Through the Tourist’s Lens: Using Social Media and Machine Learning to Understand Visual Experiences at Peruvian Archaeological Heritage Sites
Wednesday, October 21, 1:00–2:00 pm, Online
LLILAS Benson “Digital Scholarship in the Americas” Speaker Series
The intersection of social media and heritage tourism in recent decades has created an abundance of open-source imagery that remains underutilized by the archaeological heritage community and digital scholars. When paired with machine learning algorithms, photographs produced by tourists – as well as historic images in museum collections – can provide researchers with new opportunities to understand how historic site representations and visual expectations drive travel narratives and heritage perceptions that are curated on media-sharing platforms. Using Cuzco, Peru as a case study, Payntar compares how modern tourists perpetuate the visual perspectives of 19th and 20th century explorers through scene and object-based feature extraction – a process that would be impossible to replicate through manual labor.
Nicole D. Payntar is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on heritage tourism, machine learning, and archaeology in Peru. She received her M.A. in Archaeology from Durham University in 2012 and has previously served on the Antiquities Coalition’s #CultureUnderThreat Task Force and as the former Assistant Director of Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE).