Author: watrall

  • Project Intro: Mapping the New Academic Labor Movement

    Happy end-of-the-semester, CHI! I’m excited to announce my project for 2023, tentatively titled “Graduate Labor Rising: Mapping the New Academic Labor Movement.” This project will consider the rise, fall, and rise again of graduate labor organizing in the United States through rhetorical analysis paired with historic and speculative mapping. Graduate workers in the US began…

  • To My Fellowship Project and Beyond!

    When I applied to be part of CHI for this year I did so with a very specific project in mind. As part of my dissertation research, I co-conducted a photovoice project that tackled what it is like to live with lead in your environment on a daily basis. One of the deliverables from that…

  • Project Announcement: Stratford Heritage Guide

    I am excited to announce that for my CHI Fellowship project this year, I will be creating the Stratford Heritage Guide. This project will explore the subjective nature of Stratford-upon-Avon’s relationship with Shakespeare and examine how narratives about that town that are presented as completely objective have attempted to influence visitors’ perspectives. The presentation of…

  • Mapping Nzulezo: Memories, Histories, and Ecology

    This fall, I have discussed my plans to represent Nzulezo’s origin and migration history in a digital format. I want to create an interactive, web-based visualization of Nzulezo people’s seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century history. Please see my previous post for a brief discussion of the Nzulezo people and their past. Last week (Friday, December 2,…

  • Project Pitch Time

    During last week’s meeting, we each gave a short pitch of our ideas for our upcoming CHI project, which will take up the majority of our time next semester (sans one more rapid development challenge in January). For this pitch, we were asked to create a vision document outlining our project idea and walk through…

  • Learning Time Slider!

    The most recent rapid development challenge (mapping memory) was full of unexpecting road blocks and exciting successes. Being still very new to the world of coding, every small victory feels like a very big win. I learned a lot of new tricks (thanks Erica for introducing me to Atom), and I am slowing becoming more…

  • A Ghost in The TimeSlider Shell

    This coming week, we’ll be pitching our project ideas for the CHI fellowship. One component of my project will involve a making a map to demonstrate the breadth of short-term medical training programs in China during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I’m taking inspiration from the digital project The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern…

  • Map Style Challenges and Mysteries

    Last Friday the CHI Fellows continued work on our Mapping Memory project, getting into the actual coding and design of our map. Because we are working in a large group, we identified the three main tasks (design, data entry, and time slider building) and subdivided into three teams, each working on one of those elements.…

  • Mapping Out Untold Histories!

    In my previous blog post, I made known my plans of representing aspects of Nzulezo people’s history in digital format, precisely in an interactive web map, using resourcing like Mapbox and Leaflet. The people of Nzulezo are a community of Ghanaians who live in the middle of the Amanzule River in southwestern Ghana. My ongoing dissertation…

  • Mapping Memories 2022

    Hello CHI Community! This week we are working on our mapping memory project. As one of our rapid development projects, our current prompt asks us to create a website to display a narrative of our choosing based on some linked geographic coordinates over some span of time. While a bit open ended, this allows us…