicationstudies.
I don't advise on policybecause I want to be able to
take my work and have it beuseful to a range of
policymakers and lawyers and,stephanie, I've learned so much
about this from your past guestswho are lawyers with real
expertise in art law andcultural heritage law.
But I don't want to dodge thequestion.
I do have some thoughts on thisand how we might be supportive
(32:52):
of accountability in the workthat we do.
One of the cherished principlesof our collaboration through
Career Lab is transparency inour methods, and what this means
is metadata when do the datainputs come from?
(33:13):
What were the transformativeprocesses that turned so-called
raw information into data?
How did we code things?
And then, what were the stepsthat we undertook to try to
(33:34):
account for human subjectivity,which is always a factor when
creating data for use.
Then also methods what are prosand cons of the methods, and so
forth.
So this sounds perhaps obviousor fundamental.
It's not.
It's actually really importantbecause, if we think back to
(33:57):
this earlier example of $7billion supposedly raised
through the looting andtrafficking of artifacts from
Syria.
We found nothing in the way ofrobust and reliable data that
was supporting that, and yetthat was a figure that had
enormous repercussions for howcultural heritage was thought
(34:17):
about and still is thought aboutand especially archaeological
materials moved out of aconflict zone.
In the specific case of Ukraineand Russia, my own beginning in
this space started as a culturalcrimes investigator for a
project called the ConflictObservatory Ukraine, and the
(34:40):
Conflict Observatory Ukraine wasfunded by the United States
Department of State as anindependent and autonomous
research project to documentactivities that might be
prosecutable or investigatableas war crimes.
(35:00):
So I worked with a team ofarchaeologists and
anthropologists through theKorea Lab to study, to document,
I should say, activities.
We were actually part of a muchbigger consortium that also
included researchers at YaleUniversity and at George Mason
(35:20):
University.
So I began as an investigatorand documenting things through
open source information tosupport our work in these areas.
And, stephanie, I want to justcome back to your broader
(35:52):
question about the ways in whichwe see our work supportive for
accountability.
The phase of fighting right nowin Ukraine and Russia is such
that we might need to wait a bitlonger to understand what
post-war looks like, but what'simportant to emphasize is that
(36:14):
Ukrainians themselves arealready hard at work on
restitution, reparations andaccountability.
This takes the form throughdocumenting alleged atrocities,
investigating alleged atrocitiesand working together,
collaborating across differentUkrainian NGOs and community
groups, to document not onlywhat happened but what effects
(36:37):
they're having.
Now I want to be as supportiveas possible of this in my work.
My project ended the conflictobservatory.
This in my work, my projectended.
The conflict observatoryunfortunately has been closed
and there are no moreinvestigations being offered by
that program.
But what we are doing now istransferring data to groups and
(36:58):
accountability platforms thatmight be able to take the
information forward, and therecan be a couple of different
ways that that takes.
So a thing that Michelle and Ithink very rigorously about is
data transfer.
How do we actually tell thelawyers, the prosecutors, what
(37:22):
the value of the findings is?
And because your listeners aretypically very familiar with
cultural heritage, I can imaginethat the kinds of reports and
investigations we do would havevery familiar and resonant
themes, but that's not alwaysthe case for a war crimes
prosecutor who has not hadtraining in archaeology or
(37:45):
anthropology or culturalheritage.
So what we can also offer insupport of accountability is a
user guide, is a framing, is away of helping them to
understand what's in it and whyit's important for culture, for
communities, for history, eventhough we don't go so far as
(38:07):
saying here's the crime that wascommitted, because that really
is for the next set ofspecialists to tackle.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, and I would say , michelle, I'd love to hear
your thoughts on this.
And then I'll just throwanother question in is this user
guide?
Would it be specific to eachproject?
Is it something that you'regathering now for?
Yeah, okay, I'll let you bothtake that.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Fiona, do you want a last thought on that?
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Well, actually, michelle, I was pointing to you
because I think you can talkabout metadata and data
dictionaries, and this is thenuts and bolts of data rigor.
Stephanie, before that, I willjust say yes, there's a
qualitative aspect to a userguide that is case specific and
(39:00):
that would be, for example,contextualizing archaeological
disturbances in Ukrainian sitesand settlements, such that
investigators, lawyers, wouldneed to understand some of those
specific qualitative elementsthat wouldn't be necessarily
relevant to a set ofaccountability activities
(39:20):
happening in another part of theworld.
Michelle, what do you think?
Speaker 3 (39:24):
in another part of the world.
Michelle, how we think aboutdata transfer, these user guides
, the framework.
A lot of it is makingconnections to things people
already know, but connectingthem with the why and the how
for cultural heritagespecifically.
So, for example, one of thethings that I do in CuriaLab is
(39:45):
I post trainings, and some ofthem have been how do I look at
a satellite image and identify alooting pit?
Or how do I look at a satelliteimage and track conflict
developing on a border and knowthat what I'm looking at is
actually a buildup of militaryvehicles and not Amazon's new
(40:06):
warehouse in Belgorod?
Right, they can look verysimilar and one is suspicious
and one is less suspicious, butwhat's relevant?
The other thing we do is thenincorporate the OSINT right.
So my whole, when I teach mystudents a lot of these user
(40:26):
guides, it's about thinkingabout how the trade-offs in data
creation translate to a context.
So when we're talking aboutmetadata, we talk about
everything from what are theplatforms you're using to search
, how you're refining that, whatare the softwares or versions
(40:46):
of softwares you're using tothen do the analysis.
Where are you storing theinformation?
You can almost think about itlike a chain of custody that
we're creating that by itscreation and the transparency
with which it's created lendsvalidity and credibility to the
data that is produced.
So helping people to understandthat component can help them
(41:16):
understand some of the inherentvalue of the information that
we're providing.
But it's also understanding whyis this necessary or relevant
for cultural heritage?
Osint, for example, is veryoften applied in the cases of
legal accountability for humanrights violations, so why is it
also equally relevant andimportant for cultural heritage
(41:37):
potential crimes?
There's an intersection betweenhuman rights violations and
cultural heritage crimes.
Sort of explaining the contextof cultural heritage and how it
is used or misused in thesevariety of contexts.
That's sort of what we'retalking about here as well when
(41:58):
it comes to these user guides.
So there's sort of thepractical logistic here's what
to do with what we've given youand how you can reproduce it,
and then why you should care inthe first place that this has
been produced and what it canthen be used to say.
And so I'll give an example, ifthat's okay.
(42:19):
That's not in the context oflegal accountability but does
demonstrate it.
Fiona mentioned my PhD projectEgyptian Archaeological Looting.
The goal of that project was toestablish a baseline
understanding of whicharchaeological sites in the Nile
Delta are most likely to belooted and in response to which
(42:43):
kinds of factors, thinkingthrough environmental, like
drought or crop failure,economic stress, geopolitical
stress, terrorism I looked atall of them, and equally
important to that was can Iproduce a methodological
approach to creating a data seton archaeological looting
(43:06):
attempts that covers a varietyof space and is over time, that
can then be used again later onto answer other questions, For
example, to do a prediction ofwhere looting is going to appear
in the future, based on thisunderstanding of the past?
(43:27):
And so the actual dissertationis one giant methodological
handbook that includes both whatto do and what not to do,
because I was a PhD student andI did some things that I
realized were wrong but werevery understandable as an
(43:48):
approach, and so it became asimportant to talk about what
went wrong as what went right.
This has then expanded, so Inow am looking at eight years
currently of archaeological ofsatellite imagery in the Nile
Delta, of archaeological ofsatellite imagery in the Nile
Delta, and instead of looking atjust 140 sites, I'm looking at
(44:15):
the and I'm going to heavily airquote known universe of
archaeological sites in the NileDelta, and we're using
unsupervised classificationalgorithms to try to generate
the same type of data set.
Except, this is eight years'worth of data that we can use,
and so we can develop a muchbroader understanding of a
baseline.
And the eight-year period we'relooking at includes the onset of
(44:40):
drought and climatechange-related stress on the
environment, the collapse ofEgypt's currency, two coups,
multiple riots and politicalviolence instances, instances of
terrorism and also COVID, sothere's every possible stress
that the country couldexperience in this window, which
(45:03):
means we have a rareopportunity to actually generate
information on what can be donein the future.
We're generating usable datathat future scholars or
policymakers can query.
The tool itself will bepublicly available and open
source so that anyone can takeit and use it to help and apply
(45:26):
it in different contexts, withassociated documentation.
And it's all still in thisframework of how can we produce
information and data that can betransferred for others to also
help and make good.
So we try to do what we do,with rigor, with transparency,
(45:47):
with documentation, to produce avalid result that we can then
hand off to more specializedgroups that will make use of it
for their needs.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Thank you.
