News & Updates
Ashley Cerku | CHI 2024-2025 Graduate Fellow
Me in a historic Welsh castle, 2018. Hi there! My name is Ashley Cerku and I am a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. I received my Bachelor’s degree in English and Writing/Rhetoric in 2013 and my Master’s degree in Liberal Studies in 2017 from Oakland University, and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Michigan State University in 2023. My...
Launching “Mapping Native American Boarding School Postcards”
In the early 1900's, images of Native American Boarding Schools were circulating around the United States in the form of postcards. My CHI project, Mapping Native American Boarding School Postcards, explores how far these images were traveling. Why postcards? Postcards are interesting because they are, by their nature, public. Unlike letters, they are not hidden in envelopes. Postcards...
“Rituals in Communities” Launched!
Rituals in Communities is an explorative digital exhibition that portrays how communities can be formed through social activities that are specific to their culture. This project acknowledges and sheds light on the key physical actions of liturgical dance that black individuals do together in a private community. By memorializing this tradition in my community, I am able to create a digital...
CHI Fellowship Project Launched!
Today I am pleased to announce the launch of my CHI Fellowship project entitled Linguistic Semantics, Text Organization and NLP. It is an educational website whose primary function is to teach researchers in the Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities (CHDH) communities about Natural Language semantics and how professional Linguists go about studying “meaning.” Additionally, it presents some...
Launching the “Mapping Mahaweli” Project
I am excited to launch Mapping Mahaweli, which is the project I created as part of the CHI graduate fellowship. Mapping Mahaweli is a website that is based on the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Program (AMDP). This is Sri Lanka’s largest multipurpose national development program, initiated in 1961, aimed at large-scale development of the Mahaweli basin in a number of directions, including...
Explore StoryAtlas
Media is full of narratives. Some narratives are helpful, and some are harmful. But always, media embeds narratives in society's collective memory. They become the first rough draft of our history. StoryAtlas was created to map narratives that matter. StoryAtlas is a website that serves two purposes. First, it is an interactive map that uses data visualization to temporally and geographically...
Introduction to “Trade Routes to Ambergris Caye”
Have you ever been traveling somewhere on vacation and come across a cool historical and/or archaeological site and thought, "Wow, I wish I knew more about this place!" I know I have, and that was one of the motivators behind my CHI project, Trade Routes to Ambergris Caye! Trade Routes to Ambergris Caye is a mobile website designed for people visiting Marco Gonzalez, a Maya archaeological site...
Mapping success!
Since my last post, I have had a lot of success regarding my maps. My Mesoamerica map with some pop-up examples As you can see above, I have succesfully been able to put a map of Mesoamerica on the website, as well as successfully put pop-ups with information about different sites connected to Marco Gonzalez in one way or another. My future goals for this page include uploading more location...
Call for 2024-2025 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Applications
The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative invites applications for its 2024-2025 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship program. The Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowships offer MSU graduate students the skills to creatively and thoughtfully apply digital methods and computational approaches to cultural heritage collections, materials, data, questions, and challenges. 2024-2025...
NLP for News Narrative Analysis: An Explanatory Sequential Study Design
For my project, I wanted to look at the differences between a national newspaper (The New York Times) and a local newspaper (The StarTribune) in coverage of the murder of George Floyd. What are the narratives that these papers are presenting to their audiences about the same event? How do they change over time? What meaning are they trying to make and imprint in our collective memory? The sample size I was looking at for this project quickly became overwhelming. In just the first month of coverage, there were 372 articles collected for this project (252 New York Times articles and 120 StarTribune articles). There would be no way I could conduct a discourse analysis of a sample size that large in a semester.
