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	<title>Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative</title>
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	<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu</link>
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		<title>Call for 2012-2013 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Applications</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/05/14/call-for-2012-2013-cultural-heritage-informatics-graduate-fellowship-applications/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/05/14/call-for-2012-2013-cultural-heritage-informatics-graduate-fellowship-applications/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 May 2012 19:06:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ethan Watrall</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1288</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative invites applications for its 2010-2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship program.</p>
<p>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 &#38; 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.</p>
<p>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 &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative invites applications for its 2010-2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship program.</p>
<p>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 &amp; 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.</p>
<p>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 per semester.  In addition, fellows will have the opportunity to be appointed as assistants during the Cultural Heritage Informatics Field School (offered during the summer through the Anthropology Department), for which they will receive an additional $1000 stipend.  As the fellows will be expected to present their work at professional conferences and meetings, they will receive an additional $1000 in travel funds.  All fellows will be in residence at <a href="http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/">MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online</a>.  While applicants may have previous technical experience, such experience is not required to apply.</p>
<p>The Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship program is generously supported by the Michigan State University Graduate School,  <a href="http://socialscience.msu.edu/">The College of Social Sciences</a>, and the <a href="http://anthropology.msu.edu/">Department of Anthropology</a>, and is administered by the <a href="http://anthropology.msu.edu/">Department of Anthropology</a> and hosted by <a href="http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/">MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online</a>.</p>
<p>For more information, including eligibility and application requirements, check out the <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/fellowships/">full program description</a>.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Project Update &#8211; Alex Galarza</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/04/11/project-update-alex-galarza/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/04/11/project-update-alex-galarza/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:40:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>alex.galarza</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1279</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>A few months back I <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/01/25/project-introduction-alex-galarza/">introduced</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Kora and the Ciudad Deportiva</strong></p>
<p>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 &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A few months back I <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/01/25/project-introduction-alex-galarza/">introduced</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Kora and the Ciudad Deportiva</strong></p>
<p>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 modern city with ample leisure space. Yet, a combination of poor engineering, financial mismanagement, and political disputes ensured that the ambitious plans started in 1965 would be largely abandoned by the 1978 World Cup deadline.</p>
<p>I have set up the repository and will begin uploading my sources this week. I have been fortunate enough to receive a Fulbright IIE award to conduct my dissertation research, so I now know that this prototype will be developing into a working component of my project when I leave for Buenos Aires in the fall. After I finish uploading and sorting my sources, I will be working with a developer here at MATRIX to produce a front-end for the repository. Another KORA project, David Robinson’s <a href="http://aodl.org/islamicpluralism/failedislamicstates/">Failed Islamic States</a>, and MATRIX-hosted <a href="http://soviethistory.org">soviethistory.org</a> are serving as useful models for front-ends that invite users to engage with the materials in their repositories. The central issue in my design thinking is how to engage the user in a long-form historical argument without confronting them with a wall of text. How can I use images, short descriptions, and media like oral interviews and videos to engage people with my wider arguments about the role of soccer in Argentine society?</p>
<p>This brings in the question of audience and public history. My project aims to engage fans of soccer and members of the communities I study in Argentina as well as historians and anthropologists interested in questions of culture and politics. Such a wide audience presents challenges a website’s ability to capture varied interests, but it also presents an opportunity to develop a model of popular and public history that can preserve a long-form argument closer to a monograph or dissertation in an online platform.</p>
<p>I am working with a number of Argentine scholars at the <a href="http://www.unsam.edu.ar/escuelas/politica/centro_deporte/_mision.asp">Centro de Estudio del Deporte</a> at the Universidad de San Martín to gather sources and insights on my own project, but working with a digital repository like KORA presents the opportunity to work with them in the long term towards developing an <a href="http://www.neh.gov/grants/preservation/preservation-and-access-research-and-development">NEH Digital Preservation and Access</a> grant. Many of us take an annual report required of soccer clubs called <em>Memorias y Balances</em> as a base sources in our projects. The reports contain a general account of the year&#8217;s events, membership statistics, and team results and they are in the public domain. These are valuable public documents that could form the spine of an excellent repository with data that could be linked to ask very interesting questions. The Argentine football association, or <em>Associación del Fútbol Argentino</em> has already taken an interest in digitizing their own <em>memorias y balances</em> and has a few decades worth online already.</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Digital Dissertations &#8211; not only for the Humanities</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/04/07/1272/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/04/07/1272/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:39:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Emily Niespodziewanski</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>For a while now, I’ve been listening in on discussion in Digital Humanities about the pros and cons of digital dissertations. From <a href="http://www.soviethistory.org/">Seventeen Moments in Soviet History</a> to a <a href="http://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/32316/index.html?sequence=8">master’s thesis on composer Henry Cowell</a>, my colleagues have promoted the digitization of dissertations in the humanities.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.gradhacker.org/2011/11/18/don%E2%80%99t-keep-your-head-down-digital-dissertations-and-graduate-training/">GradHacker’s recent post on access to dissertations</a>. But that’s not the topic of this post. My question is:</p>
