By coming to the demo days, you can take a look at the ongoing projects at the Humanities Labs. What can the labs do for each other and what is the role of each lab within the University of Amsterdam and beyond? During this demo day of the Speech Lab, we will listen to two talks that explore the question: 'how does the brain process zero models?'.

Talk 1: Jitte Waagen

The 4DRL does research using drones equipped with various sensors, ranging from RGB cameras and laser scanners, to beyond-visible-light imagers. These are predominantly used for archaeological fieldwork in the Netherlands and abroad. Research into the potential application and effective implementation of these different technologies is important, given the continuous threat to buried archaeological remains as a result of infrastructural development, agricultural intensification, and climate change.

In this presentation, some of the current casestudies and results will be shared. In addition, two related projects will be discussed. The first, ARCfieldLAB, a project executed with support from the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS) network, focuses on network building and knowledge exchange on innovative sensor techniques in Dutch archaeology. The second, DroneML, a project in collaboration with the eScience Center, aims to develop machine learning software to enable rapid processing and analysis of large remote sensing datasets.

Talk 2: Tijm Lanjouw

The Archaeology of Archaeology approach deals with archaeologically researching complex and long-excavated archaeological sites to understand better strategy and motives of previous excavators and facilitate re-evaluation and re-interpretation of their results. On the one hand, this allows new perspectives on the archaeological narratives about the past, while on the other hand, this potentially helps the modern archaeologist to appreciate how social, ethical, political, and theoretical context can be a determinant of the archaeological process, and better explain narratives emerging from historical archaeological activity at a site.

One of the methods to engage with archaeologically research archaeology is to apply modern digital techniques. The archaeological laboratory of the site can be meticulously documented by scanners and drones equipped with a whole range of sensors, creating highly detailed 3D surface models of the site. These can be used to better understand the current archaeological topography of the site as they are now, but are also suitable to create an environment to study old documentation.

For example, old photographs of the site and the excavations can be digitized and geolocated back into a 3D environment, and subsequently projection mapping or directly virtually modeling can be used to match their contents on the current topography. This can lead to new insights as to the state of the site in various moments in the past, and understand how archaeological actions in the past shaped its modern topography. In this presentation, a few preliminary results of such applications will be shared in relation to the work of the University of Amsterdam and the 4D Research Lab at the ancient site of Troy, Turkey.