Over the course of this time,since your PhD till now, and the
rise of technology andinnovation, I wonder if both of
you, or one of you, could speakto how your rigorous approach
towards data, how it has evolvedand perhaps become easier for
you or more complex, how has theuse of technology and
(46:21):
innovation impacted your work?
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Has the use of technology and innovation
impacted your work?
I'm happy to start, Michelle,and then I think you should take
on AI and some of the reallycutting edge things that you're
doing now.
Stephanie, one of the keychanges in my thinking about
rigor is how to handledisinformation and that is to
(46:47):
say, the deliberate manipulationof sources of information, and
this has been especiallyimportant in working on Russia's
war on Ukraine and attacks oncultural heritage.
And that's because the Kremlinoperates a sophisticated program
(47:07):
of manipulating information,text, images and objects.
And, as we learned in thecourse of being trained as OSINT
investigators, it's not enoughsimply to capture digital assets
in a safe way.
We also do need to have asecure chain of custody, as
(47:32):
Michelle called it, and that isto be able to trace back to the
original source.
Where did that post come from?
Whether it's a social mediapost, an image online, a claim
and I'm not even talking hereabout deep fakes.
I really mean the kinds oftext-based claims that are made
(47:52):
about sites, objects and pastevents that are manipulated
deliberately to twist anarrative.
This was not something Ithought about very much in the
course of that first project onSyria.
There, I assumed that if peoplehad access to correct
(48:14):
information, they would want itin order to improve
epistemically improve theknowledge formation process,
that is to say, give them abetter understanding of how I
don't know the art market inarchaeological materials works,
and then they will, you know, becooperative or interested in
(48:39):
how that can transform intoother practices or policies.
So now I'm situated in a spacein which that's not true, and
this has been an importantlesson in thinking about how we
use our data, our input andinformation, how we think about
(49:01):
it, how we don't play into someof the narratives that seem to
come up again and again, thatare problematic in these ways
that I have described them.
So that is you know.
I think that if we want to putlike a fine point on it being
very careful to rely not just onone source of information but
(49:24):
several, Do some due diligenceon where the information come
from, Triangulate sources ofinformation and then preserve
the traces of data, of digitalassets, so that other folks
working in the same researchenvironment can then also
benefit from the data provenanceand trace back in their own
(49:46):
research findings.
I'll pass it over to Michellefor some different angles on
this question of methods, andshe can also talk about AI.
Speaker 3 (49:59):
It's gotten complicated.
It was already complicated.
Yeah, I mean it's gottencomplicated.
It was already complicated, butI would say that I have come to
more appreciate new layers to.
It was probably coming down thepipeline someday, and so the
(50:42):
goal was to build in space forit in the future, sort of lay
the groundwork with what I coulddo now, and then know that at
some point in the future,somebody smarter than me is
going to develop an algorithmthat I can take and use, and
that to do any of this kind ofwork did require rigor and it
did require thoughtfulness andintentionality, but it was more
thinking about initially.
What is the sustainability ofthese data?
Who are the end users?
What might they want from it?
As Fiona mentioned, thelandscape of what is considered
(51:06):
fact or truth has dramaticallychanged, so it is more
complicated now, because to dothis work requires an inherent
and intense amount of skepticism.
The assumption that I startwith is what I'm looking at is
not what it seems to be, andthen I need it to prove to me
(51:27):
that it is, and that can be assimple as you know a
well-intentioned news story thatis just bringing the picture to
repost from someone who postedit five minutes earlier because
they're trying to beat the mediarush.
Posted it five minutes earlierbecause they're trying to beat
the media rush, not doing duediligence and understanding that
(51:49):
what that picture isrepresenting is an airstrike in
Damascus from five years earlierand is not involving Aleppo at
all.
It has nothing to do withAleppo and, in fact, the story
in Aleppo is fake.
But because they're in thisrush, this sense of urgency,
their priority is different thanmy priority.
And when it comes to somethinglike algorithms, they can be
(52:15):
highly beneficial if you knowwhat they're doing and how they
work how they work.
But if you don't try to explainthe black box or you don't know
what they're doing, then youhave no context for what they
(52:39):
produce.
And we see outcomes of this bothin terms of just you know, as
I'm a professor, think about AIgenerated assignments.
You know they're not good, weknow that any you know someone
asks how do I write a paper?
Chat GPT will put something out.
It's not going to be a goodpaper, but it will be a paper,
probably.
But you also see it in thecontext of manipulation of
things that we consider to beimmutable, of manipulation of
(53:01):
things that we consider to beimmutable.
Photographs have been edited fora long time, both
pre-smartphone, age and post.
Think about any filter onInstagram or TikTok or a social
media platform that'smanipulating the video or the
image that they're seeing.
But also now think about DALIand generative AI and satellite
(53:28):
imagery, a thing that weconsider to be an objective form
of truth.
You can easily add a cloud tocover something strategic and
seamlessly blend it in.
You don't even have to workthat hard.
Adobe will do it for you.
So that used to be reallydifficult, that used to be
(53:51):
sophisticated, and now it's not.
So everything that I look at tocreate a collate and synthesize
and produce a valid and reliabledata set starts from a
perspective of skepticism, andthis really speaks to what Fiona
was talking about triangulation, different types of sources,
(54:13):
not just news, not just imagery.
We need as many differentperspectives as we can get to
triangulate that.
The thing actually happened asit said, it happened where it
happened when it happened, andall of that then needs to be
appropriately archived.
This places a much higherburden on the researchers and
(54:34):
the analysts who are doing thiswork.
It slows it down, and so it's adouble-edged sword.
Algorithms can also be highlyeffective for assisting in
speeding up some of that process.
But the distinction that I'lldraw there, when it comes to
things like algorithms or AI, isis it an algorithmic tool that
(54:57):
you can use and explain, or isit generative or is it
generative?
Something that's generative isnot going to be explainable in a
way that is satisfactory from aresearch or policy level and is
, at its core, going to beplagiarizing, so not acceptable
(55:21):
as a source, whereas analgorithmic tool, for example,
can help to streamline thingsthat would previously take a
long time.
If I get a data dump of rawsatellite imagery, which can be
at least 1.5 terabytes, I eitherhave to manually click
individual hyperlinked a set ofhyperlinks in order to manually
(55:44):
download every single file inthat data dump, or I can work
with GitHub Copilot, which onlypulls from GitHub and therefore
is considered slightly better ofa repository to train on and
develop a Python code scriptthat will loop through and do
(56:07):
that for me.
It takes three days ofdownloading down to 10 minutes
and you can tell immediately ifit's worked or not as
appropriate.
So there's a distinction thereand it's always a double-edged
sword.
The other thing I'll say is, inthis increasingly technological
(56:29):
world, the work that we do inother countries is different now
.
There was always a sense ofgeopolitical risk involved in
doing the type of culturalheritage work and answering some
of the questions that we try toanswer in active or recently
(56:49):
active conflict zones.
But now the world is veryinterconnected online and
there's so much data and so muchinformation out there that if
we can find information about apotential target of interest,
they can likely find informationabout us.
(57:10):
So, just as much as it'simportant to have a secure chain
of custody for anydocumentation or information,
you also have to be aware ofyour environment online and what
risks you're willing to take inorder to do the work.
So protect yourself, use a VPNat a minimum, try not to do your
(57:33):
work at home and you know thereare other tools out there that
can be helpful, using a virtualmachine inside of a computer or,
if you have access to it, aSCIF if you're really concerned.
There are ways of mitigatingthese things, but you should be
aware of them and the contextthat you're working in, so that
(57:56):
you don't have an unfortunateencounter.
Speaker 2 (58:01):
The complexities.
Thank you for laying all ofthat out, all of it.
What was ringing in my ears wasthis concept that you both had
raised, I believe, before thecall about, and maybe earlier in
the call about, data justice.
I would love to hear yourthoughts about the work you're
doing, how you see it, speakingto justice, not just data
(58:22):
justice, but in many layers ofit.
Speaker 1 (58:26):
I'm going to flip the question and start with
injustice, and in doing so I'minspired by the work of Miranda
Fricker, whose book EpistemicInjustice Power in the Ethics of
Knowing has been influentialfor me and for many of us
working in cultural heritage.
Frickery is a philosopher andshe begins with injustice
(58:50):
because she says that we have aclear idea of why something
constitutes an injustice if wecan first describe and analyze
the nature of the wrong that'sbeen inflicted.
I say this because I think,before we put the question of
justice out there, we have aresponsibility to understand
(59:15):
deeply what the injustice is orwas, and for me that involves
listening to different people orcommunities impacted by what
happened, the ways in which thathas been played out temporally
and spatially, especiallytemporally, since often with
(59:37):
cultural heritage and justice,we're talking about wrongs
committed many generations ago,so there could be implications
for one's ancestors, in additionto the living community.
And then, I think, also beingopen-minded about the different
kinds of institutions who areinvolved.