<p><strong>What about the social and natural sciences?</strong></p>
<p>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 <a href="http://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/">UMass Amherst’s list of open access dissertations</a>, a variety of departments &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_1273" class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 260px"><a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/library.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1273" title="Image from Flickr user ginnerobot" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/library-250x300.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="300" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Image from Flickr user ginnerobot</p></div>
<p>For a while now, I’ve been listening in on discussion in Digital Humanities about the pros and cons of digital dissertations. From <a href="http://www.soviethistory.org/">Seventeen Moments in Soviet History</a> to a <a href="http://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/32316/index.html?sequence=8">master’s thesis on composer Henry Cowell</a>, my colleagues have promoted the digitization of dissertations in the humanities.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.gradhacker.org/2011/11/18/don%E2%80%99t-keep-your-head-down-digital-dissertations-and-graduate-training/">GradHacker’s recent post on access to dissertations</a>. But that’s not the topic of this post. My question is:</p>
<p><strong>What about the social and natural sciences?</strong></p>
<p>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 <a href="http://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/">UMass Amherst’s list of open access dissertations</a>, a variety of departments are represented, including Polymer Science and Engineering. But this site merely allows the download of pdf dissertations, a soft copy just like the hard copy no one’s reading in the library.</p>
<p>I’m interested in creating a complex digital dissertation that includes my collected data as a searchable database. But there are a myriad of questions that follow, aside from plenty of formatting issues. Can I offer my references as a Zotero public collection? Are there institutional copyright laws on data collected from materials they own – in my case, a skeletal collection? How will such a digital dissertation be forward migrated when its platform is outmoded in 5, 10, 20 years? Possibly most critically:</p>
<p><strong>If I’m going to put in the energy to create a <em>better</em> dissertation by making it digital – and still include all relevant data, tables, and text &#8211; should I still have to produce a brick-like manuscript?</strong></p>
<p>These are topics that I’ll try to hash out over time and report back on as I find answers (or make decisions if there’s no precedent!) Unfortunately, I think the answer at the university and the department level to the last question will be, “Yes, you still have to write a ‘real’ dissertation even if you make a better one in the Series of Tubes.”</p>
<p>However, one answer to the forward migration question, which also entails where a digital dissertation is hosted, might be found in the previously mentioned music <a href="http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/32316">master’s thesis</a> is that you can click through to the website OR download the dissertation in html form. Unfortunately, Michigan State trails behind other large American universities and lacks an institutional repository for even pdfs of theses and dissertations.</p>
<p>Perhaps the archaeologists in the audience will be able to help out with this discussion and exploration. As a social science with plenty of hard, quantitative data, how are your peers tackling the dissertation?</p>
<p>Do you think this can be an individual battle with a dissertation committee? What are the benefits of bringing the fight to a bigger audience to forge a path for ‘alternative’ dissertations?</p>
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		<title>Social Media in Oman: directions for digital in a unique social context (part I)</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/03/29/social-media-in-oman-directions-for-digital-in-a-unique-social-context-part-i/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/03/29/social-media-in-oman-directions-for-digital-in-a-unique-social-context-part-i/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:29:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Charlotte Marie Cable</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1256</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>How will archaeology and social media meet in specific cultural contexts?<a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/social-good.jpg"><img class="alignright  wp-image-1267" title="A Social Context, for Social Media, for Social Good" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/social-good-203x300.jpg" alt="in whose society?" width="142" height="210" /></a></p>
<p>This blog post doesn&#8217;t answer that question: it poses it, and I plan (hope!) to respond to your ideas  in future posts.</p>
<p>Since 2007 I&#8217;ve been part of a team conducting <a title="UPenn Museum's Bat Archaeological Project" href="http://www.penn.museum/research-near-east-section/302-bat-archaeological-project.html" target="_blank">archaeological research</a> at the <a title="the World Heritage Site of Bat, al-Khutm, and al-Ayn" href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/434" target="_blank">UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat</a> in north-central Oman on the Arabian Peninsula. Over the past six years the project focused on the fundamentals of archaeological research: exploration. Most of the world knows little about the country as a whole – I couldn’t locate the Sultanate of Oman on a <a title="ask and ye shall receive: a map and some background information" href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mu.html" target="_blank">map</a> until I learned I might be visiting there &#8212; and we have focused most of our energy on understanding the basic context of the 4500 year-old monuments.</p>
<p>Archaeologists research the past, but we do so in the present, and anticipate needs of the future. In order to understand how to navigate the everyday &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>How will archaeology and social media meet in specific cultural contexts?<a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/social-good.jpg"><img class="alignright  wp-image-1267" title="A Social Context, for Social Media, for Social Good" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/social-good-203x300.jpg" alt="in whose society?" width="142" height="210" /></a></p>
<p>This blog post doesn&#8217;t answer that question: it poses it, and I plan (hope!) to respond to your ideas  in future posts.</p>
