News & Updates
My academic career, swayed by the digital realm
I did not think much about the digital when I came to MSU. I had a personal website that I was proud of and I knew I was interested in photogrammetry as a tool to document archaeological finds. Little did I know that my interest in photogrammetry would lead me to where I am today. Photogrammetry at the Belize Institute of Archaeology. Photo: Jack Biggs During the first year of my Ph.D. program,...
Mapping the News Cycle via StoryAtlas
The first step in creating our CHI Fellowship project is pitching our project idea to our cohort. Each of the fellows creates a project vision document, where we define our project scope, product, audiences, technology needs, and all manner of details about the project we hope to create by the end of the program. Story Atlas is still in the beginning stages, but the hope is to document its...
Towards an NLP best practice for Cultural Heritage document organization: Reconstructing the Philosophical Papers of David Lewis
Recently, I read a very short but interesting article regarding a new project which seeks to improve the methodology for the organization, classification and examination of Cultural Heritage corpora. It is a collaboration between researchers at University of Lausanne, Harvard Houghton Library, Groningen University, and Bibliotheca Hertziana, and the goal is digitize and computationally...
Mapping Mahaweli: writing the world from a river
During our last meeting in Fall 2023, I presented my proposal for the final project inspired by the second rapid development project in Sri Lanka. I proposed building a website called "Mapping Mahaweli" with a digital map that archives the historical milestones of the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Project since 1961. The website will provide a platform for users to understand the river-based...
(Un)Mapping the Settler Colonial Forest
In my last post I briefly introduced myself (#PrimaDeAfuera), described the work I do, and highlighted some of the people who help make my time here at MSU possible. In this post, I share more about the project I want to work on for the remainder of the CHI Fellowship. To start, I’ll share that I had a rough project idea at the start of this fellowship. This idea was full of excitement about...
News as Cultural Heritage
One of the questions that has challenged me as a CHI fellow is, "What qualifies as cultural heritage?" As a journalism and media scholar, I am often confronted with the tension-filled role journalism fills, a perhaps self-imposed role that is situated between the public and institutions, between individual lived experiences and collective storytelling, and between tradition and innovation. Many...
Developing a CHI Fellowship Project
Last Friday the CHI fellows presented our ideas for what we'll be working on for the rest of the year. I was torn between two ideas, but eventually settled on one that will be a greater investment in my future dissertation work: a digital archive for digitized material culture from Native American Boarding Schools. I was inspired by a project led by my advisor, Dr. Ethan Watrall, and MSU...
My Project Vision
When I first applied to be a CHI Fellow, I thought I had a project plan set—however, a new project formed in my mind after our last rapid development challenge. I will be creating a digital cultural heritage mobile website highlighting the archaeological site of Marco Gonzalez in Belize, where I work during summer break. Marco Gonzalez is at the southern tip of Ambergris Caye, and was a prime...
Angélica De Jesús // CHI Fellow 2023-24
Hi there, I’m Angélica De Jesús; a doctoral student in the MSU Sociology Department and /literal/ mami currently living in Nkwejong (aka Lansing, Michigan). During a recent chat with my abu Eréndira, she asked detailed questions about what I do at MSU. Our conversation about my work stood out to me because it was a reminder that my work, as is true for the work of many other scholars, operates...
Exploring the Significance of Community
"Community" has been my buzz word this year. Through experiencing, bonding, and being accepted in new communities, to hearing discussions and artist talks about types of community, I want to start off my process of creating my project by trying to define why community has become important for my work as an individual. Working in the studio is a lonely process if you do not have other people to...
