Blog

Launching the Timeline of Michigan Archaeology

The Timeline of Michigan Archaeology has officially launched! You can find it at timemarch.matrix.msu.edu.  Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I hope you are too. You can scroll through time, click on individual events (archaeological sites), or even search for a specific date to see what was going on at that point in time.  I created this timeline in part by request; I have often worked with school groups and the public at archaeology events and have had several requests for some sort of timeline. I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind, but I hope it suits the purpose.

The sites presented are all listed on the National Register of Historic Places, meaning that they are the some of the most significant archaeological sites in the state. There are two exceptions to this: the Tuscola Mastodon find and the Leavitt site. However, these present crucial information about this very early time in the state, and I thought it was important to include this information. The sites also span the complete history of the state, up to about 1930.

This site was created using the Timeglider JS widget, a Javascript element that can be embedded in HTML. It was surprisingly easy to work with once I became familiar with the code, and should I need to add new events in the future, should be able to. Anyone with questions on the technical process can contact me.

Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my site and find it useful. There is a lot of information contained within it. I did my best to provide what I thought people would be interested in, but if there is something that you think would be useful to include, please let me know!

Launching J-Skel

I am very proud to announce the launch of J-Skel: The Digital Ages Estimator of Subadult Skeletons at j-skel.matrix.msu.edu!  I designed this website with the goal of]-o0 acquainting upper-level undergraduate students and early graduate students of physical anthropology and human osteology (or for anyone else just interested in bones) to aging methods of juvenile skeletons.  Though this may seem like a morose topic, skeletal remains from juveniles are actually quite enlightening and can even give information as to the quality of life, area of origin, and migration patterns across time and space.

All-in-all, juvenile remains are essential in reconstructing past populations.  This can only be done by understanding how the body grows and develops during this time period, hence J-Skel.  Data gathered for this project were from multiple resources that specialized on individual bones or elements and they aged over time during the life course.  However, the majority of these projects were conducted by white European or European-American scholars on populations of similar demographics. Although there have been recent pushes to get more geographic and cultural populational studies rolling, the majority of data out there are on individuals of European descent.

The J-Skel homepage allows you to click on an interactive SVG of a child skeleton which takes you to aging methods in different parts of the body.  After months of tearing through RaphaelJS, the original javascript library I attempted to use to create the interactive elements, I could never get the SVG I created or RaphaelJS to link to my html.  However, I was eventually able to use Inkscape to create the SVG of the child’s skeleton and directly embed this lengthy code directly into the body, giving me a large interactive component to the website.

For this site, the skeletal regions I chose to group were the skull, thorax, pelvic girdle, upper limbs, and lower limbs.  Each region/subpage is broken down by bone with general descriptions of age methods and age-related changes.  Beside those are classes of buttons which correspond to different levels of fusion between bones.  For example, the frontal bone (the forehead) is originally made up of two halves that fuse and become one single bone.  The buttons beside the description would say: ‘unfused’ – for two separate halves, ‘fusing’ – one bone that is in the process of fusing the two bones, or ’completely fused’ – the two haves have become one with no remnants of the fusion line.

Depending on which button you clicked per bony element, an appropriate age range would be generated and appear in a text box on the right side of the screen.  Using the example above, if you have a specimen in front of you from a skeletal collection where the two frontal bones are in the process of fusing, by clicking on the button labeled “Fusing”, the text box to the right would reveal: “Between 2 and 4 years old”.  This process is the same for all of the bones that I used for this project.  However, not every bone or bone type in the body is used for aging one the website.  Some bones are much better than others to use for aging, so those are the ones that were selected.

One aspect of the site that I plan to work on over the summer is to include a section over aging using dentition.  The teeth form and erupt (protrude from the bone) in a very particular order and on a strict schedule such that teeth can greatly increase accuracy in age estimations.  The reason they have not been included in the site right now is due to a function of time for research.  Teeth are incredibly complicated structures and the time it would have taken to get all of the information gathered and synthesized would have prevented me from launching the website on time, so be on the lookout for that section to pop up later this summer!

I hope you find this tool as useful, interesting, and informative as it was for me to create (both content-wise and from a web designer point-of-view).  This subject is one that may on the surface seem eerie or creepy, but recognizing the value of how infants, children, and teenagers make sense of- and are affected by the world around them helps us understand cultural processes and mechanisms of society.  This tool is just one way of starting to address these interests, so I hope you enjoy the website and learn something new!

Launch Post – Camping, Landlig, Mjølner, Saklig: A Project Exploring Norway’s National Identity

Greetings to all digital cultural heritage enthusiasts! Today I formally announce the launch of my 2017 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship project: Camping, Landlig, Mjølner, Saklig: A Project Exploring Norway’s National Identity.