<p>Since 2007 I&#8217;ve been part of a team conducting <a title="UPenn Museum's Bat Archaeological Project" href="http://www.penn.museum/research-near-east-section/302-bat-archaeological-project.html" target="_blank">archaeological research</a> at the <a title="the World Heritage Site of Bat, al-Khutm, and al-Ayn" href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/434" target="_blank">UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat</a> in north-central Oman on the Arabian Peninsula. Over the past six years the project focused on the fundamentals of archaeological research: exploration. Most of the world knows little about the country as a whole – I couldn’t locate the Sultanate of Oman on a <a title="ask and ye shall receive: a map and some background information" href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mu.html" target="_blank">map</a> until I learned I might be visiting there &#8212; and we have focused most of our energy on understanding the basic context of the 4500 year-old monuments.</p>
<p>Archaeologists research the past, but we do so in the present, and anticipate needs of the future. In order to understand how to navigate the everyday of a project AND to develop knowledge for dispersal in the future, archaeologists spend a lot of time figuring out the cultures of the present. As the newly-named American-Japanese Bat Archaeological Project (AJBAP) enters its next phase, we&#8217;re confronted with the question: What do we do with all of our new data?</p>
<p>Sure, there will be a Final Report, written in English for an academic audience, to complement our annual technical reports to the <a href="http://www.mhc.gov.om/english/" target="_blank">Ministry of Heritage and Culture</a>. While that will satisfy a portion of our stakeholders, there is a real need to understand the interests and issues of local, national, and Gulf communities involved in this venture.</p>
<p>Below are some elements of Oman society, infrastructure, and culture that will color the ways in which the AJBAP shares what we have learned with Bat&#8217;s local, national, Gulf, and international communities. This is not exhaustive &#8212; it&#8217;s a blog post, folks &#8212; and I hope that others will make this part of a conversation aimed at creatively integrating various facets of community-focused archaeology, social media, and national development plans within a Gulf context.</p>
<p><strong>English, literacy, and English literacy</strong></p>
<p>Arabic is THE language of Oman, and it is primarily a spoken one. Omanis are literate in Arabic. English is taught in primary and secondary school &#8212; yet reading is not a leisure activity, nor is it the primary way in which Omanis give or receive information. Parents do not read to their children to put them to bed, and although nationally syndicated newspapers (half of which are in English) are gaining traction there are no local versions.</p>
<p><strong>Focus on the Family</strong></p>
<p>Information travels primarily through family and neighborhood groups. Family networks are extensive and include many members (nearly all men) who work in regions far from their homes.  Family networks are maintained through frequent contact, by weekly visits to the home village, a strong sense of responsibility to and solidarity with the family group, and near-constant mobile phone coverage. Online social networks are not part of the Omani understanding of neighborhood or community, although this could be changing. One university student informed me that her Facebook page was completely private so that her parents wouldn&#8217;t find out that she was online.</p>
<p><strong>Nationalism and Omani cultural diversity</strong></p>
<p>Oman is Arab. It is also a coastal country between Africa and Asia, and has been in steady contact with both continents for thousands &#8212; even tens of thousands &#8212; of years. This has created an Oman that is both culturally varied and nationally unified &#8212; a characteristic of Oman that provides tourists and anthropologists endless intrigue, <em>and is of equal interest to Omanis themselves</em>. Om<a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/3.-AsalaAnchors.jpg"><img class="alignright  wp-image-1266" title="Omanis love to learn more about their own cultural traditions" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/3.-AsalaAnchors-300x200.jpg" alt="Omanis from the show Asala (&quot;Authentic&quot;) reporting on the Muscat Festival" width="300" height="200" /></a>anis are proud of their cultural diversity and consider that richness an important part of their national identity. In addition, the government has aggressively sought to maintain a specific national identity that includes the &#8220;<a title="Yes, this is a real, and important, term" href="http://www.omanet.om/english/misc/omanise.asp" target="_blank">Omanisation</a>&#8221; of public and private sectors, and trickles down to such aspects of daily life as national dress requirements of <a title="A class trip" href="http://galenf.com/middle_east/oman61.jpg" target="_blank">schoolboys</a>.</p>
<p><strong>The future of social media in an Omani context</strong></p>
<p>The infrastructure of Oman changes at a breathtaking rate. Following a newly updated road map is a foreigner&#8217;s exercise in frustration, as the map will frequently indicate roads that do not yet exist and omit the roads that were built almost overnight. Mobile networks are accelerating, as well. In November 2010 a fellow project member spent several hours each evening on the roof of the house, holding her laptop above her head for the best possible reception as she sent her graduate school applications off. A year later, communication provider <a title="&quot;The Sultanate's customer-friendly service provider&quot;" href="http://nawras.om/" target="_blank">Nawras </a>came out with &#8212; wait for it &#8212; high speed <a href="http://www.dubib.com/news/12201_nawras-home-broadband-comes-with-free-modem-for-three-postpaid-plans#.T3HZDtlmNVI" target="_blank">Broadband internet</a> for one-fifth the price. The issues of network coverage in such a sparsely populated country coupled with competing mobile networks have been answer not by a movement to smartphones, but by the addition of even more basic mobile phones: one for each network: a 22-year-old of my acquaintance had five.</p>
<p>This may seem to set a somewhat grim face to the potential uses of social media in Oman. I don&#8217;t think this is the case. Slightly smaller than Kansas (and considerably more rugged), the Sultanate of Oman has a mere 2.2 million residents. That Omanis keep close social ties across such vast distances suggests that social media have important roles to play in this changing nation. The specific forms these media take are likely to be as unique as the culture itself. I welcome ideas, examples, caveats, and comments. Up next from me: government-sponsored digital infrastructure, and potential applications in heritage management and education.</p>
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		<title>A Slim Purview into Digital Medical Anthropology</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/03/12/a-slim-purview-into-digital-medical-anthropology/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/03/12/a-slim-purview-into-digital-medical-anthropology/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:47:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>fayana.richards</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Articles & Discussions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1247</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Twitter has proven to be an extremely useful platform for learning about current medical anthropology research, call for proposals, and related digital projects. As an emerging scholar, it has also been the place where I have been able to interact with senior anthropologists. On Twitter, medical anthropologists such as <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/lancegravlee" target="_blank">Lance Gravlee</a>,  <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/Ay0kunnu" target="_blank">David Simmons</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/graffhm" target="_blank">Hannah Graff</a>. With that being said, medical anthropology graduate students outpaces the number faculty and/or applied medical anthropologists on Twitter.</p>