I don't think it's productive tostart with a position that
(01:00:01):
museums are the enemy.
Museums are complicated, butthere are many museums doing
really important work and theyare staffed by curators,
conservators, docents who care alot about the ways in which
they are custodians of objectsand stories and also
(01:00:26):
relationships with people with adirect interest in those
objects.
So to come back to Fricker andjust like, why injustice?
At this point in my career, I'mthinking specifically about
epistemic injustice.
Fricker breaks that down intotwo forms testimonial and
hermeneutic.
Testimonial is the idea that wehave equal standing in
(01:00:50):
understanding or havinginformation about something.
And testimonial injusticeoccurs when somebody, for
example, isn't regarded ashaving a legitimate
interpretation of an objectbecause they don't have a PhD or
a master's in museum studies.
And then hermeneuticalinjustice the other side of this
is actually not having accessto the resources to make
(01:01:15):
interpretations of one's ownsocial experiences or history.
So what I said earlier aboutthe destruction of libraries and
books could be seen as anexample of hermeneutical
injustice if a community isactually cut off from the
sources of knowledge that wouldhelp them to understand
themselves.
So I am now working in thisframework, because for me it is
(01:01:40):
helpful, in filling in aholistic picture of knowledge,
culture and societies, to gatherinformation and different
(01:02:09):
inputs in such a way that webecome temporary custodians of
this information and that whatMichelle and I and our
collaborators are doing iseffectively serving as stewards
and researchers in this moment,who can then be sharing our
findings with others who canbenefit from it.
Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Absolutely.
For me, coming from criminaljustice, the question of what is
justice is very sticky.
You know it raises questions ofjustice for whom?
And for me, that resonates inthe work that I do in Curia and
that we do in Curia in two ways.
(01:02:49):
The first is an ethics ofpractice the recognition that if
I'm going to be working on dataabout Syria or about Egypt,
then that information should berelevant to them and there
should be access.
So some of that is data access,some of that is sharing results
(01:03:10):
, some of that is trying to formpartnerships and to listen and
place whatever I'm finding backinto a, a local context that is
then relevant and adding meaning.
So then, the end goal of, forexample, any of my analyses as a
methodological person is notjust the results, but then to go
(01:03:32):
to people, who, to whom itwould matter the most, and say
can you, let's have aconversation about this and see
what do you think of it, what'smissing, what, what does this
mean to you?
But it also then, on the otherhand, it for me, raises this
(01:04:03):
recognition that a legallysatisfactory resolution in the
cultural heritage system or inthe legal system in general is
not guaranteed to be the samething as justice, and so that
comes back to the question ofjustice for whom.
Is it justice for the communityof origins?
Are we thinking about justicefor?
You know we've had severalepisodes about descendant
communities justice in the eyesof the legal system.
Those are not guaranteed to bethe same thing and they may be
(01:04:25):
mutually exclusive.
So I don't want to be theperson to decide what is justice
.
As Fiona said, we are transientcaretakers of information that
we hope will be of use to thepeople who are seeking justice,
(01:04:45):
whatever that looks like forthem.
But the minute that Ipersonally decide this is what
justice looks like, then I'mlimiting who could benefit from
what we're trying to work withand what we're trying to produce
.
Keep that recognition and thatcomplexity in our minds, while
(01:05:10):
not necessarily putting our owninterpretation onto it.
Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Thank you, Thank you both.
Is there anyone who has anyquestions?
Hi?
Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
I have a question.
I'm Lauren, so I know youtalked about the institutional
support you received from theNational Science Foundation and
the U.
What is the role of theuniversities that you teach?
Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
at in Curia Labs.
People who are entirely softfunded or reliant on soft
funding are jumping from grantto grant.
So, for example, with the Syriawork, being at an institution
(01:06:01):
like my university allows formore time to dig into these
questions and to be as thoroughas this work requires, and but
also it provides a really, Iwould argue, valuable training
ground for future.
Hopefully, people who are atleast doing reliable and
rigorous work, and then I alsohost the trainings that Curia
puts on at the university.
So there's some, there isinstitutional support from the
(01:06:23):
university, as well as resourcesthat allow us to do our work.
Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
And Lauren, I would add, students, students,
students.
We have trained students sincethe very beginning and some of
those students have trained usbecause they bring important and
really awesome knowledge, ideas, questions and capabilities and
really awesome knowledge, ideas, questions and capabilities.
(01:06:49):
And so our institutions haveprovided us with the mechanisms
and processes necessary torecruit, to identify, to hire
and then support students.
So it's been a combination ofgrant money and university money
that's actually paid them, butwe have both been committed to
paying our student researchersgood wages, living wages or
above, not the kind of likeentry level wage, because their
(01:07:12):
time's important and their ideasare important.
Then we also have benefitedfrom university support through
libraries.
Have I said it already?
I really cherish our librarians, computing services and storage
.
So a lot of in-kind support aswell.
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Thank you.
I would just ask one lastquestion, then, of both you,
fiona and Michelle what is themark that you hope to be making
with this work that you're doing?
Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
I want one of our marks to be establishing
frameworks of cooperation andcollaboration that cherish equal
access to knowledge, equalaccess to information, because I
think that's one of the bestways to get to equal access to
(01:08:11):
accountability.
Not all of cultural heritage is, or the cultural heritage work
that we do is best framed as alegal problem or a legal
question, but almost everythingthat we do is a knowledge
question.
In fact, I would say, michelle,that all of it is right.
I think another vector for usnow will be helping the
(01:08:34):
non-cultural heritage economists, political scientists and
sociologists and so forth tounderstand the importance of
cultural heritage in the workthat they do, so, even if they
don't see themselves as culturalheritage specialists that they
recognize that this is more thanjust a variable.
This is a central feature ofhuman communities and ought to
(01:08:58):
be accounted for as such.
And I'll end that note and thenpass it to Michelle for a final
thought.
Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
I agree with everything Fiona said and, as
part of that, this is not uniqueto cultural heritage spaces.
This is pretty common in a lotof social science fields and
probably hard science fields aswell.
People tend to work in silos andour approach is to say
(01:09:28):
everybody has a place at thistable, as Fiona was saying, and
that the methods.
We don't have to wait for otherpeople to come around and say
this is how this works.
There was a perception incultural heritage studies for
like 10 years that there was nodata because nobody had bothered
to put it into one Excelspreadsheet, and so Fiona and I
(01:09:49):
looked at that and said, okay,we'll put it into a spreadsheet
and we'll do it using methodsfrom other social sciences who
have figured out how to do thiswell.
So one of the lasting marksthat I would hope that we're
able to see is a shift inapproach, that there's the
(01:10:11):
recognition that otherdisciplines have in the social
sciences have a role here aswell, that there's value in
sharing knowledge betweencountries, between organizations
, between disciplines, and thatthese frameworks and methods can
ultimately help us move towardsproactive approaches here and
(01:10:37):
that those methods, if we canbring people to the table,
there's benefit for everybody indoing that and that ultimately,
cultural heritage will benefit,social science will benefit,
society will benefit and we canpush forward instead of sort of
sitting in cycles.
Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
I so value and appreciate this
interdisciplinary, collaborativeapproach that you both have.
It's really really to beembraced and celebrated, and
it's rare, I think.
So thank you so much for allthe work you're doing and this
approach that you're taking toit to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
Thanks for the conversation and for the work
that you're doing on yourpodcast throughout your episodes
to cast a bright light ondifferent ideas and work being
done in the field.
Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
There will be links in the show notes to learn more.
If you are intrigued by thispodcast, it would be much
appreciated if you could leave arating or review and tag
Warfare of Art and Law podcast.
Until next time, this isStephanie Droddy bringing you
Warfare of Art and Law.
Thank you so much for listeningand remember injustice anywhere
(01:11:57):
is a threat to justiceeverywhere.
When we started this collaboration, it was as two
social scientists who werefocused on cultural heritage
questions.
I now understand that we havefound other collaborators within
cultural heritage who share ourinterest in and commitment to
(00:23):
questions about the social, thepolitical, the economic.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that
focuses on how justice does ordoesn't play out when art and
law overlap.
Hi everyone, it's Stephanie,and that was Dr Fiona Greenland
discussing CurioLab, which sheco-directs with Dr Michelle
Fabiani.
What follows is a conversationwith Dr Greenland and Dr Fabiani
(00:54):
, during which they share abouthow they came to found CurioLab,
of their various projects thathave brought to life the vision
of Curia Lab to provide aflexible platform for the
collection, analysis anddissemination of research on
cultural heritage, dynamics andcommunity impacts, particularly
(01:15):
in the aftermath of loss, and wealso look at how they define
justice and the mark they hopeto be leaving with their work
through Curia Lab.
Dr Michelle Fabiani and DrFiona Greenland.
Welcome to Warfare of Art andLaw.
And Second Saturday Thank youso much for being here.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Thrilled to be here.
