Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative

Author: watrall

  • “New” lenses

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    Given it was not that long ago since my last post, I would like to take this opportunity to stay with my last topic and brainstorm new and interesting ways I could approach canonical works. I will say with this current mapping challenge I somehow lucked out enough (or perhaps my group is just truly…

  • Digital Tools and Ghana Studies

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    In July, the Ghana Studies Association held a conference in Accra. While attending the panels, I thought about how the digital humanities can feature in Ghana Studies scholarship. The conference featured presentations across the humanities and social sciences organized around the theme “Ghana as center.” One of my favorite panels was titled “(Re-)Writing Ghana’s Economic…

  • Why Should We Care About the Public?

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    In life, we are often told to do our own thing without thinking about what others think. Be yourself. In academia, the sentiment can often be to do your own thing because what others think is uneducated bull-pucky. This is maybe a bit extreme, but often, consideration for what the public thinks about our research…

  • Some thoughts on QGIS’s Web Mapping Plugin

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    I have always found maps of all sorts fascinating. Studying Eurasian history, I have relied on historical maps to try to fathom historical actors’ knowledge of space. In terms of conceptualizing my own CHI project, quite a few scholarly and journalist works that incorporate thematic maps and other interactive media have informed and inspired me.…

  • Digital Environmental Humanities from a Geographical Perspective

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    TABLE OF CONTENTS: I. Character vs. Nature II. Brief Month Recap III. Weather gods and Spirituality IV. Previous Studies on Storms and Natural Disasters V. What does/could Digital Environmental Humanities Look Like? I. Character vs. Nature Character vs. nature stories have been told time and time again in American popular culture. In television and film,…

  • Thankful for Digitized Sources

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    Digitized sources make it possible for us to conduct research more easily than ever before. My own research continues to benefit from digital collections such as Michigan State’s own Feeding America project. The New York Public Library’s (NYPL) digital collections of historic menus and also every copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book have been…

  • Reflections on the CHI Data Visualization Challenge

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    Earlier this month, we were challenged to take an openly accessible set of data and use JavaScript to visualize that data in interesting ways. All of this information was put into a webpage that we had to build with the help of a bootstrap theme. As a person with little in terms of computer skills…

  • Challenges of JS—creating a word cloud

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    One of the most exciting parts of the CHI Fellowship experience are the weekly challenges. A challenge I really dread is anything involving JavaScript. During my first tenure as a CHI fellow, I assiduously avoided JS. I happily built the HTML code ground up, broke lots of things, before finally having something workable.  When I did…

  • Interrogating the Western Canon

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    As a Victorianist, I strive to not teach imperial literature alone, although that composes a vast amount of my syllabus every semester. Alongside these texts, or succeeding them, are works that challenge imperial assumptions. If we are examining Victorian literature, we are doing so critically, considering not only the function of protagonists, but the presence (and just…