<p>In terms of blogging platforms featuring a significant amount of medical anthropology related content, <a href="http://somatosphere.net/" target="_blank">Somatosphere</a> and <a href="http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/" target="_blank">Neuroanthropology</a> post content regularly. A multi-individual driven effort, Somatosphere features content covering areas such as bioethics, medical anthropology, science, and psychiatry. A significant amount of its contributors are either graduate students and/or early career academics. Neuroanthropology, hosted by PLoS, examines the intersections of anthropology and neuroscience and is maintained by anthropologists <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/daniel_lende" target="_blank">Daniel Lende</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/GregDowney1" target="_blank">Greg Downey</a>.</p>
<p>Medical &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Twitter has proven to be an extremely useful platform for learning about current medical anthropology research, call for proposals, and related digital projects. As an emerging scholar, it has also been the place where I have been able to interact with senior anthropologists. On Twitter, medical anthropologists such as <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/lancegravlee" target="_blank">Lance Gravlee</a>,  <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/Ay0kunnu" target="_blank">David Simmons</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/graffhm" target="_blank">Hannah Graff</a>. With that being said, medical anthropology graduate students outpaces the number faculty and/or applied medical anthropologists on Twitter.</p>
<p>In terms of blogging platforms featuring a significant amount of medical anthropology related content, <a href="http://somatosphere.net/" target="_blank">Somatosphere</a> and <a href="http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/" target="_blank">Neuroanthropology</a> post content regularly. A multi-individual driven effort, Somatosphere features content covering areas such as bioethics, medical anthropology, science, and psychiatry. A significant amount of its contributors are either graduate students and/or early career academics. Neuroanthropology, hosted by PLoS, examines the intersections of anthropology and neuroscience and is maintained by anthropologists <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/daniel_lende" target="_blank">Daniel Lende</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/GregDowney1" target="_blank">Greg Downey</a>.</p>
<p>Medical anthropology digital project contributions are few, but there have been a few notable contributions. Over the past few years, Daniel Lende and his students have taken on the ambitious project of constructing a <a href="http://medanth.wikispaces.com/">Medical Anthropology Wiki</a> designed to cover foundational methods and concepts within the field. Another project that would be of interest to medical anthropologists would the <a href="http://xen007.tlc2.uh.edu:8081/asthmafiles">Asthma Files collaborative</a> , which examines the etiology of asthma from multidisciplinary setting and brings in the expertise of social scientists, artists, scientists, etc. The Asthma Files collaborative team includes anthropologists, such as Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, and Alison Kenner.</p>
<p>While at the 2011 American Anthropological Association meeting last year in Montreal, Canada, I was able to talk to quite a few anthropologists about my experience as a CHI fellow. Our conversations primarily focused on thoughts about digital medical anthropology as a way to enhance scholarly collaboration and communication. In the end, I received a mixed bag of reactions. On one hand, I was given the green light to construct a digital repository for a Society for Medical Anthropology CAGH Task Group. On the other hand, I think it is important to discuss the present hesitance and skepticism during this conversation. For example, several medical anthropologists engage in qualitative research gathering much of our data from living human subjects. Therefore, we must engage in conversations about developing best practices for protecting the safety and identity of our participants while contributing to digital projects. I hope to address some of these concerns through <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/03/project-introduction-fayana-richards/">my CHI project</a>, a digital repository, which will be designed to house qualitative data.</p>
<p>I think one out of many entry points concerning the usage of digital space and platforms by medical anthropologists would be the consideration of digital as a form of social justice and community engagement. This approach would bring up questions such as,  ‘How could we put this approach in conversation with the digital divide?’ This stance of course is nothing new, but I think it would speak to the broader discipline.</p>
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		<title>Digital History &#8211; A Selective State of the Field</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/29/digital-history-a-selective-state-of-the-field/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/29/digital-history-a-selective-state-of-the-field/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:38:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>alex.galarza</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1211</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>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:</p>
<p><strong>Digital Sessions at the Annual American Historical Association meeting<br />
</strong>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&#8217;s program had its own section devoted to digital sessions: <a href="http://www.historians.org/annual/2012/digitalhistory.cfm">The Future is Here: Digital Methods in Research and Teaching in History.</a> The proliferation of digital sessions can be credited to increasing practice and interest in digital work, but having a <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Daniel-Cohen/130925/">prominent DH practitioner like Dan Cohen</a> on the program committee also played a big part. Another important benchmark was the first <a href="http://aha2012.thatcamp.org/">THATCamp at AHA</a>, a fruitful &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>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:</p>
<p><strong>Digital Sessions at the Annual American Historical Association meeting<br />
</strong>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&#8217;s program had its own section devoted to digital sessions: <a href="http://www.historians.org/annual/2012/digitalhistory.cfm">The Future is Here: Digital Methods in Research and Teaching in History.</a> The proliferation of digital sessions can be credited to increasing practice and interest in digital work, but having a <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Daniel-Cohen/130925/">prominent DH practitioner like Dan Cohen</a> on the program committee also played a big part. Another important benchmark was the first <a href="http://aha2012.thatcamp.org/">THATCamp at AHA</a>, a fruitful event that included mostly first-timers to the unconference format.</p>
