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.
A central component of my CHI project is working with historical data. The creation of a database from historical documents is a long and tedious process, so I have decided to use one already available online. A group of economic historians published the African Commodity Trade Database (ACTD) by working with the Rural Environment History Group at Wageningen University. One of their datasets includes more than nine thousand commodities exported from Africa from the early nineteenth century to World War II. I plan to build from their work by transforming some of their data into visualizations on a website. This process includes several decisions that will shape my final visualizations and the historical contextualization I will contribute to explaining them. I've described part of that process below by highlighting some of the decisions I've made in selecting which data to use.
In the late 1500’s-early 1600’s, England experienced an explosion of plays written, performed, and attended. Concurrently, England witnessed an influx in the publication of artistic manuals.
The Saharan World at a Glance (SWAG) is a mobile-first digital text book. The site was designed specifically with incoming undergraduate students in mind. The site’s content is framed around the Saharan World: the North African coast, the Sahara, and the Sahel.
The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (SCVMC) Historic Cemetery was re-discovered in 2012 due to construction related to expansion and seismic retrofitting at the west end of the hospital property.
