Category: CHI Grad Fellow Post
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Cleaning Trade Data
A major part of my CHI project is cleaning trade data that I collected from the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) in Accra and Tamale, Ghana that includes paper records of the goods carried by traders across the Volta River. The statistics, however, are not a complete picture of trade in the region,…
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From the Ivory Tower to the School Yard: Writing About Archaeology for a Young Audience
As a Ph.D. candidate, most of my writing is geared toward an audience composed of fellow grad students, professional archaeologists, university professors, and avocational archaeologists. In many ways, we write in a language that only other archaeologists, those initiated into the discipline and its methods, can understand. How, then, do we translate this idiosyncratic language…
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Adventures in JavaScript: Creating games for Archaeology 101
A main component of the Archaeology 101 project will be interactive games created through different JavaScript libraries to teach visitors about different archaeological concepts. If you aren’t familiar with the project, please check out the project introduction blog: part 1 and 2 to learn more!
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Introductory R and RStudio Workshop
As a returning CHI fellow, I was tasked with organizing a workshop on a digital humanities tool of my choice. I knew I wanted to do something related to data analysis and visualization and eventually decided on the computing language R, which I used last year to clean and transform a dataset. I like using…
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Historical Research in the Age of Digitization
Earlier this week I read an article titled “Why Don’t Archivists Digitize Everything” by Samantha Thompson from the Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives. Thompson thoughtfully provided both positive and critical reflection regarding archival digitization initiatives. With seemingly so many documents, objects, and audio recordings available online, digitized sources still only represent a fraction of…
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Introducing the Archaeology 101 Project: Part 2
As introduced yesterday by Autumn, the Archaeology 101 project will generate an interactive website with the main goal of introducing elementary and middle school students, as well as other interested individuals, to archaeology. The website will include basic introductory information that will teach visitors how to think like an archaeologist. It will then reinforce these…
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Project Introduction: Archaeology 101
Introducing Archaeology 101! This project is a collaborative CHI project between myself and Jeffrey Painter. At the launch, this project will be an interactive website that can be used to introduce elementary and middle school students (and other interested parties) to archaeology!
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Project ideas
In my last post I posed a bunch of questions about digital pedagogy. My long attempt at an answer is going to be my project. I am planning a website that will be a pedagogical tool to help teach an undergraduate course on the American Revolution. The idea behind the course is to get college freshmen…
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Thinking about digital pedagogy
This post is long overdue, mostly because I have been wrestling with these thoughts for a while. Without necessarily revealing what my project will be (that will be the next post), I want to talk about the use of digital tools in pedagogical projects. A challenge for me has been thinking about using digital tools…
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Commodities on the Volta River
For my CHI project, I plan to publish a clean dataset composed of information about trade goods carried across the Volta River in West Africa. An important nexus of trade from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the Volta River was traversed by traders moving back and forth from the forest region of present-day Ghana…