<p>Highlights from AHA 2012:</p>
<ul>
<li>A fantastic <a href="http://aha.confex.com/aha/2012/webprogram/Session7151.html">&#8216;Hands-On Workshop&#8217;</a> session that included Dan showing off <a href="http://pressforward.org/">PressFoward</a> and Jeff McClurken demonstrating online tools for teaching digital history. Jeff was able to expand on many of his points from a demo he gave during a <a href="http://www.nitle.org/help/digital_humanities_events.php">National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education Seminar series</a> on teaching DH &#8211; <a href="https://nitle.webex.com/ec0605ld/eventcenter/recording/recordAction.do;jsessionid=MSyZPxwG8hkys2TcX0pj8FY92BkvKKQLmZRrDjRkCTkvvRWCnfTz!1284456716?theAction=poprecord&amp;actname=%2Feventcenter%2Fframe%2Fg.do&amp;actappname=ec0605ld&amp;renewticket=0&amp;renewticket=0&amp;apiname=lsr.php&amp;entappname=url0107ld&amp;needFilter=false&amp;&amp;isurlact=true&amp;rID=4613757&amp;entactname=%2FnbrRecordingURL.do&amp;rKey=2ce5b84b1efd6dd0&amp;recordID=4613757&amp;siteurl=nitle&amp;rnd=8320204848&amp;SP=EC&amp;AT=pb&amp;format=short">the presentation is worth watching</a> and includes demos from Brian Croxall and Ryan Cordell. (More on PressForward below)</li>
<li>During a THATCamp session discussion on graduate training, tenure, and promotion, I had the opportunity to work with Doug Seefeldt, Jason Heppler, and many others to produce a <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/what-counts-historical-profession">&#8220;Call to Redefine Historical Scholarship in the Digital Turn&#8221;</a>. The AHA Research Division has it on the agenda for April.</li>
<li>While Jim Grossman, an advocate of digital history who has addressed some <a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2011/1110/1110pre1.cfm">important issues</a> is no longer president, <a href="http://www.williamcronon.net/">Bill Cronon </a>promises to be a strong ally and has dedicated his presidential column to <a href="http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1201/The-Public-Practice-of-History-in-and-for-a-Digital-Age.cfm">things</a> <a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1202/Scholarly-Authority-in-a-Wikified-World.cfm">digital</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Publishing and Blogging</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/">Digitalhumanitiesnow.org</a> recently launched <a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/2012/02/introducing-the-journal-of-digital-humanities-2/"><em>The Journal of Digital Humanities</em></a>, a journal that will:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8230;publish scholarly work beyond the traditional research article&#8230; select content from open and public discussions in the field, [and] encourage continued discussion through peer-to-peer review.</p></blockquote>
<p>One of the pieces that made it into the peer-review process for the March edition is an <a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/2012/01/clustering-with-compression-for-the-historian-by-chad-black/">article by Chad Black</a> on using clustering compression to identify patterns in legal records from colonial Spanish America. Another historian, Tim Hitchcock, had his post on <a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/2012/01/academic-history-writing-and-its-disconnects-by-tim-hitchcock/">academic history writing</a> selected. These digital historians are have their work featured under a broader &#8216;Digital Humanities&#8217; umbrella, crystallized in this new journal. This is a trend I have found typical for digital historians &#8211; working in the interdisciplinary space of DH.</p>
<p>One of the effects of working under the DH umbrella includes a challenge to historical argumentation in the monograph form. Two challenges (or complements?) are blogging and the blending of history and journalism. Two scholars at the London School of Economics <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/24/five-minutes-patrick-dunleavy-chris-gilson/">recently argued</a> that</p>
<blockquote><p>Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now. The paradigm de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role.</p></blockquote>
<p>Dan Cohen writes that historians should be <a href="http://www.dancohen.org/2012/02/08/digital-journalism-and-digital-humanities/">taking more queues from digital journalists</a> and outlines some areas where historians can collaborate and overlap. These are exciting developments that parallel <a href="http://www.michaeljkramer.net/issuesindigitalhistory/blog/?p=571">Michael Kramer&#8217;s important call</a> to place more value on sharing the <em>process</em> of scholarly production rather than fetishizing the end product as the only think worth circulating. This would be a healthy step for the profession that would distance our image of the &#8216;lone wolf&#8217; historian, researching alone, in secret, until the monograph or article is complete. This image has never corresponded well to the reality of peer-review and collaboration with colleagues, archivists, and the public. The scale, expertise, and investments required in large (and smaller) digital history projects can also help develop historians into better team players.</p>
<p><strong>AHA Digital Article Prize<br />
</strong></p>
<p>The AHA has also announced that it will select a <a href="http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1202/Call-for-Submissions-for-the-AHR-Prize.cfm">&#8216;Best Digital Article&#8217;</a> to be published in the April 2014 <em>American Historical Review</em>. The AHA should be applauded for putting some weight and prestige into digital publications and featuring them in its flagship publication. They also have provided a detailed rubric for judging digital articles, a welcome engagement with the nuance of practices in digital work. However I find the rubric a bit restrictive &#8211; I invite the reader to peruse them and judge for themselves what sorts of limits there are in the rubric&#8217;s conception of worthy scholarship.</p>
<p>Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki&#8217;s <a href="http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/"><em>Writing History in the Digital Age</em></a>, a born-digital edited volume that will be published by the University of Michigan Press. The volume provides its own &#8216;state of the field&#8217; in not only providing a diverse set of readings, but also in the many comments left by readers during the peer-review stages of the project.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Chewing on Digital Rhetoric</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/23/chewing-on-digital-rhetoric/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/23/chewing-on-digital-rhetoric/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:10:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rachael Hodder</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Articles & Discussions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellows]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[digital rhetoric]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[graduate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rhetoric]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1207</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>“What does a digital rhetorician do?”<br />
“What is digital rhetoric?”<br />
“What is rhetoric?”</p>
