Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative

Author: watrall

  • Technologies of Change

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    watrall
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    Once I had changed the direction of my project, the next task was deciding on sources, interface, and overall design. For the former, I decided to make use of the International River Boundary Database (IRBD), which contains information about border rives including their lengths (estimated using GoogleEarth. While that was a great database, it did…

  • Some reflections…after doing this two times

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    This website began as an assignment as I was trying to define the rationale and parameters of my project. I stumbled upon the International River Boundaries Database (IRBD) and realized its significance. But it has taken five years to articulate and realize my vision. In making this website I realized a few things: First, I…

  • Introducing “Mapping Action”

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    watrall
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    I’m proud to introduce “Mapping Action: Lesbian Avengers Actions in New York City.” As a companion to my dissertation entitled “Making as World-Making: What the Lesbian Avengers Can Teach about Communal Composing, Agency, and World-Building.” In my dissertation,  through ethnographically informed qualitative interviews, I detail themes on making from former members of the Lesbian Avengers—an…

  • Launching “Fan Culture”

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    watrall
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    This project “Fan Culture” is inspired by my previous CHI project “Multiculturalism in the German Football World,” which focuses primarily on the German National Football Team. Last year, I planned to work on the representations of multiculturalism on both national and regional levels. The national perspective went fairly well and I was able to map…

  • Project Launch: Mapping the Upper Missouri

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    I am so excited to announce the public launch of my project, Mapping the Upper Missouri: Visualizing Negotiation, Diplomacy, and Culture on the Northern Plains, 1801-1853. The story map and supplemental materials provide a geospatial history of the fur trade, intercultural exchange, and diplomacy in the upper Missouri River region (present-day Montana). It encompasses four…

  • Introducing River Borders!

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    watrall
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    I am thrilled to launch River Borders– a website/database of river borders across the world, an outcome of my senior CHI fellowship. This website aims to be an accessible pedagogical tool for educators, specifically high school educators, by offering a centralized repository of river borders across the world. Using data from the International River Boundaries Database (IRBD) at…

  • Launching “After the Flood: How Nashville Neighborhoods Changed after the Great Flood of 2010”

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    watrall
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    NOTE: As of May 2021, this project has been redesigned. Check out the new website housed in GitHub. The blog post below is in reference to the previous website design and process. The process of the newly designed project is documented on a different project blog, which details the new site’s characteristics, challenges, and possible…

  • Launching “Mapping the Young Lords”

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    I’m excited to announce the completion of my CHI project “Mapping the Young Lords”. This project has seen a few iterations since I first thought about what it would be in December. The goal of the site is to visualize the consequences of public health related direct action on behalf of the Young Lords organization…

  • MSU Digital Archaeology Collections

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    This is the launch post for Zach Francis’s 2019-2020 CHI fellowship project. Click to check out the MSU Digital Archaeology Collections website! At the beginning of this year, I knew that I wanted to do something to bring the archaeological collections held by the Michigan State anthropology department into the digital world. The main motivation…

  • Launching Volta River Commodities

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    watrall
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    My CHI project, Volta River Commodities, is built around a dataset that I created from West African colonial trade statistics. Officials from the Gold Coast (what is now Ghana) were stationed at preventative stations along the colony’s borders to control the movement of people and goods. The information that they recorded included descriptions of objects…