Project title:
Camping, Landlig, Mjølner, Saklig: A Project Exploring Norway’s National Identity

Project URL:
http://clmsproject.matrix.msu.edu/

Project overview:
This project is my narrative of my explorations of expressions of Norwegian national identity. It is the culmination of my graduate coursework for my master’s thesis in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, my experiences studying abroad in Oslo at the International Summer School, and my participation as a graduate fellow in the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University. It is my endeavor to explore answers to the question of “What does it mean to be Norwegian?” through the use of digital cultural heritage tools to explore new methodologies to answer this question. Read More

Launching the database

Before embarking on this project, Dr. Watrall said that making a database in SQL and taking online with PHP would involve too steep a learning curve to climb within the context of my participation in CHI this year. He was right. Ultimately, we decided that the most realistic goal would be to complete the database. The database provides a unique basis for thinking about the history of hydroelectricity in East Africa – namely, a quantitative basis – but unfortunately it is not yet freely available. Additionally, I can now use this SQL code as a template for expanding the database to include information about related environmental and economic phenomena in the Lake Victoria basin. I have not abandoned the hope for the database to be accessible online, but I think that the only time-efficient way for the database to get online is for me to collaborate with someone who is specifically trained to complete this kind of work.

Apart from the technical challenges associated with the project, there was conceptual work to be done as well in order to effectively digitize and integrate the array of sources that I used, i.e. data cleaning. Cleaning the data involved a few steps. First, I had to simplify most of the tables by dissembling them into discrete data points and reassembling them into multiple new tables. This step was necessary because the tabular data that British colonial technocrats sent to each other often consisted of complex, multifactorial tables that correlated various arrays of keys across time and space. I examined the individual data points that constituted these tables in order to distill a set of recurring keys. I used these keys as my bases for rebuilding the corpus into a database that would be amenable to computerized analysis.

The various keys map onto four axes of differentiation. The first axis compares different categories of users, with the most significant categories being “government,” “commercial,” and “railway.” It also distinguishes between the specific users that were active in the industrial towns that, in the late colonial period, began to dominate the northern end of Lake Victoria. The various entities included mines, factories, and housing complexes.

The second axis of comparison distinguishes between two different ways to use for electricity: power, measured in horsepower, and light, measured in kilowatts. Many electricity users deployed both forms, but many also restricted their use to one only. This axis also shows the database user that people used electricity to generate power for three specific types of use – namely, to run arc furnaces, to provide motive power, and to achieve steam raising.

The third axis provides a basis for differentiating between production and consumption, by reminding the database user that separate entities were responsible for each action and could only ever have partial knowledge of each other. The concept of “demand” is the key link included in this database between consumers and planners.

The fourth axis includes the terms that the hydroelectricity industry used to grapple with the difficulties of managing change over time in their development projects. Industry planners used several scales of temporal cycles in order to make these changes legible. These scales included variation within a year, which could be measured in terms of variables like “peak” and “average” use. Note that some keys force the database user to consider multiple axes of differentiation at the same time. Consider “estimated_demand,” which includes a relational element as well as a temporal element; this particular key offers to the database user a quantitative description of how people thought their relationships with each other would change over time.

Taken together, this set of keys that are shared across the corpus of statistical tables can give the database user multiple points of leverage over the social and technical contours of the hydroelectric industry and its variation across time and space. The user can produce quantitative representations of changing relationships in the consumption and production of hydroelectricity during the final years of colonial rule in East Africa.

Mapping?

In this post, I reflect on the possibility of building a spatial map of the information that is contained in the database. The initial challenge is to learn how to build such a map using HTML and Java. HILT and CHI introduced me to the basics of this work, but I would have to go further in order to make a useful map. This post considers a couple of the benefits and challenges that would come from doing so.

The main benefit is to increase the power of the database to let the user visualize and manipulate historic information for the purpose of understanding the world of hydroelectricity in late colonial East Africa. Mapping the flows of hydroelectricity that existed between the factories, mines, and plantations of this time period can give scholars a new window onto the economic and environmental relationships that structured people’s lives.

The main conceptual challenge is how to represent change over time across space through the use of a digital platform. Most network analysis and mapping tools are not geared towards presenting change over time, and those that do face limitations. One limitation is the fact that “time” does not exist uniformly, but requires representation in multiple simultaneous registers. A potential solution to this practical obstacle to the creation of a database that represents change over time is to overlay different cycles of time in the production and consumption of hydroelectricity. Relevant cycles include daily, seasonal, and annual patterns of use.

There is also the practical challenge of mapping historic data that, in some instances, lacks clear geographic coordinates. Overcoming this obstacle, I suspect, must require archival and field research to triangulate past geographies, and is not amenable to digital solutions.

Partial connections in ways of knowing: Technocrats vs. The Database

In some of my earlier blogging in CHI, I reflected on the extent to which a digital database would reflect the ways of thinking and knowing that were used by the people who produced the data points from which the database is built. Here, I try to collect those thoughts.

The epistemology of the database and the epistemology of hydroelectric planners only have “partial connections” (Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings, 2016). This fact brings advantages and weaknesses to scholarship based on a database such as this. A key strength is that the data reflects the areas of interest of historical actors; a limitation is that it recombines and reframes the information in ways that may not actually bear relevance to people’s actual lives.

In the context of this database about hydroelectric planning in late colonial Uganda and Kenya, the constraints of this limitation are somewhat minimized because the source information already exists in tabular form. Digitizing and recombining hydroelectric records introduces contemporary epistemologies to reframe historical knowledge in a way that is largely foreign to the discipline of history – but I do not think that it is an activity that would have seemed totally foreign to the technocrats of the Uganda Electricity Board of the 1950s, who were already beginning to experiment with the use of computers to analyze their data. To see the creation of a digital database from their knowledge as a natural extension of it would be teleological, but I think it would be an overstatement to say that the two epistemologies are only coincidental.