CHI Fellowship Program

DHSI and Digital Scholarship

At the start of June, I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I was asked a number of interesting questions from other participants that I thought I would share:

What did I attend DHSI? A focused classroom setting with a proven record of leaving students with new skills. I was interested in GIS software as a way to build maps and analyze quantitative and spatial data in my dissertation, but had limited success in exploring the software on my own because of the steep learning curve. The GIS course has delivered on its promise of combining examples of the utility of GIS in helping answer questions in humanities research while also providing excellent guided tutorials and one-on-one help from the instructor. DHSI also came highly recommended by colleagues as a place not only to learn new skills, but to network with a large and engaging group of people producing digital scholarship.

Why am Read More

Call for 2012-2013 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Applications

The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative invites applications for its 2010-2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship program.

The Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowships offer MSU graduate students in departments and programs with an emphasis on cultural heritage (Anthropology, History, Art History, Museum Studies, Historical & Cultural Geography, Classics, etc.) the theoretical and methodological skills necessary to creatively apply information, computing, and communication technologies to cultural heritage materials. In addition, the fellowships provide graduate students with the opportunity to influence the current state of cultural heritage informatics, and become leaders for the future of cultural heritage informatics.

During the course of their fellowship (which lasts an academic year), students will collaboratively develop a significant and innovative cultural heritage informatics project. Projects might include (but are certainly not limited to) a serious game, a mobile application, a digital archive, or a collaborative digital publication. To support their work, fellows will receive a stipend of $2000 Read More

Project Update – Alex Galarza

A few months back I introduced my two projects for the year. I have made more progress on my prototype for an online dissertation chapter than redesigning the front-end of the footballscholars.org site, so I will focus on the Ciudad Deportiva chapter prototype.

Kora and the Ciudad Deportiva

KORA is serving as the digital repository for the Ciudad Deportiva chapter. As a reminder, the chapter deals with the curious case of the Ciudad Deportiva, a mix between a stadium complex and amusement park. It was built over seven artificial islands on sixty hectares of land filled in the Rio de la Plata. Besides an enormous 140,000-seat stadium and various athletic facilities, the project was to include an aquarium, mini-golf, mechanical rides for children, and a drive-in movie theatre for 500 cars. This project combined public and private funds, embodying a new vision of middle-class consumption that fit into city planner’s designs for a Read More

Digital Dissertations – not only for the Humanities

Image from Flickr user ginnerobot

For a while now, I’ve been listening in on discussion in Digital Humanities about the pros and cons of digital dissertations. From Seventeen Moments in Soviet History to a master’s thesis on composer Henry Cowell, my colleagues have promoted the digitization of dissertations in the humanities.

The discussion of the benefits of open-access (in concert with the “security dangers” of the same) has played a big role in departmental, institutional, and online discussions among scholars. For a review of this issue, see GradHacker’s recent post on access to dissertations. But that’s not the topic of this post. My question is:

What about the social and natural sciences?

If the discussion to move into the digital age with theses and dissertations is happening in the sciences, maybe it’s just not happening online. As you can see from UMass Amherst’s list of open access dissertations, a variety of Read More

Digital History – A Selective State of the Field

This post is a selective survey of the state of digital history. My overview is neither exhaustive nor definitive, instead focusing on my own experiences and reflections as an observer and student. So, here are a few recent themes that partially illuminate the contours of digital history:

Digital Sessions at the Annual American Historical Association meeting
I was lucky in that my first annual meeting for my professional association also featured a record amount of sessions devoted to digital history. In fact, Chicago’s program had its own section devoted to digital sessions: The Future is Here: Digital Methods in Research and Teaching in History. The proliferation of digital sessions can be credited to increasing practice and interest in digital work, but having a prominent DH practitioner like Dan Cohen on the program committee also played a big part. Another important benchmark was the first THATCamp at AHA, a fruitful event that included mostly Read More