Thanks for having us, Thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Tiffany.
So I would love to begin ifeach of you would kind of share
a bit about your background andthen how you came to collaborate
together to create Curia Lab.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Sure, fiona, I'll go first, if that's all right.
I come from a background incultural anthropology and
archaeology.
Before moving into criminologyand criminal justice, I was
trying to find my way in termsof where's an area where I felt
(02:13):
like I could make a difference,and, through a lot of
experimentation, working incollections and working within
the legal framework of museumsand a very interdisciplinary
education, I settled oncriminology and criminal justice
, as it gave a solid foundationand a very holistic
(02:35):
methodological framework that Icould use to look at this
international intersection ofart and antiquities and illicit
economies, behavioral patterns,as well as novel approaches to
data collection, and so my focushas always been on the illicit
(02:55):
antiquities realm and illicitart area.
But how I have approached it haschanged, and I try to come at
my work from as broad aperspective as possible.
So if there's a field that youcan think of, I have probably at
least done some studying in it.
I do data science.
(03:16):
I've studied cultural heritagelaw, domestically and
internationally, economics,sociology and internationally.
Economics, sociology, politicalscience, terrorism,
environmental science.
I try to bring as much as I canto the table, while recognizing
that I don't have to be theexpert in everything that's very
(03:36):
true about Michelle.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
She is the Swiss army knife of cultural heritage
studies, where every blade issharp.
I trained first in classicalarchaeology and my focus was on
the Western Roman Empire, and Itrained in the formal features
(03:58):
of imperial sculpture and didexcavations in Italy and in
Spain, and I was a classicalarchaeologist for 10 years.
In fact I got my first doctoraldegree in that field and along
the way I got curious aboutbigger contemporary system
(04:21):
questions.
So that included questionsabout museums and collecting
practices as well as the globalcirculation of archaeological
materials, and these questionsstarted to be of interest to me
in the late 90s, which was aperiod before we could say
(04:44):
established university interestin these.
There weren't the range ofmuseum studies programs yet I
found it necessary to retrain.
So I did a second doctorate,and this one was in public
policy and sociology doctorateand this one was in public
(05:08):
policy and sociology, and it wasthrough that program that I
developed many of the skills andframeworks that I bring to bear
now in the work with Michelleand that Michelle touched on as
well.
So I would say at core we aresocial scientists with deep
training in archaeology andanthropology.
And you asked another question,Stephanie, that I want to pick
(05:30):
up on, and that is when westarted working together.
We met in 2015 at a conferencein Chicago, and I remember this
conversation because Michellewas a PhD student, I was a
postdoc.
She told me about this projectshe was doing.
I thought this project was wildand what she was doing was more
(05:50):
ambitious than anything I'dseen in studies of looting.
She was working with a largeset of satellite images to
understand the relationshipbetween political and economic
instability and looting in Egyptuncharted territory and I
thought, if this woman knows howto do this, this is somebody I
(06:12):
want to work with.
And in 2021, we formallyestablished the lab after many
years of collaborating projectsand different methods.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Yeah, and that that initial conversation, I think I
cracked Fiona down because of areally fantastic article she
wrote um bashing the 5 million,6 million value of the art
market.
That comes from nowhere, and Ijust so appreciated how nuanced
her framing of it seems likeanything she wrote was, and so I
(06:46):
just found my way to theconference specifically so that
I could sit down with thisfantastic researcher and pick
her brain about really anythingthat I could, and we never
looked back.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, what a powerhouse collaboration you two
create.
So Curia Lab, let's dive intothat.
And so we've talked about kindof the seed of it, so would you
take it from there?
Speaker 3 (07:14):
So Curia Lab has this idea behind it that there's so
much we can do when we try to,when we have first of all data
to do it with, and so a lot ofwhat we started with in the lab
is working on how can we andwhere can we find and coalesce
(07:39):
data that are relevant forpolicymakers and for scholars
and that are importantly,accessible to these communities.
There are a lot of data sourcesthat are protected, either
because they were produced byfederal government or that are
part of the intelligenceapparatus of any nation, and so
(08:01):
there may be very nuanced viewsof art and antiquities, crimes
that we can't actually validateor replicate and therefore we
can't build off of repository ofdata.
(08:28):
In the criminal justice area,there's the really large open
access data set or data systemcalled ICPSR, where you can find
data on pretty much any topicyou want and as you create data
you can house it.
That was sort of one.
Inspiration is if we couldbecome this clearinghouse, but
we also really wanted toincorporate the idea of
resilience and how data can helpinform ideas about what
(08:52):
resilience are, and so Curia ina large extent focuses on this
nexus of new technologies, onstate government participation
in protection and destruction,as well as grassroots efforts.
We try to have a very highlyethical, high ethical standard
(09:12):
for how we collect and storedata, for consideration about
how we should be trainingourselves and others and how,
then, what we produce can helptrain others to contribute to
this work.
And I'll pause here to letFiona also add in I'll tackle
the I in our lab name.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
From the beginning, stephanie, we thought about
information, the heterogeneoussources of information that go
into understanding culturalheritage, archaeological
materials, artworks, sites ofimportance and, of course,
intangible heritage.
Informatics is the science ofinformation and we recognize in
(10:00):
each other a deep found respectfor the ways in which librarians
organize information, preserveinformation, preserve the traces
of the provenance ofinformation, where does it come
from, and making it availableand useful for users.
So, information scienceshouldn't be confused with data
(10:20):
science.
These things, of course, speakto each other.
But informatics is the focus onstoring and making useful in an
organized and transparentlylogical way for a range of users
, and I want to home in on thispoint for just a moment.
(10:42):
Is we think collectively aboutthe ways in which museums,
libraries and librarians findthemselves facing significant
funding cuts at this moment inthe United States?
And just to say, there's a lotthat we will be missing if
(11:04):
libraries and librarians are notable to do their job of
preserving and organizing andpresenting information.
So informatics of course speaksto broader fields of work.
For us in the Currie Lab, it'sabout how we can capture,
preserve, store, organize andmake available information about
(11:24):
cultural heritage.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
When you were talking about your first meeting
together, I believe youmentioned the project that
related to Egypt.
Would that be one of the firstprojects that Curia Lab started
on?
I'd seen a list of projects.
One of them related toarchaeological looting in Egypt.
I believe One of them relatedto archaeological looting in
Egypt, I believe, so I wonderedif that was it or if you could
expand on that.
(11:47):
That was Michelle's.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
PhD project and she should tell you about it because
(12:10):
it has continued to analyze theways in which satellite images
shaped the field of thendeveloping knowledge about
looting in Syria and in theSyrian civil war.
Of course, for many years, butespecially in the 2010s,
archaeological sites andarchaeological materials were
(12:31):
significantly damaged, dispersedor destroyed by the war.
We knew that the question oflooting finance coming out of
the sale of archaeologicalmaterials was a significant
interest to policymakers in theUnited States, so that study
(12:55):
looked at how archaeologists andpolicymakers and satellite
image scientists were usingremote sensing imagery to
generate knowledge about thisset of activities.
We really were together,interdisciplinary, multi-methods
(13:21):
in the work and asked ourparticipants a range of
questions about culturalheritage damage in Syria,
arrived at estimates of damageand how that might have been
influential in some of theestimates that were then coming
out.
Michelle mentioned that beforeshe met me, she was aware of my
(13:45):
article.
It appeared in a couple ofdifferent online platforms
questioning the figures that hadbeen discussed widely in the
press and in policy circlesabout how much the Islamic State
in particular was earning.
I saw figures of $6 billion US$7 billion US.
(14:09):
This seemed unlikely, but Iwanted to understand, with rigor
and better data how thesefigures could have been
sustained.
So that was a separate projectthat was built out at the
University of Chicago, but justto say, our first project
(14:32):
together, I would say, was anextension of that set of
questions about what washappening with cultural heritage
in Syria and the Civil War, andwhat that NSF grant allowed us
to do was go deep into oneparticularly important source of
information that was then inuse in some pretty novel and
(14:54):
untested ways.
We wanted to know how robustand reliable the new forms of
information were for assessingthe scope of the looting trade,
and I'll pass it to Michelle andeither of you.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Michelle, certainly you pick up from there, but I,
just before we move on, youreferenced participants and I
just wondered if you couldexpand on who they were and this
novel information that you'rereferencing.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Our participants range from a wide swath.
We sort of broke them intothose three categories of the
technicians who work withsatellite imagery and produce
satellite and other open sourcesof data.
Then the researchers, who thentake any data that they have
access to.
(15:42):
The specifics of theparticipants.
But we tried to intersectional agroup as we could, so that
means we had people who werereally familiar with the
algorithms that are used to, forexample, do orthorectification,
which is the process of pinningsatellite imagery or other
(16:04):
types of aerial imagery to thesurface of the earth so that
they can be geolocated anduseful analytically.
