Dr. Shawn Graham, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Carleton University in Canada has posted something wicked cool on his blog. Looted Heritage: Monitoring the Illicit Antiquities Trade

“monitors various social media and regular media feeds for stories and reports about the trade in antiquities, which then get mapped. The more such things are made visible, the better our chances of spotting important trends and developments. It also maps academic work on the problem of the illicit antiquities trade.”

Map! Check it out, check it out!

As can be imagined, this week the biggest of the red dots is on Greece.

Dr. Graham posts that he originally included data from ebay into that map but it just got to be too much. Yet, if there was too much traffic on ebay, I would like to see a visual of that traffic. I feel that being able to detect volume and content changes when it comes to online auctions might be useful in the “hey where is all this Nicaraguan material suddenly coming from” sense. I look forward to seeing what Dr. Graham comes up with there!

Three cheers, Dr. Graham, this is a very interesting idea and I look forward to seeing more!