2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

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 two native mobile apps built and implemented, I’m able to see a (near) finished product that attempts to broadcast and highlight something as important as campus archaeology in a way that takes advantage of the affordances and dynamism of technology. This is something I think is a really valuable link between the work I do as a digital rhetoric student and the work that CHI Initiative achieves to do.

The journey we’ve taken to arrive at this final point was laced with many challenges that only served to make seeing the completed msu.seum project that much more rewarding. The volume of html files we created and manipulated to fit within the information architecture we laid out was the most challenging aspect of working on the UI/UX team. Near the end of our two-week race to finish the app, the main goal for Rachael and myself was not only to create an intuitive user experience, but to also maintain consistency throughout all the pages and files attached to msu.seum. Going through all of the files to ensure this consistency was difficult not only for us, but for other legs of the msu.seum machine as well, since user designs informs both content and programming.

But, despite how overwhelming the number of html files we crafted and subsequently navigated through, I’ve come away from this project with the better problem solving skills, the ability to work across different genre conventions (html, css, jquery, along with different software platforms like iOS, and Android), and, as I stated earlier, a stronger connection to the goals of the digital humanities.

When thinking about all of the projects we completed during our five weeks and especially the last two weeks where our energy was funneled into msu.seum, the underlying element that made all of them possible was project management—something that we talked about early on in the fieldschool that carried through to all of our endeavors. Through the different projects we’ve undertaken, I’ve been able to see how skills like planning, communication, and organization and compartmentalization function in different ways to achieve the realization of a goal.