Author: watrall
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Making a GitHub Diagram
What You Think You Know You know how to use a computer, right? Obviously that’s true since you’re reading this, but that doesn’t mean you know how a computer works. You probably have some idea that electricity, circuits, binary and other computer stuff are working together to make the thing run, but for most people…
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From the Ivory Tower to the School Yard: Writing About Archaeology for a Young Audience
As a Ph.D. candidate, most of my writing is geared toward an audience composed of fellow grad students, professional archaeologists, university professors, and avocational archaeologists. In many ways, we write in a language that only other archaeologists, those initiated into the discipline and its methods, can understand. How, then, do we translate this idiosyncratic language…
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Adventures in JavaScript: Creating games for Archaeology 101
A main component of the Archaeology 101 project will be interactive games created through different JavaScript libraries to teach visitors about different archaeological concepts. If you aren’t familiar with the project, please check out the project introduction blog: part 1 and 2 to learn more!
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Introductory R and RStudio Workshop
As a returning CHI fellow, I was tasked with organizing a workshop on a digital humanities tool of my choice. I knew I wanted to do something related to data analysis and visualization and eventually decided on the computing language R, which I used last year to clean and transform a dataset. I like using…
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Historical Research in the Age of Digitization
Earlier this week I read an article titled “Why Don’t Archivists Digitize Everything” by Samantha Thompson from the Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives. Thompson thoughtfully provided both positive and critical reflection regarding archival digitization initiatives. With seemingly so many documents, objects, and audio recordings available online, digitized sources still only represent a fraction of…
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Nashville’s Great Flood of 2010: A Pre- and Post-Disaster Look at Neighborhood Change and Socioeconomic Recovery
The 10 year anniversary of Nashville’s Great Flood will occur on May 1st and 2nd of 2020–less than four months marks the remembrance of one of the biggest natural disasters in Nashville, Tennessee. The Great Flood of 2010 in Nashville resulted in approximately $2 billion dollars in damage. Previous literature have noted that natural disasters…
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MSU Online Archaeological Collections
Project Launch Post As a returning CHI fellow, I am hoping to build upon my last years CHI project. Last year I built a digital repository in Kora and the metadata scheme organizing the data within it. This year, I hope to take the data that I have deposited into that repository and bring it…
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Mapping Nonhumans
Originally I planned on using Brian McBride’s Bootleaf to launch this project of mapping nonhuman presence across a Victorian landscape. His template conveniently conjoins the benefits of Leaflet and Bootstrap, but its convenience is also its pitfall, at least for me. For instance, if someone would like to add multiple maps or different centers of…
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Introducing the Archaeology 101 Project: Part 2
As introduced yesterday by Autumn, the Archaeology 101 project will generate an interactive website with the main goal of introducing elementary and middle school students, as well as other interested individuals, to archaeology. The website will include basic introductory information that will teach visitors how to think like an archaeologist. It will then reinforce these…
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Project Introduction: Archaeology 101
Introducing Archaeology 101! This project is a collaborative CHI project between myself and Jeffrey Painter. At the launch, this project will be an interactive website that can be used to introduce elementary and middle school students (and other interested parties) to archaeology!