<p>To most people outside my field, it’s not immediately obvious what my field of study means or what I do. As a degree candidate in <a href="http://wrac.msu.edu/graduate/" target="_blank">Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing</a>, I hear these questions often from my friends, family, even some of my own colleagues! As rhetoricians, my colleagues and I are often concerned with these types of epistemological questions and end up deeply entrenched in these what does it all mean rabbit holes.</p>
<p>Certainly, we can be sure of some things: many of us are humanists and writers; we live in writing programs such as English or literary-type disciplines or communication programs; more often than not, we’re trained in those types of programs. Because we’re located in different places from university to university, there is some ambiguity over the location of rhetoric. Rhetoric is defined &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>“What does a digital rhetorician do?”<br />
“What is digital rhetoric?”<br />
“What is rhetoric?”</p>
<p>To most people outside my field, it’s not immediately obvious what my field of study means or what I do. As a degree candidate in <a href="http://wrac.msu.edu/graduate/" target="_blank">Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing</a>, I hear these questions often from my friends, family, even some of my own colleagues! As rhetoricians, my colleagues and I are often concerned with these types of epistemological questions and end up deeply entrenched in these what does it all mean rabbit holes.</p>
<p>Certainly, we can be sure of some things: many of us are humanists and writers; we live in writing programs such as English or literary-type disciplines or communication programs; more often than not, we’re trained in those types of programs. Because we’re located in different places from university to university, there is some ambiguity over the location of rhetoric. Rhetoric is defined by one of those <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm" target="_blank">long-dead Greek guys who says it’s “all the available means of persuasion.&#8221;</a> I’m not disagreeing with this definition, but I find it insufficient for defining rhetoric as a discipline. Were I to really fly my rhetoric flag, I would begin by asking “What is a discipline?” but I’ll save you the trip down that rabbit hole. Instead, I’ll share my experience of the academic discipline of rhetoric and how we make sense of the technological affordances of our information society.</p>
<p>In the case of my Master’s program at Michigan State University, we are separate from the Department of English and are instead housed in the <a href="http://wrac.msu.edu/" target="_blank">Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRAC)</a>. WRAC is a large department that includes undergraduates, graduate students, and professors engaged in cultural studies, composition studies, rhetoric studies, and professional writing studies. WRAC is also home to the university’s first-year writing program which helps thousands of MSU freshmen meet their Tier-I writing requirements every year.</p>
<p>As a Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing student, I have had the opportunity to do theoretical inquiry into technical communication, content management, creative non-fiction writing as well as practical skill-building in web development, filmmaking, and teaching. Combined study in rhetorical theory and technical literacies is a unique feature of my program that has afforded myself and my fellow digital rhetoricians opportunities to think heuristically about the application of technology to rhetorical situations such as web and software design, information architecture, multimodal composing, research, and teaching. Graduates from my MA program go on to jobs in web development, user experience design, communications, and technical writing as well as teaching and further graduate study in doctoral programs in information studies, rhetoric, and composition.</p>
<p>Through studying digital rhetoric at MSU, I have developed a philosophy of rhetorical practice that privileges situational, cultural, and audience-specific contexts and utilizes a heuristic, rather than deterministic, view toward the application of technology. In other words, this means that we digital rhetoricians use our training in rhetoric to employ the appropriate digital tools for a particular situation based on the needs and constraints of our audience or users, the time and place, and other conditional factors.</p>
<p>Because of this particular attitude toward technology and rhetoric, digital rhetoricians are well-suited to work in informatics and digital humanities. It bears saying, however, that not all people who identify as rhetoricians have the same attitude about the application of technology to rhetorical situations; and it’s most certainly important to say that not all humanists share this sentiment.</p>
<p>Having situated my local experience with digital rhetoric, I hope to follow-up by tracking the study of digital rhetoric on a broader scale, looking at national conferences and organizations.</p>
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		<title>(Digital) State of the Field: Physical Anthropology</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/16/state-of-the-field-physical-anthropology/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/16/state-of-the-field-physical-anthropology/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Emily Niespodziewanski</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Articles & Discussions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1195</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Social media is largely overlooked by physical anthropologists. This is due in part to the nature of the data that goes into research. Someone studying vitamin A deficiency in infants in relation to the mother in Kenya does not need to use social media to interview or retrieve the blood nutrient levels of her research participants. Likewise, as I mentioned in an <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2011/12/12/institutional-tweeting-bridging-the-gap/">earlier post</a>, forensic anthropologists in particular are constrained by ethics and the sensitive nature of the cases they work on.</p>
<p>Leading academic institutions in this field have yet to embrace the public outreach power of tools like Twitter, but this is changing slowly. At the same time, many graduate students (and some more senior academics) use Twitter personally and professionally to network.  A good faculty role model would be @JohnHawks: this paleoanthropologist blogs, he&#8217;s engaged with the online community via  Twitter, and he&#8217;s one of the few &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_1198" class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 263px"><a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/karen_roe.jpg"><br />
<img class="size-medium wp-image-1198" title="OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/karen_roe-253x300.jpg" alt="" width="253" height="300" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Image credit Flickr user karen_roe</p></div>
<p>Social media is largely overlooked by physical anthropologists. This is due in part to the nature of the data that goes into research. Someone studying vitamin A deficiency in infants in relation to the mother in Kenya does not need to use social media to interview or retrieve the blood nutrient levels of her research participants. Likewise, as I mentioned in an <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2011/12/12/institutional-tweeting-bridging-the-gap/">earlier post</a>, forensic anthropologists in particular are constrained by ethics and the sensitive nature of the cases they work on.</p>
