Tag Archives: Michigan State University

Introduction to Cindy Nguyen

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I’m originally from Los Angeles and in a little over a month I will move back to California for the Ph.D. program in Southeast Asian history at Berkeley. In my time here at Michigan State, I finished an M.A. in history, experienced ‘seasons’ for the first time, and developed a curiosity for digital humanities. My work on the MSU Vietnam Group Archive, a digitization project spearheaded by the MSU Department of History, MSU Archives & Historical Collections, and MATRIX, initially sparked my interest/confusion of the possible combination of ‘digital’ and ‘humanities.’I particularly enjoy the collaborative nature of many digital humanities projects including the Vietnam Group Archive. I’m still learning about this wonderfully exciting world of dh resources, events, and centers, and hope that this summer’s field school will continue to broaden my understanding.

 I am also interested in the methodological possibilities of digital humanities in the representation of space and movement. My current research explores the flourishing culture of Vietnamese travel embodied by the surge in travel stories (du ký) and advertisements published primarily in romanized Vietnamese newspapers between the 1920s and 1940s. With the work of data crunching and GIS software, I hope to also ‘translate’ the textual representations of travel into a visualization of Vietnamese movement more broadly from the 16th century to 20th century. In this wider comparison of the rich sources of precolonial and colonial travel stories, maps, and itineraries, I seek to shed light upon the distinct changes and literary continuity over time. I believe that digital tools, larger data sets, and GIS can be useful tools for textual based research and can help bridge to the divide between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ research. For more on my research, see my Academia.edu page.

Welcome to the 2013 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

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I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome welcome everyone (both students and those who are watching remotely) to the inaugural Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool.  The CHI Fieldschool is an outgrowth of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University, and is intended to introduce students to the tools and techniques required to creatively apply information and computing technologies to cultural heritage materials and questions.

Over the next 5+ weeks, students will think, read, discuss, learn, experiment, hack, prototype, build, deploy, and launch.

The the public (those who are purposefully watching the fieldschool or those who wander upon it by chance):

I encourage you to read what we are doing, explore what we are building, and interact with us.  The CHI Fieldschool very much adheres to an open access philosophy.  We encourage constructive comments and stimulating discussion. If you are on Twitter, watch the #msuchi hashtag.

To the fieldschool students:

Before we get seriously rolling, you’ve got a (short) to do list:

  • If you want, sign up for a Twitter account (if you don’t have one already) – remember to use the #msuchi hashtag when tweeting about fieldschool related stuff.
  • Sign up for a Gravatar account (if you don’t already have one)
  • Activate your course blog account (you will receive an email by Tuesday at the absolute latest)
  • Introduce yourself to the world on the blog.  Tell us a little about your background and your interests. Be sure talk about why you are taking the fieldschool – why is cultural heritage informatics/digital cultural heritage important to you?
  • Have a look at the Creative Commons Licenses.  For each thing you post to the fieldschool blog, you will need to choose the license that best works for you – which means you need to have at least a passing familiarity with what the licenses actually mean. A couple of years back, the incomparable Bethany Nowviskie (Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute) wrote a thoughtful piece about why she was switching the license on her blog and Flickr stream from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY.  It is definitely worth a read.