This is the editorial note for Digital Relics, the magazine. I'll keep it short.

What this is

A field-reporting publication, written and edited by me — Elara Reed — on the intersection of computational methods and the material past. I have spent the last fourteen years splitting my working life between archaeological field seasons (mostly the eastern Mediterranean and Mesoamerica) and a small computational-archaeology lab in Sydney. Digital Relics is where the field notes from both halves of that life end up.

The dispatches are first-person, technical where the technique matters, and reported. I don't write speculative explainers. Every post comes out of a project I am actively working on or a piece of work I have read carefully enough to summarise without hand-waving.

What this isn't

It isn't a thought-leadership newsletter on "AI in archaeology". The phrase "AI" appears in this magazine only when it is doing actual specific work — for example, a 90-million-parameter transformer trained on the Linear B corpus, which is a concrete object that does concrete things and fails in concrete ways. The generic AI commentary is well-supplied elsewhere on the internet and I will not be adding to it.

It also isn't a review of other people's work. Where I reference colleagues, it is because I am citing them or working with them, not because I have an opinion on their output.

What to expect

Dispatches arrive at roughly the pace of fieldwork: somewhere between a handful and a dozen substantial pieces a year. They will tend to cluster around:

• Fieldwork — current-season notes from active sites. LIDAR, photogrammetry, XRF, multi-spectral imaging, GIS overlays. See the dispatch from the Petén basin for the format.
• AI / decoding — small, specific computational models applied to small, specific epigraphic corpora. The Linear B transformer is one. There are two more in progress.
• Preservation — workflows for documenting fragile material non-destructively. The Bodleian manuscript pipeline is the current canonical one.
• Ethics — the harder, slower questions that the technology itself will not answer. The Aleppo essay is an example of where I currently stand and how I got there.

Every dispatch carries a category and a set of tags. The Categories and Topics pages are the way in if you want to read by subject. The Archive lists everything by year.

A note on the title

"Digital Relics" is a working title from 2024 that has stuck. Some colleagues have noted, gently, that "relic" carries an art-market connotation that doesn't quite sit with how archaeologists talk about material culture. They are right. I keep the title for continuity but the practice is straightforward: nothing is for sale, no objects are removed from context, and every dispatch that touches a physical object is published with the explicit cooperation of the relevant local heritage authority.

How to get in touch

The magazine is independent and ad-free. The only thing I'd ask is that if a dispatch is useful to you, you forward it to one specific colleague who will also find it useful — that's how the readership has grown to this point, and it's the model I'd like to keep.

Write to elara@digitalrelics.uk. I read everything, and answer most of it, eventually.

— Elara, Sydney