The Michigan State University Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Fieldschool introduces students to the tools and techniques required to creatively apply information and computing technologies to cultural heritage materials and questions. The CHI Fieldschool is a unique experience that employs the model of an archaeological fieldschool (in which students come together for a period of 5 or 6 weeks to work on an archaeological site in order to learn how to do archaeology). Instead of working on an archaeological site, however, students in the CHI Fieldschool come together to collaboratively work on several cultural heritage informatics projects. In the process they learn a great deal about what it takes to build applications and digital user experiences that serve the domain of cultural heritage – skills such as programming, media design, project management, user centered design, digital storytelling, etc.
After five weeks of intensive exploration of the role of technology within cultural heritage, the inceptive CHI fieldschool at Michigan State University is officially finished. The end product of our course, msu.seum, has me thinking about the value of mobile technology within cultural heritage. As a native iOS and Android app entirely devised and implemented […]
When I look back over the last two weeks of the CHI Fieldschool and see the almost finished project msu.seum, I am impressed by what we accomplished. Six students in two weeks producing an almost finished application for both android and iphone. Working in content we had to find the materials for this application, which included […]
The time that I’ve spent working with my fellow fieldschool students on our final project equipped me with a better understanding of how digital platforms can enhance, shape and distribute aspects of cultural heritage that can sometimes be left unseen and unheard to the uninitiated. With the first phase of the msu.seum project complete, and […]
Although we didn’t check off every item on our feature wish list for msu.seum, I’m very proud of the application we built. The content, design and programming coalesced into a fairly polished alpha application. We reached that point in two weeks thanks to coordination. Each team did a great job of pulling things together by […]
To begin, I’d like to illustrate msu.seum by the numbers… 6 CHI fieldschool students 2 programmers 2 UX designers 2 content curators 10 days 60 hours… officially – some have kept working off the clock! over 1000 commits to our file repository 42 folders and subfolders 300+ files, all manually generated and coded msu.seum is […]
As msu.seum becomes the primary focus of the fieldschool, I’m finding that my experiences working on the UX/UI design aspect of the project echoes back to a sentiment I expressed in an earlier blog post—the idea of situating user experience neatly within both a granular and global framework. Now that we are fully immersed in […]
As part of the programming team for msu.seum, our task was to dive head first into Phonegap, jQuery Mobile, Google Maps API and the various flavors of javascript included in them. In order to start building the app, we had to quickly get our bearings with the various frameworks and APIs. Below, are some of the strategies […]
I had the opportunity this week to be part of the UI team for msu.seum. I really enjoyed working on on this part of the project. I had never worked on UI design before and was very excited for this opportunity. We put together the wireframes for msu.seum, and it was an interesting challenge. We […]
The fundamental mechanics and user experience of a mobile application is pivotal towards its success. If the underlying programming of a mobile is faulty, the entire project fails. However, the long term holding power and initial draw to a mobile application is based around the content. Regardless of the functionality of the mobile, if the […]
After a long week of project-ing, it’s nice to sit back and reflect. With the deadline of our final project fast approaching, the 9am to 4pm days of the fieldschool have become all-out workdays, everyone sat dutifully at a laptop computer chugging away on his or her own assignments. Curation of the aural environment is […]
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