Category: CHI Grad Fellow Post
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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…
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Mapping the Hooligans
In 2013, ProFans published a public statement that pointed out the rise of the right-wing extremist activities in German football stadiums. The statement by ProFans, the largest football fan organization, appealed to the relevant parties to work together and to avoid the deterioration of the situation. After Merkel opened the borders to refugees in 2015,…
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Data from the Atlantic Slave Trade, Part 2
In my last post, I discussed how historians use ethnonyms in historical datasets. The main take-away from that post is ethnonyms are difficult to interpret but can reflect the movement of African slaves with similar socio-cultural characteristics to specific regions in the Americas. Historians use this information to explore cultural continuities between Africans and African-descended people…
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Digitizing the History of Archaeology: Ethical responsibilities
Recently I have had the opportunity to scan over 1000 slides of excavations that occurred along the southern coast of Peru throughout the 90’s and early 00’s. While the task itself was mundane and took many more hours than I was expecting, the images that I discovered through this digitization process were absolutely breathtaking. I…
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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.…
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“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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…