Swedigarch Inspirational Lecture #10 with Bruno Castellano Mengibar: Buried Stories – What stories can SEAD data tell us?

In this inspirational lecture, held at Umeå University, and on Zoom Bruno Castellano Mengibar will introduce the SEAD Buried Stories project, and explain how and why it was developed.

Buried Stories is a public-facing web application that reinterprets data in the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD), as a set of narrative experiences aimed at people with no archaeology background. With most databases the barrier for non-specalists users is not the data’s complexity but its presentation.

Therefore, this web app was designed to appeal to general audiances. SEAD was developed as a research infrastructure intended for researchers and specialists to explore the data with specific research questions already in mind. However, within the same records, one can find stories that a non-specialist would find interesting.

The initial project inspiration came from Figure 3c of Buckland et al. (2018), which highlights likely paths for the spread of the flightless weevil over time. This figure inspired an Exploratory Data Analysis EDA looking for other potential datasets with storytelling potential. The result is eight self-contained stories, grouped into three thematic hubs:

• Six-Legged Sagas (living creatures/taxa related stories)
• Clay Chronicles (stories with ceramics data)
• Timber Tales (dendrochronology data).

Each hub is framed as a thread to pull rather than a dataset to interrogate. Every story is built entirely from records within SEAD’s Database.

The stories are constructed via a Python pipeline, which queries the SEAD staging database. From that point, static data is written so that the interface can be built with Next.js to read the JSON directly. The published site holds no database credentials itself, yet the data it shows is always a traceable, versioned snapshot. Because SEAD stores no imagery of its own, photographs of species and sites were resolved at export time from GBIF and Wikimedia and carry a visible license and creator credit alongside every image.

Bruno Castellano Mengibar developed the Buried Stories project during an internship with SEAD, as part of Arbetsförmedlingens program, Korta Vägen. Bruno holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics, as well as Master studies in Big Data, Data Science & AI and professional experience in Business Intelligence, Analytics and AI across different business areas.

Bibliography:

Buckland, P.I., Sjölander, M., Eriksson, E.J. (2018). Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology