This episode features archaeology PhD student, Vera Haponava and her advisor Dr. Catriona Pickard, a senior lecturer at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Edinburgh University.
We explored in detail of how they carefully curate samples from relics for the stable isotope analysis. The real world politics and varied interests present unexpected hurdles for laboratory research. We also talked about very realistic suggestions for aspiring future archaeology graduate students in how to choose a topic and a graduate program with all these non-laboratory challenges.
How does historical review play a role in interpreting data? Is there any "objectivity" in the data? We also talked about concrete examples where the assumptions about historical context totally changes how archaeologists work on the materials.

In this episode, we are experimenting with a new kind of conversation where we dive deep into a question in a certain research field with a PhD student and explore how they think about this question.
Here, we invited Vera Haponava, a first-year archaeology PhD student from the University of Edinburgh. She earned her master's degree in archaeology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. 
Her research interest is bioarchaeology, especially with stable isotopes as a research method. Her own PhD research topic includes paleodiet in Belarus from birth till adulthood, in cemeteries of ~10-12th.

In this episode of Research Journey Podcast, we invited two researchers in computational social science from Cornell University. Among all the interesting topics covered, we discussed member-based research in social sciences, how to use NLP to reveal themes in science fiction, how to deal with hate speech on social media, the Imposter Syndrome and the importance of representation, and factors essential for a successful PhD journey.

 
Our first guest is Aspen Omapang, is a third-year PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University in the Social Media Lab. She is a Data Science Fellow for the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. Her current projects include the politicization of science on Youtube, and the experiences of queer beauty content creators.

 The second guest is Federica Bologna. She is a second-year PhD student, also in Information Science at Cornell University. She has a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the interaction of NLP (Natural Language Processing), computational social science, and cultural analytics.

Credits
Host | Xiaoyue Zhu
Edit | Xiaoyue Zhu
Theme music | Cody Cook, Zhiwei Li
Cover | Generated by DALLE2, edited with Photoshop

Twitter: @ResearchJourne1
Website: researchjourney.org
If you’d like to be our next guest, please email us at researchjourneyinitiative@gmail.com

Thank you for listening.