News & Updates
The Debut of The Urban Toxicity Project
The dream for this project is much bigger than its current reality. Right now, it is a map with two points marked on it and only one of those points (Milwaukee) will take you anywhere. However, it represents the seed from which I am hoping to grow a collaborative effort to document incidents of urban toxicity in the United States. A project I am (creatively) calling, The Urban Toxicity Project....
Call for 2023-2024 Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship Applications
The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative invites applications for its 2023-2024 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. 2023-2024...
Introducing “Graduate Labor Rising”
Happy May Day! I am pleased to announce the launch of my 2022-2023 project, Graduate Labor Rising. This website traces the development of graduate labor unions across the US, their roots in radical labor traditions, and their turn towards justice-oriented bargaining, then shares a library of collective bargaining agreements to aid current and future graduate labor organizers. Despite the...
Switching Gears
Whenever working on a digital project, I try to be open to the fact that my initial plan will not always be possible to follow through all the way to the end. I’ve often had issues with my code since I’m primarily self-taught, or sometimes things just don’t turn out the way I imagined once I pair the technology with my content. I’ve learned to accept these little failures as part of the process...
Where, oh, where has my modal gone?
Having finally sorted out my map, and even gotten the pop-ups to work the way I wanted them to, I have been attempting to build out a modal that will appear on load to provide an overview of the project and give users suggestions for exploring the map. The first half of that was not too bad. I was able to figure out how to create a modal that opened on a button push. But when I then tried to...
Database Decisions
After pivoting my project to create a searchable text database of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) instead of a speculative, collaborative map with local union members, my next step was to decide how to actually create this database. To build or not to build? There are two main types of databases: relational and non-relational. Relational databases, like Structured Query Language...
A Learning Curve!
Getting the “Mapping Nzulezo” project going is exciting as it is equally challenging. As a novice in the I.T. world, I am expected to grapple with some technical issues as I figure out how to create an interactive story map. Yes, an interactive story map! That is how I envisioned the “Mapping Nzulezo” project. My professor and colleague CHI Fellows recommended J. Dougherty &...
The Best Laid Plans
After learning from my experiences with unforeseen delays (read: code struggles) during last year’s CHI fellowship project, I’ve been developing my project management skills this year: carefully delineating the scope of the final product, mapping the time allocated to each element of the project, and resisting the temptation to add more components when they would significantly increase the...
Sometimes You’re Just Over-Complicating It
I have discovered one of the primary pitfalls of relying on YouTube tutorials- good software changes fast and finding tutorials for the newest version of a thing can be challenging. I have spent the better part of two weeks trying to get my map to work. It isn't a complex map, and the individual elements were not especially challenging to figure out. I created a simplified style for my map tiles...
Making Progress
In my January post, I discussed the new workflow I was developing for my project. Last year, I prioritized content while this year I am prioritizing technical infrastructure. So, how are things going after one month compared to last year? Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, but the answer is much better. So far, I’ve already managed to create the entire bootstrap framework for my website...