We also had terrorism andcounterterrorism specialists.
We had people within thegovernment, within policy
offices of the government, atdifferent levels.
We tried to incorporatearchaeologists.
(16:25):
We incorporated somecriminologists, really as much
as we could, to look at thissort of briefly
interdisciplinary area that wasfocusing on archaeological
looting in this terrorism andconflict space of an active
conflict and understand howthings like validity and
(16:48):
reliability were beingconsidered in the production of
data and what it means toproduce data in the context of
urgent science.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I had seen your presentation.
I mentioned before we got onthe call and you had referenced
in it, talking about this Syriaproject, that Aleppo was the
exception.
Could you kind of describe abit about what that means, what
your kind of an overview of theinformation that you had from
the other areas and what was itabout Aleppo that made it the
(17:19):
exception?
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yeah, so that's actually a second project we
have on Syria, where we werereally.
That project started with thisgoal of wanting to look at the
intersection between civilianfatalities and civilian
(17:42):
casualties in Syria and attacksagainst cultural heritage,
trying and this was also fundedby the National Science
Foundation trying to ask againwith high rigor and formal
methods to what degree can wesay that these two things are
(18:04):
related?
There have been historicalclaims that they're related,
that some are much clearer thanothers, but it's an empirical
question and in the context ofSyria, there have been a lot of
calls for action based on thesupposed relationship.
But in a complex geopoliticalenvironment, calls for action
(18:26):
ideally should be evidence-basedand we were hoping that we
could provide some evidenceeither for or against calls to
action.
That particular line ofinvestigation ultimately, if you
watch the presentation, didn'twork because there are always
(18:48):
trade-offs when you collect dataand when you are collecting
data on an active conflict,which any conflict data source
is doing at any given time, youare just processing thousands
and thousands of pieces ofinformation constantly and, as
it turns out, every worthwhileconflict data set that we found
(19:13):
does not provide the actualgeolocation, the actual location
of where an incident that hasassociated civilian casualties
happened.
They instead sort of cap it atthe town, which makes perfect
sense.
It also makes any statisticalanalysis of the relationship
between where civilians have hadcasualties and where cultural
(19:36):
heritage sites have beenattacked virtually impossible.
So we have this evaluation hasevolved to then consider other
relevant factors, specifically,for example, the relevant the
the effectiveness of no strikelist designations for cultural
(19:57):
heritage.
There are a lot of really goodreasons to put cultural heritage
sites as no strike locations,reasons to put cultural heritage
sites as no-strike locationsand, assuming that those
designations work, we should seea protective effect, meaning
that if there is a church thatis designated as no-strike, then
it is more likely for attacksto also avoid the immediate
(20:21):
surrounding area, sort ofcreating these buffer zones of
safety for civilians and alsothe heritage itself.
However, conflict is messy andthere are also strategic reasons
then to try to target sitesthat are known to be on lists
(20:41):
that you know protected locationlists, and so there's also a
risk that being on a list of nostrike would make a church more
of a target than it otherwisewould have been.
You might see this if anadversary ends up saying well,
(21:03):
we know, this church is likelyon a no-strike list, which means
they can't hit us here, sowe're going to harbor here and
then the heritage ends upgetting damaged or destroyed
through other means or throughthis sort of microdynamics of
conflict and operations.
So you asked about why focus onAleppo.
(21:24):
Well, Aleppo had really intenseterritorial control battles
during the course of the heightof the Syrian conflict.
It also has very clearneighborhoods.
It has a lot of really detailedfocus because of the intense
(21:48):
territorial control changeelements, and so it has both a
majority of incidents forcultural heritage attacks.
It has a high number ofno-strike locations compared to
the rest of the country, andthen it has really good coverage
in terms of data availability.
So it's considered special inthe context of Syria because so
(22:11):
much focus was there.
It means that it's a little bitdifferent than the surrounding
areas from an analyticalperspective, but that makes it a
really fantastic case study atthe same time, if we're only
looking at Aleppo.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
And because of the nuance there, there's just a lot
that we can unpack.
There's one more piece I'll addto that Stephanie, the second
project.
As Michelle has just described,it started with curiosity about
what's been called the preludehypothesis.
This is the notion that attackson culture sometimes precede
(22:57):
attacks on people, and there'sthis idea that somehow, by
registering moments when anaggressor party is attacking
culture, writ large can takedifferent forms, that we can use
this to predict when and whereattacks on human communities
(23:19):
might follow.
This is a really importanthypothesis to analyze because it
has been, as Michelle said, ithas been presented as the reason
for pretext I should saypretext for military action.
(23:39):
And so, if it's true, this is areally valuable observation and
(24:08):
one that we ought to anchor indata.
But if it's not true, this isalso important because then
probably military action as apretext isn't going to help.
It might even inflictunnecessary damage.
Studied Syria because of theavailability of a few different
data sets, and our contributionwas to bring together different
kinds of data that hadn't yetbeen connected or put into a
quantitative space-time methodsframework.
So we worked with the UppsalaData Conflict Program in Sweden,
one of the world's best sourcesof information about civilian
(24:31):
casualties in war, and then wealso worked with publicly
available reports from theCultural Heritage Initiative of
ASOR, and this was a projectthat was done with funding from
the United States government totry to document damage to
(24:52):
cultural heritage sites in Syria.
So what Michelle just said Idon't need to say again, but
this has been a reallycomplicated, multi-year study.
We cannot prove the preludehypothesis.
That itself is an importantfinding, but nor can we tell you
what exactly is thisrelationship.
So how is it that in Aleppo, ahigh number of mosques have been
(25:17):
killed, and so have civilians.
Is that simply explained bycollateral damage in a high
kinetic warfare environment, oris there something else going on
?
And so this is why we continueto study it and continue to be
really open to conversationswith other scholars who are also
assessing this really importantnexus of questions about
(25:42):
violence in different formsnexus is questions about
violence in different forms.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah, we can't say anything clearly like specific
about this relationship, but oneof the things that we have
found that's really, reallyfascinating is that you can
trace some of these territorialchanges through the different
patterns of attacks on culturalheritage.
(26:07):
So there are some clear.
There are specific neighborhoodsin Aleppo that are just
systematically bombarded, andthen there are other
neighborhoods that have justvery precise, almost looks like
someone took paint and did ascatter shot.
It's one month here, it's onemonth there, and that changes.
(26:29):
And we see that pattern changeby type of attack as well as by
reported actor, althoughattributing actor is challenging
in a conflict, and so we don'tgo any more specific than state
and non-state, which is, youknow, a very broad brush.
But you can see this whenterritory changes, the patterns
(26:55):
change and so there is somethingthere, there is a pattern,
there is a dynamic at play, apotential for understanding this
dynamic, to help us understandwhy heritage is attacked in
conflicts and when and by whom.
But the data are very messy.
We're working with basicallyopen source intelligence on
(27:19):
cultural heritage attacks fromat this point now, 10 years ago,
and so there's a lot ofmessiness there that we are very
thorough and diligent in tryingto account for and to let speak
for itself, without us tryingto impose any of our own
contemporary assumptions onto it.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Was there a similar hypothesis going into the work
you've been?
Speaker 1 (27:45):
culture then yes, and that's not a hypothesis that
(28:11):
needs testing, that is sothoroughly documented at this
point that we can move to deeperquestions, including what are
the effects of Russia's all-outassault on Ukrainian culture?
That all-out assault has takenmultiple forms.
(28:31):
Some of those forms includewhat we would identify with
traditional forms of culturalheritage museums, archives,
monuments, artworks.
We could think of the builtenvironment of culture and
history.
But what's been less discussedin mainstream media, but not
(28:56):
less discussed in Ukraine, amongUkrainians, is the more subtle
forms of Russia's attack onUkrainian culture.
One example is the assault onsources of knowledge and
libraries.
So before the full-scaleinvasion, ukraine had 14,351
(29:22):
functioning libraries.
As of December, that number hadgone down to just over 11,000.
There's been an almost 20% dropand there are communities now
across the country where thereis no functioning library.
Libraries matter.
They matter because in Ukrainethey are community spaces.
They often have events, oftenhave a safe, warm place, which,
(29:48):
in a country where there areoften power shortages to the
domestic utility supply, isreally important.
People can go be warm, findshelter and read a book or just
be with each other in safety.
And of course, along with theattack on libraries has come
deliberate attacks on Ukrainianlanguage books.
(30:08):
So there have been bookburnings, documented across the
country, done deliberately, andI mean bonfires of books taken
out of people's homes, out oflibraries, out of churches,
piled up and set on fire.
This is not collateral, this isabsolutely targeted.
Also, in the occupiedterritories, the removal of
(30:30):
Ukrainian language books fromschools, from universities, from
public facilities and theirreplacement with Russian
language books.