<p>Leading academic institutions in this field have yet to embrace the public outreach power of tools like Twitter, but this is changing slowly. At the same time, many graduate students (and some more senior academics) use Twitter personally and professionally to network.  A good faculty role model would be @JohnHawks: this paleoanthropologist blogs, he&#8217;s engaged with the online community via  Twitter, and he&#8217;s one of the few faculty presences in physical anthropology online.</p>
<p>The greatest strength of forensic anthropology is the field’s willingness to harness the power of databases. One excellent example is the Forensic Data Bank, a collection of data from thousands of known forensic cases that is used to create modern equations of various sorts. Another is <a href="http://www.namus.gov/">NamUs</a>, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System – this database houses information on all missing persons and <em>also</em> all unidentified remains, permitting easier cross-referencing and matching up of victims.</p>
<p>As is the case with so many academic disciplines in the U.S., budgets are tight in anthropology, and digitization comes with both creation and upkeep costs. The decision of how much funding to allocate to digital tools varies between institutions. So, while some laboratories are working with advanced three-dimensional imagers and Elliptic Fourier Analysis to forge new paths, low-budgets work with more analog methods. This discrepancy is one reason I want to <a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/01/27/translating-trusted-tools-to-trendsetting-technology/">translate analog methods</a>: to facilitate the transition into digital not by interpreting but by simply translating. I hope no French or Italian readers will remind me that <em>t</em><em>raduttore, traditore,</em> literally: translation is treason!</p>
<p>In summary, physical anthropology, like many disciplines, is in a state of transition where it is slowly integrating digital technologies into its infrastructure. It’s certainly not on the cutting edge; anthropologists have adopted tools slowly and only when they are well-established. Online publication of journals is ubiquitous, but unfortunately I&#8217;m not aware of any other arenas of digital scholarly publication or dialogue. As a field, we’re not taking many risks, but perhaps this is understandable in a financially unstable environment. At the minimum, I encourage physical anthropologists to join in digital dialogue and outreach facilitated by social media. The choice to join the conversation is an individual one that leads to valuable collaborations.</p>
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		<title>Project Introduction: Fayana Richards</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/03/project-introduction-fayana-richards/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/03/project-introduction-fayana-richards/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:39:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>fayana.richards</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1192</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>My project will be split up into two components: building a data repository using Kora and writing a corresponding white paper that will discuss my experiences in constructing a model for qualitative data. The first component, the data repository, will house qualitative data, such as one-on-one/focus groups interview transcripts and participant observation field notes.  From my experience, it is this type of data that produces much anxiety for qualitatively driven anthropologists. The repository will also host multimedia content such as photos, audio and video. Another important aspect of the repository will be the inclusion of supplementary material, such as project bios, interview guides, consent forms and code books. Despite the wide range of content proposed for the digital repository, a primary concern that cuts across all platforms for anthropologists, who conduct research with human subjects, is confidentiality and human subject protection. This project seeks to address these issues through the &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My project will be split up into two components: building a data repository using Kora and writing a corresponding white paper that will discuss my experiences in constructing a model for qualitative data. The first component, the data repository, will house qualitative data, such as one-on-one/focus groups interview transcripts and participant observation field notes.  From my experience, it is this type of data that produces much anxiety for qualitatively driven anthropologists. The repository will also host multimedia content such as photos, audio and video. Another important aspect of the repository will be the inclusion of supplementary material, such as project bios, interview guides, consent forms and code books. Despite the wide range of content proposed for the digital repository, a primary concern that cuts across all platforms for anthropologists, who conduct research with human subjects, is confidentiality and human subject protection. This project seeks to address these issues through the construction of a model that will attempt to embody these concerns.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>For the second component of my project, I will be working on a white paper that will compliment my experience constructing a data repository for qualitative data. Using my experience as an example, my intention is to use this space to discuss concerns around confidentiality and intellectual property and how they can be addressed or at least mitigated by a set of best practices that will be generated based on my model. One of the most important variables to be considered will be issues of privacy and confidentiality: How can we identifiers will be need to be removed without significantly changing the presented material? As a medical anthropologist, how do I deal with the collection of sensitive medical information and how much of this should be included?</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>One of my intentions for building this repository is to provide an example for anthropologists handling qualitative data. While issues of confidentiality and intellectual property are an extremely important issue, I do not believe these concerns are enough to end the conversation about open access data. I consider these conversations to rest on a continuum where solutions aren’t all or nothing and will vary based on the context. This is fine. With that being said, I consider developing best practices as one step towards providing one example to encourage open source data/sharing among scholars. Given the recent controversy surrounding the American Anthropological Association’s <a href="http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/01/31/american-anthropological-association-takes-public-stand-against-open-access/">stance on open access</a> , it is important to have these concrete examples.</p>
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		<title>Introducing Corridor</title>
		<link>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/02/introducing-corridor/</link>
