News & Updates
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.
To fail, fail, fail again
We discussed this at the beginning of CHI, but what I've learned the most through this fellowship is that failing does not equal losing. Of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't cause me to get a little sad or even angry when I do fail. The biggest "fail" (if you can really call it that) for me during this fellowship was my attempt at Bootstrapping my CHI Fellows project. I did not have a lot of...
How to Make a Web Map
In my last post I wrote about preparing to build a web map to illustrate the spatial reach of postcards featuring images of Native American Boarding Schools. Good news: the map is coming along nicely! In this post, I'll share my process for creating a web map. I'll share a few resources that helped me learn how to make a web map using Leaflet. First, check out these Leaflet tutorials. These...
Standing on the Shoulders of Open Source Giants
analysis, geojson for the data translation, and JavaScript for the interactive functionality. Don’t ask me why I decided to do it this way. I’ve never taken the easy road in my life. Every time I worked on the project, I shed a tear for not being able to use Flourish rather than coding my own data project.
We can always do more Natural Language Semantics
In my last blog post, I discussed a few details about my current CH/DH NLP research project where I intend to investigate to what extent a corpus can be “reconstructed” using NLP techniques. Since then, I’ve done some practical work and some broader thinking. I’ll start with updates on the practical. As my project calls for NLP analysis, I’ve set myself to learning those tools. I’ve...