So this is important becausewhen we think about how cultural
heritage is supported andprotected, it's essential that
(30:52):
we understand the cognitiveunderpinnings that give us
knowledge about those culturalheritage sites and objects.
Other aspects of Russia'sassault on Ukrainian culture
have included the massappropriation of archaeological
materials and artworks frommuseums.
(31:13):
This is something that has beenwell underway since shortly
after the full-scale invasion,but then, sadly, in Crimea,
which has been under occupationsince 2014,.
This has been going on for evenlonger and there's much more to
say about that in thearchaeological area.
I would just underscore that wehave enough information and
(31:39):
Ukrainians are working reallyhard to try to document all of
this.
What we need to understand iswhat the effects are and what
are some of the pathways toaccountability.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
And that was a question that was coming to me
was the work that you do toinform accountability.
How do you use this informationand what does that look like?
Are there other examples whereyou've done that?
Speaker 1 (32:05):
I start by saying I'm not a lawyer, and Michelle and
I are equal in this in beingcommitted to thorough,
transparent and rigorousdescription and analysis, with
data made available forreplication studies data made
(32:29):
available for replicationstudies.
I don't advise on policybecause I want to be able to
take my work and have it beuseful to a range of
policymakers and lawyers and,stephanie, I've learned so much
about this from your past guestswho are lawyers with real
expertise in art law andcultural heritage law.
But I don't want to dodge thequestion.
I do have some thoughts on thisand how we might be supportive
(32:52):
of accountability in the workthat we do.
One of the cherished principlesof our collaboration through
Career Lab is transparency inour methods, and what this means
is metadata when do the datainputs come from?
(33:13):
What were the transformativeprocesses that turned so-called
raw information into data?
How did we code things?
And then, what were the stepsthat we undertook to try to
(33:34):
account for human subjectivity,which is always a factor when
creating data for use.
Then also methods what are prosand cons of the methods, and so
forth.
So this sounds perhaps obviousor fundamental.
It's not.
It's actually really importantbecause, if we think back to
(33:57):
this earlier example of $7billion supposedly raised
through the looting andtrafficking of artifacts from
Syria.
We found nothing in the way ofrobust and reliable data that
was supporting that, and yetthat was a figure that had
enormous repercussions for howcultural heritage was thought
(34:17):
about and still is thought aboutand especially archaeological
materials moved out of aconflict zone.
In the specific case of Ukraineand Russia, my own beginning in
this space started as a culturalcrimes investigator for a
project called the ConflictObservatory Ukraine, and the
(34:40):
Conflict Observatory Ukraine wasfunded by the United States
Department of State as anindependent and autonomous
research project to documentactivities that might be
prosecutable or investigatableas war crimes.
(35:00):
So I worked with a team ofarchaeologists and
anthropologists through theKorea Lab to study, to document,
I should say, activities.
We were actually part of a muchbigger consortium that also
included researchers at YaleUniversity and at George Mason
(35:20):
University.
So I began as an investigatorand documenting things through
open source information tosupport our work in these areas.
And, stephanie, I want to justcome back to your broader
(35:52):
question about the ways in whichwe see our work supportive for
accountability.
The phase of fighting right nowin Ukraine and Russia is such
that we might need to wait a bitlonger to understand what
post-war looks like, but what'simportant to emphasize is that
(36:14):
Ukrainians themselves arealready hard at work on
restitution, reparations andaccountability.
This takes the form throughdocumenting alleged atrocities,
investigating alleged atrocitiesand working together,
collaborating across differentUkrainian NGOs and community
groups, to document not onlywhat happened but what effects
(36:37):
they're having.
Now I want to be as supportiveas possible of this in my work.
My project ended the conflictobservatory.
This in my work, my projectended.
The conflict observatoryunfortunately has been closed
and there are no moreinvestigations being offered by
that program.
But what we are doing now istransferring data to groups and
(36:58):
accountability platforms thatmight be able to take the
information forward, and therecan be a couple of different
ways that that takes.
So a thing that Michelle and Ithink very rigorously about is
data transfer.
How do we actually tell thelawyers, the prosecutors, what
(37:22):
the value of the findings is?
And because your listeners aretypically very familiar with
cultural heritage, I can imaginethat the kinds of reports and
investigations we do would havevery familiar and resonant
themes, but that's not alwaysthe case for a war crimes
prosecutor who has not hadtraining in archaeology or
(37:45):
anthropology or culturalheritage.
So what we can also offer insupport of accountability is a
user guide, is a framing, is away of helping them to
understand what's in it and whyit's important for culture, for
communities, for history, eventhough we don't go so far as
(38:07):
saying here's the crime that wascommitted, because that really
is for the next set ofspecialists to tackle.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah, and I would say , michelle, I'd love to hear
your thoughts on this.
And then I'll just throwanother question in is this user
guide?
Would it be specific to eachproject?
Is it something that you'regathering now for?
Yeah, okay, I'll let you bothtake that.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Fiona, do you want a last thought on that?
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Well, actually, michelle, I was pointing to you
because I think you can talkabout metadata and data
dictionaries, and this is thenuts and bolts of data rigor.
Stephanie, before that, I willjust say yes, there's a
qualitative aspect to a userguide that is case specific and
(39:00):
that would be, for example,contextualizing archaeological
disturbances in Ukrainian sitesand settlements, such that
investigators, lawyers, wouldneed to understand some of those
specific qualitative elementsthat wouldn't be necessarily
relevant to a set ofaccountability activities
(39:20):
happening in another part of theworld.
Michelle, what do you think?
Speaker 3 (39:24):
in another part of the world.
Michelle, how we think aboutdata transfer, these user guides
, the framework.
A lot of it is makingconnections to things people
already know, but connectingthem with the why and the how
for cultural heritagespecifically.
So, for example, one of thethings that I do in CuriaLab is
(39:45):
I post trainings, and some ofthem have been how do I look at
a satellite image and identify alooting pit?
Or how do I look at a satelliteimage and track conflict
developing on a border and knowthat what I'm looking at is
actually a buildup of militaryvehicles and not Amazon's new
(40:06):
warehouse in Belgorod?
Right, they can look verysimilar and one is suspicious
and one is less suspicious, butwhat's relevant?
The other thing we do is thenincorporate the OSINT right.
So my whole, when I teach mystudents a lot of these user
(40:26):
guides, it's about thinkingabout how the trade-offs in data
creation translate to a context.
So when we're talking aboutmetadata, we talk about
everything from what are theplatforms you're using to search
, how you're refining that, whatare the softwares or versions
(40:46):
of softwares you're using tothen do the analysis.
Where are you storing theinformation?
You can almost think about itlike a chain of custody that
we're creating that by itscreation and the transparency
with which it's created lendsvalidity and credibility to the
data that is produced.
So helping people to understandthat component can help them
(41:16):
understand some of the inherentvalue of the information that
we're providing.
But it's also understanding whyis this necessary or relevant
for cultural heritage?
Osint, for example, is veryoften applied in the cases of
legal accountability for humanrights violations, so why is it
also equally relevant andimportant for cultural heritage
(41:37):
potential crimes?
There's an intersection betweenhuman rights violations and
cultural heritage crimes.
Sort of explaining the contextof cultural heritage and how it
is used or misused in thesevariety of contexts.
That's sort of what we'retalking about here as well when
(41:58):
it comes to these user guides.
So there's sort of thepractical logistic here's what
to do with what we've given youand how you can reproduce it,
and then why you should care inthe first place that this has
been produced and what it canthen be used to say.
And so I'll give an example, ifthat's okay.
(42:19):
That's not in the context oflegal accountability but does
demonstrate it.
Fiona mentioned my PhD projectEgyptian Archaeological Looting.
The goal of that project was toestablish a baseline
understanding of whicharchaeological sites in the Nile
Delta are most likely to belooted and in response to which
(42:43):
kinds of factors, thinkingthrough environmental, like
drought or crop failure,economic stress, geopolitical
stress, terrorism I looked atall of them, and equally
important to that was can Iproduce a methodological
approach to creating a data seton archaeological looting
(43:06):
attempts that covers a varietyof space and is over time, that
can then be used again later onto answer other questions, For
example, to do a prediction ofwhere looting is going to appear
in the future, based on thisunderstanding of the past?
(43:27):
And so the actual dissertationis one giant methodological
handbook that includes both whatto do and what not to do,
because I was a PhD student andI did some things that I
realized were wrong but werevery understandable as an
(43:48):
approach, and so it became asimportant to talk about what
went wrong as what went right.
This has then expanded, so Inow am looking at eight years
currently of archaeological ofsatellite imagery in the Nile
Delta, of archaeological ofsatellite imagery in the Nile
Delta, and instead of looking atjust 140 sites, I'm looking at
(44:15):
the and I'm going to heavily airquote known universe of
archaeological sites in the NileDelta, and we're using
unsupervised classificationalgorithms to try to generate
the same type of data set.
