Category: CHI Fellowship Program
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The Launch of MapMorph
MapMorph: Teaching Human Variation is pedagogical tool for teaching the history and implications of race theory in biological anthropology, as well as the causative forces controlling human variation (climate and genetics). The website describes how climate is known to influence the human form, such as cranial size and shape and body ratios. This project changed…
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Introducing the Peruvian Origins Informatics Project!
I am excited to finally launch the “Peruvian Origins Informatics Project” for public viewing. This website was designed to illustrate material culture of the pre-ceramic inter-zonal connection between the highlands and coast of southern Peru. Within the website there are many features and areas to explore. One main feature of the website is a mapping…
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Making my Dissertation Digital
Have you ever tried to explain your dissertation to your family? Your students? Strangers or acquaintances you barely know? This is a trying task. My dissertation focuses on mobility and migration between four different West African countries (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea), looking at the multitude of reasons people moved and the larger meaning of…
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The Challenge of Language
When I decided to use my CHI Fellowship to chronicle and disseminate the stories of individual migrants, my greatest question was the problem of language. My wider research focuses on the experience of migrants and the wider significance of migrants in southern Senegambia, but through a combination of oral history interviews, archival sources, and published…
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Hitting the Proverbial Wall
I think there is a point in time that every novice reaches in technical projects when they wonder..will I actually successfully complete this project? This is my current mental state in my CHI project. I am swimming in a sea of technical questions in relation to the map demonstration of macromorphoscopic trait data. My…
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Do I Want to be Remembered for This? Digitization and 1990s Anime Fandom
Part of the impetus for embarking on this project was the conservation of convention history. Many of the constituent components of early fandom have disappeared or were never recorded in the first place. As pop culture is seen as disposable–ask anyone who has longed for an original Action Comics #1–there was even less incentive to…
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Teaching Early African History/Studies with a Digital Lens
I recently attended a panel on teaching pre-1800 African history using digital humanities. The panel focused on early African history, but some of the presentations ignored the digital humanities portion of the title and only really focused on the pre-1800 part. Perhaps the theme of the panel changed after the program was printed, or maybe…
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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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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…