Author: watrall
-
Who Writes Our Stories?: Critical Digital Literacies & Youth Activism
My research interests are transdisciplinary and primarily focus on race, storytelling, and s/place. Working alongside communities of Color, I also consider education and schooling sites to make meaning. There is a lot of amazing work being done that considers Black Studies and digital scholarship, and so below I focus primarily on digital tools in education.…
-
“Just Communication”: Exploring the History of Fandom and the Internet
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” –R. Batty, Blade Runner This year for my CHI project I am interested in tracing the development of American anime fandom, with a particular emphasis on the dual role of the internet as a means of communication and as a medium for the…
-
Mapping Marvell and Indigenous Mapping
Expectations At the beginning of this journey in CHI, I had no idea how we were going to go about learning to do culture digitally. Learning some Java, building a website and watching The Matrix seemed like some likely things. But learning how to create maps for your web pages using mapbox and leaflet had…
-
Mapping Internal African Migration
My research focuses on a particular borderland split between four West African countries: Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea. Since the late 19th century, people in this borderland have moved between countries for a variety of reasons and in multiple directions. I plan to use my CHI Fellowship to map some of these movements. For some…
-
Privacy in Digitally-Driven Projects in Forensic Anthropology
Today, the majority of research and daily practices in Forensic Anthropology have a digital component. When writing grant proposals for forensic research, institutions, such as National Institute of Justice or the National Science Foundation, generally fund projects that have deliverables in the form of large data mining and sharing via digital sources. In daily practice,…
-
Who am I? Nationality, identity, and digital tools
In 1922, Albert Einstein said, “Since the theory of relativity is accepted by the readers, nowadays, I am recognized as a ‘German scholar’ in Germany and the ‘Swiss Jew’ in Britain. However, if my theory is no longer popular or accepted, then I immediately turn into the ‘Swiss Jew’ for the Germans and the ‘German…
-
A Question of Authenticity: Digital Artifacts in Museums
One of the reasons I was drawn to the CHI fellowship was my interest in the digital preservation of artifacts and historical sites for use in museums. I saw the opportunities of photogrammetry and 3D rendering as essential to the future of museums of any kind and wanted to learn more about the possibility of…
-
Data from the Atlantic Slave Trade
I am currently supporting Matrix with Enslaved, a digital project that links historical datasets related to the Atlantic slave trade. My work includes looking at data compiled by different historians and reorganizing that data so it is easier to link to other datasets. Most of these datasets are organized by person and include a number of…
-
Access to Digital Humanities: a critique
With the invention and advancement of the digital humanities, anthropology is in a unique position to be inclusive to the populations that are being studied. We as curators of digital archives have the opportunity to help enable access to a societies cultural heritage but is access always equal? Hypothetically, access to the digital humanities should…
-
Whaddup!
I’m Shewonda Leger. I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, with a specialization in women’s and gender studies. I take my responsibilities as a scholar seriously, because there are very few Haitian American women like myself in academic spaces. Therefore, my research makes space for conversations about…