Except, this is eight years'worth of data that we can use,
and so we can develop a muchbroader understanding of a
baseline.
And the eight-year period we'relooking at includes the onset of
(44:40):
drought and climatechange-related stress on the
environment, the collapse ofEgypt's currency, two coups,
multiple riots and politicalviolence instances, instances of
terrorism and also COVID, sothere's every possible stress
that the country couldexperience in this window, which
(45:03):
means we have a rareopportunity to actually generate
information on what can be donein the future.
We're generating usable datathat future scholars or
policymakers can query.
The tool itself will bepublicly available and open
source so that anyone can takeit and use it to help and apply
(45:26):
it in different contexts, withassociated documentation.
And it's all still in thisframework of how can we produce
information and data that can betransferred for others to also
help and make good.
So we try to do what we do,with rigor, with transparency,
(45:47):
with documentation, to produce avalid result that we can then
hand off to more specializedgroups that will make use of it
for their needs.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Thank you.
Over the course of this time,since your PhD till now, and the
rise of technology andinnovation, I wonder if both of
you, or one of you, could speakto how your rigorous approach
towards data, how it has evolvedand perhaps become easier for
you or more complex, how has theuse of technology and
(46:21):
innovation impacted your work?
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Has the use of technology and innovation
impacted your work?
I'm happy to start, Michelle,and then I think you should take
on AI and some of the reallycutting edge things that you're
doing now.
Stephanie, one of the keychanges in my thinking about
rigor is how to handledisinformation and that is to
(46:47):
say, the deliberate manipulationof sources of information, and
this has been especiallyimportant in working on Russia's
war on Ukraine and attacks oncultural heritage.
And that's because the Kremlinoperates a sophisticated program
(47:07):
of manipulating information,text, images and objects.
And, as we learned in thecourse of being trained as OSINT
investigators, it's not enoughsimply to capture digital assets
in a safe way.
We also do need to have asecure chain of custody, as
(47:32):
Michelle called it, and that isto be able to trace back to the
original source.
Where did that post come from?
Whether it's a social mediapost, an image online, a claim
and I'm not even talking hereabout deep fakes.
I really mean the kinds oftext-based claims that are made
(47:52):
about sites, objects and pastevents that are manipulated
deliberately to twist anarrative.
This was not something Ithought about very much in the
course of that first project onSyria.
There, I assumed that if peoplehad access to correct
(48:14):
information, they would want itin order to improve
epistemically improve theknowledge formation process,
that is to say, give them abetter understanding of how I
don't know the art market inarchaeological materials works,
and then they will, you know, becooperative or interested in
(48:39):
how that can transform intoother practices or policies.
So now I'm situated in a spacein which that's not true, and
this has been an importantlesson in thinking about how we
use our data, our input andinformation, how we think about
(49:01):
it, how we don't play into someof the narratives that seem to
come up again and again, thatare problematic in these ways
that I have described them.
So that is you know.
I think that if we want to putlike a fine point on it being
very careful to rely not just onone source of information but
(49:24):
several, Do some due diligenceon where the information come
from, Triangulate sources ofinformation and then preserve
the traces of data, of digitalassets, so that other folks
working in the same researchenvironment can then also
benefit from the data provenanceand trace back in their own
(49:46):
research findings.
I'll pass it over to Michellefor some different angles on
this question of methods, andshe can also talk about AI.
Speaker 3 (49:59):
It's gotten complicated.
It was already complicated.
Yeah, I mean it's gottencomplicated.
It was already complicated, butI would say that I have come to
more appreciate new layers to.
It was probably coming down thepipeline someday, and so the
(50:42):
goal was to build in space forit in the future, sort of lay
the groundwork with what I coulddo now, and then know that at
some point in the future,somebody smarter than me is
going to develop an algorithmthat I can take and use, and
that to do any of this kind ofwork did require rigor and it
did require thoughtfulness andintentionality, but it was more
thinking about initially.
What is the sustainability ofthese data?
Who are the end users?
What might they want from it?
As Fiona mentioned, thelandscape of what is considered
(51:06):
fact or truth has dramaticallychanged, so it is more
complicated now, because to dothis work requires an inherent
and intense amount of skepticism.
The assumption that I startwith is what I'm looking at is
not what it seems to be, andthen I need it to prove to me
(51:27):
that it is, and that can be assimple as you know a
well-intentioned news story thatis just bringing the picture to
repost from someone who postedit five minutes earlier because
they're trying to beat the mediarush.
Posted it five minutes earlierbecause they're trying to beat
the media rush, not doing duediligence and understanding that
(51:49):
what that picture isrepresenting is an airstrike in
Damascus from five years earlierand is not involving Aleppo at
all.
It has nothing to do withAleppo and, in fact, the story
in Aleppo is fake.
But because they're in thisrush, this sense of urgency,
their priority is different thanmy priority.
And when it comes to somethinglike algorithms, they can be
(52:15):
highly beneficial if you knowwhat they're doing and how they
work how they work.
But if you don't try to explainthe black box or you don't know
what they're doing, then youhave no context for what they
(52:39):
produce.
And we see outcomes of this bothin terms of just you know, as
I'm a professor, think about AIgenerated assignments.
You know they're not good, weknow that any you know someone
asks how do I write a paper?
Chat GPT will put something out.
It's not going to be a goodpaper, but it will be a paper,
probably.
But you also see it in thecontext of manipulation of
things that we consider to beimmutable, of manipulation of
(53:01):
things that we consider to beimmutable.
Photographs have been edited fora long time, both
pre-smartphone, age and post.
Think about any filter onInstagram or TikTok or a social
media platform that'smanipulating the video or the
image that they're seeing.
But also now think about DALIand generative AI and satellite
(53:28):
imagery, a thing that weconsider to be an objective form
of truth.
You can easily add a cloud tocover something strategic and
seamlessly blend it in.
You don't even have to workthat hard.
Adobe will do it for you.
So that used to be reallydifficult, that used to be
(53:51):
sophisticated, and now it's not.
So everything that I look at tocreate a collate and synthesize
and produce a valid and reliabledata set starts from a
perspective of skepticism, andthis really speaks to what Fiona
was talking about triangulation, different types of sources,
(54:13):
not just news, not just imagery.
We need as many differentperspectives as we can get to
triangulate that.
The thing actually happened asit said, it happened where it
happened when it happened, andall of that then needs to be
appropriately archived.
This places a much higherburden on the researchers and
(54:34):
the analysts who are doing thiswork.
It slows it down, and so it's adouble-edged sword.
Algorithms can also be highlyeffective for assisting in
speeding up some of that process.
But the distinction that I'lldraw there, when it comes to
things like algorithms or AI, isis it an algorithmic tool that
(54:57):
you can use and explain, or isit generative or is it
generative?
Something that's generative isnot going to be explainable in a
way that is satisfactory from aresearch or policy level and is
, at its core, going to beplagiarizing, so not acceptable
(55:21):
as a source, whereas analgorithmic tool, for example,
can help to streamline thingsthat would previously take a
long time.
If I get a data dump of rawsatellite imagery, which can be
at least 1.5 terabytes, I eitherhave to manually click
individual hyperlinked a set ofhyperlinks in order to manually
(55:44):
download every single file inthat data dump, or I can work
with GitHub Copilot, which onlypulls from GitHub and therefore
is considered slightly better ofa repository to train on and
develop a Python code scriptthat will loop through and do
(56:07):
that for me.
It takes three days ofdownloading down to 10 minutes
and you can tell immediately ifit's worked or not as
appropriate.
So there's a distinction thereand it's always a double-edged
sword.
The other thing I'll say is, inthis increasingly technological
(56:29):
world, the work that we do inother countries is different now
.
There was always a sense ofgeopolitical risk involved in
doing the type of culturalheritage work and answering some
of the questions that we try toanswer in active or recently
(56:49):
active conflict zones.
But now the world is veryinterconnected online and
there's so much data and so muchinformation out there that if
we can find information about apotential target of interest,
they can likely find informationabout us.
(57:10):
So, just as much as it'simportant to have a secure chain
of custody for anydocumentation or information,
you also have to be aware ofyour environment online and what
risks you're willing to take inorder to do the work.
So protect yourself, use a VPNat a minimum, try not to do your
(57:33):
work at home and you know thereare other tools out there that
can be helpful, using a virtualmachine inside of a computer or,
if you have access to it, aSCIF if you're really concerned.
There are ways of mitigatingthese things, but you should be
aware of them and the contextthat you're working in, so that
(57:56):
you don't have an unfortunateencounter.
Speaker 2 (58:01):
The complexities.
Thank you for laying all ofthat out, all of it.
What was ringing in my ears wasthis concept that you both had
raised, I believe, before thecall about, and maybe earlier in
the call about, data justice.
