Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative

Author: watrall

  • CHI Fellows Intro: Andrew LoPinto

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    Hello there, internet!  I am Andrew.  I am a PhD student here at Michigan State University in the Department of Anthropology as well as a research assistant for the Campus Archaeology Program.  My background is in archaeology, and specifically, bioarchaeology and mortuary analysis.  Yes, I work with the dead.  Macabre?  Perhaps.  Interesting?  DEFINITELY!  Bioarchaeology can clue us…

  • CHI Fellow Introduction: Liz Timbs

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    My name is Liz Timbs. I am a doctoral candidate in African History here at Michigan State University. I also hold a Master’s in Comparative World History from George Mason University. In my graduate education, I have had the opportunity to work at two institutions which have demonstrated dedication to the application of digital methods…

  • Settler Colonialism Uncovered: Launching Stage 1

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    At its most simplistic, settler colonialism was (and is) a process in which emigrants move(d) with the express purposes of territorial occupation and the formation of a new community rather than the extraction of labor or resources (however, these may have been or become secondary objectives).[1] An integral part of this process was and is Indigenous…

  • Welcome to the New 2013-2014 Cultural Heritage Informatics Grad Fellows

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    The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative is pleased to welcome seven new CHI Grad Fellows for the 2013-2014 academic year.  The new fellows come from the Departments of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures – and represent a wide variety of subdisciplines and areas of research. In the…

  • Tumulus: A Mapping Archive of Northern Albanian Burial Mounds – Final Words

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    My CHI project, Tumulus, which can be found here, is an archive of archaeological data that were collected from previous field seasons in northern Albania.  Rather than keeping data hidden away in FileMaker, our efforts are best served, I think, when they are made available and others can use them – particularly since a dizzying…

  • Launching Detroit Digital

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    I’m very happy to announce the launch of Detroit Digital.  The culminating project of the 2013 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool (which ran from May 27 to July 3), Detroit Digital was built over the course of 2 weeks by 10 students (one of which came from as far away as New Zealand to participate in the fieldschool).  The project, which…

  • Talking about Digital Pedagogy

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    “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation…

  • Born Digital Collection: Call for Abstracts

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    Composing In/With/Through Archives: An Open Access, Born Digital Edited Collection In 2008, Kate Eichorn wrote: “To write in a digital age is to write in the archive” (1). She reflects on how the ubiquitous nature of “the archive” may be “inflected in our writing, especially in emerging genres of writing ” (1). In other words,…

  • What we talk about when we talk about archives:

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    On January 4th, I attended an MLA panel titled “Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities.” Adeline Koh – a speaker on this panel – talked at length about her current project “Digitizing Chinese Englishmen: Representations of Race and Empire in the Nineteenth Century. (This panel provoked a great deal of discussion. For now, here’s…

  • On Archival “discoveries”: What does it mean?

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    In June 2012, The Atlantic published an article by Suzanne Fischer titled “Nota Bene: If you ‘Discover’ Something in an Archive, It’s not a Discovery.” [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/nota-bene-if-you-discover-something-in-an-archive-its-not-a-discovery/258538/]. Fischer wrote the article in the aftermath of the publication of the Leale Report. Briefly, Charles Leale was the Surgeon-General when President Abraham Lincoln was shot. He was the…