Author: watrall
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The Feasibility and Worthwhileness of a Project.
Scope has been a primary concern for a lot of us during the semester. You have to have an idea that falls right into that Goldilocks zone of feasible and worthwhile. My particular project is no exception. As a research assistant for the anthropology department, I started off the semester hoping to digitize an entire…
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What does Digital Humanities mean to you?
A few days ago, in the office, my co-workers referred to me as the “DH person”. “The DH group” is also used to refer to the scholars on MSU campus who work with Digital Humanities. On the one hand, I am proud to be recognized as a “DH person.” On the other hand, I still…
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It’s All About the Deliverables
We, as academics, are conditioned to write grant and project proposals for research that we are interested in pursuing. We have our general format that we follow for these proposals…introduction, background information, research problem and questions, materials and methods, and potential impacts of the research project. However, a large focus of research proposals today, particularly…
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Who will read my academic book? Telling public stories about Africa and Africans
As a graduate student 90+% of the way through writing my dissertation, I often have ask myself this question: how many people will ever read anything I write? My dissertation will be read by my committee members, maybe a couple of historian friends, grad students or professors in the countries I study, maybe future grad…
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To the Beginning: Anime and American Fandom in the 1980s
The first problem to resolve in mapping out American anime fandom is where to situate a start point for the project. The first major anime convention in the United States was Project A-Kon, first held in 1990. Before this point, smaller anime meetings were held as stand-alone local events by clubs or as part of…
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Popups: the Greatest Puzzle
I had my first eureka moment in programming a couple of weeks ago. Our cohort was tasked with building a website with a map, putting some points on that map and making some popups appear when you click on those points. We decided to utilize https://www.mapbox.com to build the dataset, the tileset and the map…
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Getting Digital into the Humanities
I recently attended a digital round table at a conference on Asian that focused on open access, online journals and the difficulty in maintaining the journal both financially and technically. While the presenters clearly cared very deeply for their journals and upholding academic integrity, they were just as plainly overwhelmed with the management of a…
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Mapping the Hooligans
In 2013, ProFans published a public statement that pointed out the rise of the right-wing extremist activities in German football stadiums. The statement by ProFans, the largest football fan organization, appealed to the relevant parties to work together and to avoid the deterioration of the situation. After Merkel opened the borders to refugees in 2015,…
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Data from the Atlantic Slave Trade, Part 2
In my last post, I discussed how historians use ethnonyms in historical datasets. The main take-away from that post is ethnonyms are difficult to interpret but can reflect the movement of African slaves with similar socio-cultural characteristics to specific regions in the Americas. Historians use this information to explore cultural continuities between Africans and African-descended people…
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Digitizing the History of Archaeology: Ethical responsibilities
Recently I have had the opportunity to scan over 1000 slides of excavations that occurred along the southern coast of Peru throughout the 90’s and early 00’s. While the task itself was mundane and took many more hours than I was expecting, the images that I discovered through this digitization process were absolutely breathtaking. I…