I would love to hear yourthoughts about the work you're
doing, how you see it, speakingto justice, not just data
(58:22):
justice, but in many layers ofit.
Speaker 1 (58:26):
I'm going to flip the question and start with
injustice, and in doing so I'minspired by the work of Miranda
Fricker, whose book EpistemicInjustice Power in the Ethics of
Knowing has been influentialfor me and for many of us
working in cultural heritage.
Frickery is a philosopher andshe begins with injustice
(58:50):
because she says that we have aclear idea of why something
constitutes an injustice if wecan first describe and analyze
the nature of the wrong that'sbeen inflicted.
I say this because I think,before we put the question of
justice out there, we have aresponsibility to understand
(59:15):
deeply what the injustice is orwas, and for me that involves
listening to different people orcommunities impacted by what
happened, the ways in which thathas been played out temporally
and spatially, especiallytemporally, since often with
(59:37):
cultural heritage and justice,we're talking about wrongs
committed many generations ago,so there could be implications
for one's ancestors, in additionto the living community.
And then, I think, also beingopen-minded about the different
kinds of institutions who areinvolved.
I don't think it's productive tostart with a position that
(01:00:01):
museums are the enemy.
Museums are complicated, butthere are many museums doing
really important work and theyare staffed by curators,
conservators, docents who care alot about the ways in which
they are custodians of objectsand stories and also
(01:00:26):
relationships with people with adirect interest in those
objects.
So to come back to Fricker andjust like, why injustice?
At this point in my career, I'mthinking specifically about
epistemic injustice.
Fricker breaks that down intotwo forms testimonial and
hermeneutic.
Testimonial is the idea that wehave equal standing in
(01:00:50):
understanding or havinginformation about something.
And testimonial injusticeoccurs when somebody, for
example, isn't regarded ashaving a legitimate
interpretation of an objectbecause they don't have a PhD or
a master's in museum studies.
And then hermeneuticalinjustice the other side of this
is actually not having accessto the resources to make
(01:01:15):
interpretations of one's ownsocial experiences or history.
So what I said earlier aboutthe destruction of libraries and
books could be seen as anexample of hermeneutical
injustice if a community isactually cut off from the
sources of knowledge that wouldhelp them to understand
themselves.
So I am now working in thisframework, because for me it is
(01:01:40):
helpful, in filling in aholistic picture of knowledge,
culture and societies, to gatherinformation and different
(01:02:09):
inputs in such a way that webecome temporary custodians of
this information and that whatMichelle and I and our
collaborators are doing iseffectively serving as stewards
and researchers in this moment,who can then be sharing our
findings with others who canbenefit from it.
Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Absolutely.
For me, coming from criminaljustice, the question of what is
justice is very sticky.
You know it raises questions ofjustice for whom?
And for me, that resonates inthe work that I do in Curia and
that we do in Curia in two ways.
(01:02:49):
The first is an ethics ofpractice the recognition that if
I'm going to be working on dataabout Syria or about Egypt,
then that information should berelevant to them and there
should be access.
So some of that is data access,some of that is sharing results
(01:03:10):
, some of that is trying to formpartnerships and to listen and
place whatever I'm finding backinto a, a local context that is
then relevant and adding meaning.
So then, the end goal of, forexample, any of my analyses as a
methodological person is notjust the results, but then to go
(01:03:32):
to people, who, to whom itwould matter the most, and say
can you, let's have aconversation about this and see
what do you think of it, what'smissing, what, what does this
mean to you?
But it also then, on the otherhand, it for me, raises this
(01:04:03):
recognition that a legallysatisfactory resolution in the
cultural heritage system or inthe legal system in general is
not guaranteed to be the samething as justice, and so that
comes back to the question ofjustice for whom.
Is it justice for the communityof origins?
Are we thinking about justicefor?
You know we've had severalepisodes about descendant
communities justice in the eyesof the legal system.
Those are not guaranteed to bethe same thing and they may be
(01:04:25):
mutually exclusive.
So I don't want to be theperson to decide what is justice
.
As Fiona said, we are transientcaretakers of information that
we hope will be of use to thepeople who are seeking justice,
(01:04:45):
whatever that looks like forthem.
But the minute that Ipersonally decide this is what
justice looks like, then I'mlimiting who could benefit from
what we're trying to work withand what we're trying to produce
.
Keep that recognition and thatcomplexity in our minds, while
(01:05:10):
not necessarily putting our owninterpretation onto it.
Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Thank you, Thank you both.
Is there anyone who has anyquestions?
Hi?
Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
I have a question.
I'm Lauren, so I know youtalked about the institutional
support you received from theNational Science Foundation and
the U.
What is the role of theuniversities that you teach?
Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
at in Curia Labs.
People who are entirely softfunded or reliant on soft
funding are jumping from grantto grant.
So, for example, with the Syriawork, being at an institution
(01:06:01):
like my university allows formore time to dig into these
questions and to be as thoroughas this work requires, and but
also it provides a really, Iwould argue, valuable training
ground for future.
Hopefully, people who are atleast doing reliable and
rigorous work, and then I alsohost the trainings that Curia
puts on at the university.
So there's some, there isinstitutional support from the
(01:06:23):
university, as well as resourcesthat allow us to do our work.
Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
And Lauren, I would add, students, students,
students.
We have trained students sincethe very beginning and some of
those students have trained usbecause they bring important and
really awesome knowledge, ideas, questions and capabilities and
really awesome knowledge, ideas, questions and capabilities.
(01:06:49):
And so our institutions haveprovided us with the mechanisms
and processes necessary torecruit, to identify, to hire
and then support students.
So it's been a combination ofgrant money and university money
that's actually paid them, butwe have both been committed to
paying our student researchersgood wages, living wages or
above, not the kind of likeentry level wage, because their
(01:07:12):
time's important and their ideasare important.
Then we also have benefitedfrom university support through
libraries.
Have I said it already?
I really cherish our librarians, computing services and storage
.
So a lot of in-kind support aswell.
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Thank you.
I would just ask one lastquestion, then, of both you,
fiona and Michelle what is themark that you hope to be making
with this work that you're doing?
Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
I want one of our marks to be establishing
frameworks of cooperation andcollaboration that cherish equal
access to knowledge, equalaccess to information, because I
think that's one of the bestways to get to equal access to
(01:08:11):
accountability.
Not all of cultural heritage is, or the cultural heritage work
that we do is best framed as alegal problem or a legal
question, but almost everythingthat we do is a knowledge
question.
In fact, I would say, michelle,that all of it is right.
I think another vector for usnow will be helping the
(01:08:34):
non-cultural heritage economists, political scientists and
sociologists and so forth tounderstand the importance of
cultural heritage in the workthat they do, so, even if they
don't see themselves as culturalheritage specialists that they
recognize that this is more thanjust a variable.
This is a central feature ofhuman communities and ought to
(01:08:58):
be accounted for as such.
And I'll end that note and thenpass it to Michelle for a final
thought.
Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
I agree with everything Fiona said and, as
part of that, this is not uniqueto cultural heritage spaces.
This is pretty common in a lotof social science fields and
probably hard science fields aswell.
People tend to work in silos andour approach is to say
(01:09:28):
everybody has a place at thistable, as Fiona was saying, and
that the methods.
We don't have to wait for otherpeople to come around and say
this is how this works.
There was a perception incultural heritage studies for
like 10 years that there was nodata because nobody had bothered
to put it into one Excelspreadsheet, and so Fiona and I
(01:09:49):
looked at that and said, okay,we'll put it into a spreadsheet
and we'll do it using methodsfrom other social sciences who
have figured out how to do thiswell.
So one of the lasting marksthat I would hope that we're
able to see is a shift inapproach, that there's the
(01:10:11):
recognition that otherdisciplines have in the social
sciences have a role here aswell, that there's value in
sharing knowledge betweencountries, between organizations
, between disciplines, and thatthese frameworks and methods can
ultimately help us move towardsproactive approaches here and
(01:10:37):
that those methods, if we canbring people to the table,
there's benefit for everybody indoing that and that ultimately,
cultural heritage will benefit,social science will benefit,
society will benefit and we canpush forward instead of sort of
sitting in cycles.
Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
I so value and appreciate this
interdisciplinary, collaborativeapproach that you both have.
It's really really to beembraced and celebrated, and
it's rare, I think.
So thank you so much for allthe work you're doing and this
approach that you're taking toit to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
Thanks for the conversation and for the work
that you're doing on yourpodcast throughout your episodes
to cast a bright light ondifferent ideas and work being
done in the field.
Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
There will be links in the show notes to learn more.
If you are intrigued by thispodcast, it would be much
appreciated if you could leave arating or review and tag
Warfare of Art and Law podcast.
Until next time, this isStephanie Droddy bringing you
Warfare of Art and Law.
Thank you so much for listeningand remember injustice anywhere
(01:11:57):
is a threat to justiceeverywhere.
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