		<comments>http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/2012/02/02/introducing-corridor/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rachael Hodder</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellowship Program]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CHI Project Info]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[academic conferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[backchannel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CHI Fellows]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conference backchannel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conferences]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[corridor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[twitter]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/?p=1172</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/4463598697_da1d2699d0.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1181" style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial;" title="Crowd in the Hallways" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/4463598697_da1d2699d0-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>Twitter has been an invaluable tool for me as a new grad student and growing scholar. Communicating and building connections over Twitter has helped form relationships with my colleagues and professors in my program and across the university. Using Twitter has also afforded me access to the growing domain of digital humanities through the tweets of scholarly publications, organizations, thought leaders, and my own colleagues &#8211; in fact, it was through a tweet that I learned of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at MSU.</p>
<p>Though <a href="http://twitter.com/zenparty">I have been a Twitter user for years</a>, I first experienced its utility in a scholarly context while attending my first major academic conference. I had never been to a major academic conference before and I thought that the conference backchannel might be a good way to get acclimated to the new practices and setting. I was right: using the Twitter hashtag for the &#8230;</p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/4463598697_da1d2699d0.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1181" style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial;" title="Crowd in the Hallways" src="http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/4463598697_da1d2699d0-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>Twitter has been an invaluable tool for me as a new grad student and growing scholar. Communicating and building connections over Twitter has helped form relationships with my colleagues and professors in my program and across the university. Using Twitter has also afforded me access to the growing domain of digital humanities through the tweets of scholarly publications, organizations, thought leaders, and my own colleagues &#8211; in fact, it was through a tweet that I learned of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at MSU.</p>
<p>Though <a href="http://twitter.com/zenparty">I have been a Twitter user for years</a>, I first experienced its utility in a scholarly context while attending my first major academic conference. I had never been to a major academic conference before and I thought that the conference backchannel might be a good way to get acclimated to the new practices and setting. I was right: using the Twitter hashtag for the conference, I scouted lunch spots, found electrical outlets in the conference center, and made plans easily with colleagues from home. More recently, while attending a comparatively smaller, DH-centric conference, I found Twitter useful for making connections with new people, asking questions and discussing conference talks as they were happening, and learning about the talks that I wasn’t able to attend due to concurrent scheduling. In both cases, the conference backchannels gave me access to information that I likely would not have had as a newcomer to not only the conferences, but academia in general.</p>
<p>Based on my own experience, it is evident that Twitter can be a powerful tool for folks attending academic conferences, both newcomers and seasoned vets. That said, it is my goal this semester to build a tool which enhances the utility of Twitter in the context of scholarly conferences.</p>
<p><strong>Introducing Corridor</strong><br />
I will build a web application called <strong>Corridor</strong>. It is a web application that will be used to collect and collate metadata for Twitter hashtags which are used during academic conferences. Though Twitter hashtags mediate and aggregate conference tweets among those “in-the-know”, they can be inaccessible to an outsider, even if the conversation is one that interests them, because conference hashtags often look like complete nonsense (e.g. #cccc11, #cw2012, #ir11, #HASTAC2011). The primary feature of the tool, then, will be to contextualize conference hashtags, displaying user-curated metadata about specific conferences; this will include the title of the conference, location, dates and more information. I hope that <strong>Corridor</strong> will help illuminate the exciting backchannel discourse of scholarly conferences for newcomers to online academia, but newcomers to academia in general.</p>
<p><strong>Corridor</strong> will also be able to track relations or connections between other hashtags used at the conference as a means of resolving redundant hashtags. For instance, the <a href="http://www.ncte.org/cccc/conv">Conference on College Composition and Communication</a> in Atlanta last spring had several hashtags: #cccc2011, #cccc11, and #cccc are just a few of the primary tags. I used <a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/">Tweetdeck</a> to follow multiple conference hashtags, but it was impossible for me to view all tags in one stream. This resulted in silos of conference discourse; the effect of redundant, non-mainstream hashtags for conference attendees who are trying to engage via Twitter is like being marooned on an island.</p>
<p>Other primary features <strong>Corridor</strong> will includes are Twitter authentication for user accounts and social or crowd-sourced moderation as a means to keep the hashtag ecosystem in order. Future iterations include tweet sorting tools; metrics for measuring the velocity of individual tweets or Twitter users; conference tag clouds based on keywords from tweets; and more.</p>
<p><strong>Outlook and Challenges</strong><br />
<a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/#">Bootstrap, a framework made by Twitter</a>, seems like a viable option for constructing the design of <strong>Corridor</strong>. With a strong background in HTML and CSS and nearly a decade of learning by unmaking and breaking things, I’m confident about the prospect of working with Bootstrap. Digging into the <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/">Twitter API</a> and programming <strong>Corridor</strong> will undoubtedly pose a significant challenge for me, but it’s one that I look forward to.</p>
<p>Programming literacy is an essential skill for humanist scholars. The web is a programmed tool that permeates our social lives, our work, and our communication practices. By precluding ourselves the means to understand how the web is built and how it functions on a technical level, we do ourselves a great disservice. However, I hope that after I’ve grown some programming chops of my own from my work on <strong>Corridor</strong> this semester that I will be prepared to produce cutting edge scholarly work that is valued in both academic and non-academic communities.</p>
<p>Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahockley/4463598697/">Aaron Hockley</a>; used with permission CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</p>
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