Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative

Hosted and administered by the Department of Anthropology in partnership with MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University, The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative is a platform for interdisciplinary scholarly collaboration in the domain of digital cultural heritage. In addition, the initiative strives to equip students with the methodological skills necessary to creatively apply information, communication, and computing technology to cultural heritage materials, questions, and challenges.

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from the Cultural Heritage Informatics blog:

The dead have come alive!

April 17, 2014 | Katy Meyers ieldran, the Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Mapping Project, is officially live and can be found here: ieldran.matrix.msu.edu It's been very exciting having the project live! However, because I went live early (most CHI projects will be going live on May 1) there are a number of features I wasn't able to finish. There are two major features that I hope to add in the near feature.

Submission of sites by users: I really want users to be able to add data to the project. The form wouldn't directly add data, but rather would email it to me, and then I could add it. However, due to my lack of knowledge of PHP and lack of time to add more data at the moment, I had to comment this feature out. It is something very important to the project, especially since we currently don't have inhumation only cemeteries in the database. With more time in the future, I will definitely add those sites and hopefully perfect the submission form.
Downloads of spatial data: One of the reasons I went ahead with this project was that I wanted to make and share spatial data about site locations so that other people could use it and wouldn't have to remake the data every single time. Sadly, due to my own lack of knowledge of PHP, I wasn't able to get this feature running in time. I also need to figure out a way to add a license to the data so that the hard work that Matt Austin and I did to create it won't be forgotten. However, it is impossible to add license or commenting directly into geoJSON data- meaning that we need to come up with another way of adding metadata either through an attached XML document or some type of modal.

Current and Recent CHI Projects

Miami Towns Destroyed by Harmar ca. 1790

Settler Colonialism Uncovered

The majority of present-day states are former colonies or colonial metropoles, a number of which were or still are settler colonies. Consequently, it is essential to know where and how such colonies formed to understand current geopolitics and to raise Read More

Excavation of an Early Bronze Age tumulus in tumulus in Shtoj, Shkoder, Albania

Tumulus Mapping Project

The tumuli (burial mounds) of northern Albania appeared suddenly on the Shkodër plain around the start of the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BC). The ongoing Projekti Arkeologjikë i Shkodrës (PASH), which is co-directed by Drs. Michael Galaty (Millsaps College) and Lorenc Bejko (University of Read More

Digitizing & Localizing Radical History

The Digitizing and Localizing Radical History project is motivated by an interest in researching, investigating, and understanding the dynamics of space as it is shared by individuals and groups who are connected and disconnected in a variety of ways. Further, the project is interested in the Read More

History of Soccer in Zambian Towns

The History of Soccer in Zambian Towns project explores the political and social history of football in Zambia from the 1940s to the present. Drawing on archival and oral sources, the project focuses specifically on ten towns, each of which are connected by the main rail line in Read More