Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative

Author: watrall

  • Introducing West African Migration Stories

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    watrall
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    When I first started the CHI Fellowship, I had dreams of mapping the migration of all of the people I spoke with during the course of my field work. I interviewed over 350 people, and probably half of them migrated at one point or another. That would have been an awfully crowded map! The more…

  • Introducing the Peruvian Origins Informatics Project!

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    watrall
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    I am excited to finally launch the “Peruvian Origins Informatics Project” for public viewing. This website was designed to illustrate material culture of the pre-ceramic inter-zonal connection between the highlands and coast of southern Peru. Within the website there are many features and areas to explore. One main feature of the website is a mapping…

  • Data Fears

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    The metadata scheme for my digital repository is finished and entered into KORA. There is now officially a place to enter data from the MSU archaeological collections online, and I am ecstatic. There is, however, still the fear that what I built may have hidden issues. This fear in part stems from a few talks…

  • The Simpler, The Better: Photo Carousels

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    watrall
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    I’ve often complained about introductory-level tutorials that operate under the assumption that you know something about programming. While in some cases I’ve successfully worked through a particularly difficult tool or explanation, ultimately what I’ve learned is: there’s probably an easier way.

  • Making my Dissertation Digital

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    watrall
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    Have you ever tried to explain your dissertation to your family? Your students? Strangers or acquaintances you barely know? This is a trying task. My dissertation focuses on mobility and migration between four different West African countries (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea), looking at the multitude of reasons people moved and the larger meaning of…

  • Feedback at the Speed of Light

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    watrall
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                 As a historian, most of my work – reading, writing, revising – is conducted alone. Feedback especially takes long periods of time and varies between professors and colleagues. Papers often go through conferences, editing, and rejection before you can claim you have completed a piece of work. On the other hand, Digital Humanities allows…

  • The Challenge of Language

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    watrall
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    When I decided to use my CHI Fellowship to chronicle and disseminate the stories of individual migrants, my greatest question was the problem of language. My wider research focuses on the experience of migrants and the wider significance of migrants in southern Senegambia, but through a combination of oral history interviews, archival sources, and published…

  • The Journey through Metadata

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    Previously….                My previous update was written while in the middle of developing a metadata scheme for an anthropology department digital library. Most of this effort was directed towards finding the appropriate data to describe the data being curated by the department. This largely entailed the researching of metadata schemes and the consideration of unique…

  • Call for 2019-2020 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Applications

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    The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative invites applications for its 2019-2020 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship program. The Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowships offer MSU graduate students the skills to creatively and thoughtfully apply digital methods and computational approaches to cultural heritage collections, materials, data, questions, and challenges.

  • Project update

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    watrall
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    As a second-year PhD student, I have been trying to balance myself between three roles: a student, a teaching assistant, and a researcher. Frankly speaking, it has not been easy for me. Attending courses and teaching everyday have taken the majority of my time. Therefore, I truly value the time I have in the LEADR…