Category: CHI Grad Fellow Post
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Mapping Morton Village: Writing the Content
In this post, I would like to discuss what will be included within the Mapping Morton Village interactive map. For the past several weeks, Nikki Silva and myself have been working on the written content of Mapping Morton Village. We decided to write the content of the site with the public in mind, focusing on…
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Structuring the Fields
It is time to show the fields we are using in our database on Baptismal Records for Slave Societies (BARDSS). In previous posts, we pointed out that this database was possible thanks to a project hosted at Vanderbilt University and led by professor Jane Landers. Landers and her team have been travelling to…
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The Importance of Fields in Database Projects
We discussed in previous posts about the importance of selecting representative fields when we are creating a database based on historical records. It is critical to go back again to this point due to the importance it has while designing a functional digital database. We all know that historical sources contain…
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Databasing Historical Records: Some of the Challenges
Structuring a database is not an easy task. During this year of work, we have faced many challenges that have required from us great intellectual efforts and reflection. Nevertheless, I have heard from “digital humanists” and programmers that because we have a software developer, we are not making the database, that someone…
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This is my story: The beginning of reclaiming the past to look to the future
This is my story: Detroit 1967 is in the infancy of development. So, what is it again? It is a multimedia archive and repository that serves to catalog and historicize this canonical and significant time in the 20th century with oral histories from eyewitnesses and participants of the rebellion. This endeavor is a continuation of…
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AHA presentation and discussion of BARDSS
In January, we presented our project, the Baptismal Record Database for Slaves Societies, at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association. This was the second time we showed our project in public. The first time we did it was during a workshop organized by Vanderbilt University, by professor Jane Landers in November 2015.…
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Simulacra and Simulation and my Journey into the Third Order of Copyright Law
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to protect a representation these days. Anyone remember reading Baudrillard? I remember reading that whole treatise on simulated reality years ago and associating the whole thing with war and television. These days, I’m pretty sure he was thinking about copyright. Just kidding. I’m pretty sure he…
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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…