Author: watrall
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Changing Directions – Introducing TOMB
As Katy mentioned in our recent Digital Archaeology Institute blog post, she and I have decided to take our project in a different direction. We originally proposed a project called ossuaryKB, a mortuary method knowledge base. However, as we’ve been working toward the project over the last semester, we hit quite a few roadblocks. After…
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Mapping Morton Village: Creating the Interactive Map
Creating the Interactive Map For the past two weeks, as Autumn Beyer worked on coding our site, I have been working on the interactive map for our joint CHI Fellowship project – Mapping Morton Village. I had some problems at the beginning, including a computer that would not function and some confusion as to the…
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Mapping Morton Village: Coding the Website
Mapping Morton Village — writing the basic code for the website. For the past two weeks, I have been working on the code for my joint CHI Fellowship project with Nikki Silva: Mapping Morton Village. We knew the general structure of what we wanted the site to look like and using a bootstrap theme I created the…
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Expanding The Xicano Cookbook
For my CHI project this year, I will be continuing work on my project The Xicano Cookbook, a digital essay documenting Xicano culture in the Great Lakes region. With a special emphasis on food practice, visual art, and oral history, it articulates the ways in which Xicanos have survived and thrived on Anishinaabe land in…
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Namibia Digital Repository: An Effort Towards “Democratizing Knowledge”
The politics of publishing in African studies are controversial and problematic. This is the dilemma: foreign researchers are able to obtain more funds than African-based academics to conduct often very innovative research projects. In order to obtain tenure, and therefore more research funds, these professors publish in western university presses (or Palgrave and Routledge, which…
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This is my story: Detroit 1967
“They [the media] just referred to it as a riot. Down on the ground it looked like a rebellion. But the media and the power structure had a lot of things wrong,” said Ed Vaughn, activist and businessman in Detroit.[1] This is my story: Detroit 1967 is an oral history based multimedia project, which looks…
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Attuning to Cultural Differences through Community Soundscapescapes
As new(er) communicative landscapes emerge, humanities educators and research in the teaching of cultural heritage have enthusiastically embraced digital and visual culture. From more (g)local understandings of cosmopolitanism to understanding how locative literacies and contemporary technologies are mediating youth identity making with place, the digital has made its mark. Despite this renewed emphasis on multimodality,…
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Archiving Oral Culture
I’ve been taking my comprehensive exams over the course of this semester, which provides a strange and exhausting opportunity to really step back and think about the state of my field of research, as well as the ways that field has historically been presented to students and scholars from outside of the field. The overlap…
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Politics and Form : The Armed Services Editions
As a CHI Fellow, I’m undertaking a large-scale text analysis of the Armed Services Editions, a collection of novels sent to US Soldiers during WWII to “fight the war on ideas,” to consider issues of politics and literary form. I first stumbled on the Armed Services Editions a few years ago, while researching Ernest Hemingway’s…
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BARDSS – “Baptism Record Database for Slave Societies”
Hi everyone, I would like to introduce the project I am developing now at Michigan State University. I am currently working collaboratively with Andrew Barsom, a fellow doctoral student in the Department of History at MSU, on the Baptismal Record Database for Slave Societies (BARDSS) project. This online database, which is part of MSU’s…