MATRIX is very happy to announce the publication of Archaeology 2.0: New Tools for Communication and Collaboration.  Co-edited by Eric C. Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, and Ethan Watrall (MATRIX Associate Director and Department of Anthropology Anthropology Assistant Professor), the volume explores how the web is transforming archaeology and is the first in the new Cotsen Digital Archaeology series published by UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

The volume’s description reads:

How is the Web transforming the professional practice of archaeology? And as archaeologists accustomed to dealing with “deep time,” how can we best understand the possibilities and limitations of the Web in meeting the specialized needs of professionals in this field? These are among the many questions posed and addressed in Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration, edited by Eric Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, and Ethan Watrall. With contributions from a range of experts in archaeology and technology, this volume is organized around four key topics that illuminate how the revolution in communications technology reverberates across the discipline: approaches to information retrieval and information access; practical and theoretical concerns inherent in design choices for archaeology’s computing infrastructure; collaboration through the development of new technologies that connect field-based researchers and specialists within an international archaeological community; and scholarly communications issues, with an emphasis on concerns over sustainability and preservation imperatives. This book not only describes practices that attempt to mitigate some of the problems associated with the Web, such as information overload and disinformation, it also presents compelling case studies of actual digital projects—many of which are rich in structured data and multimedia content or focused on generating content from the field “in real time,” and all of which demonstrate how the Web can and is being used to transform archaeological communications into forms that are more open, inclusive, and participatory. Above all, this volume aims to share these experiences to provide useful guidance for other researchers interested in applying technology to archaeology.

The digital edition of the volume is especially important because it is open access (hosted by the  University of California eScholarship service) and being made available freely to the scholarly community and the public under a Creative Commons BY-SA (By Attribution, Share Alike) license.

The volume’s c0-editors went so far as to a prepare a unique copyright statement in order to provide both context and rationale for why the open access edition of the volume under this specific CC license:

This volume carries a Creative Commons BY-SA (By Attribution, Share Alike, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) license. In short, this means that others can freely distribute, remix, and build upon the contents of this volume, provided two very important conditions are met: the original author receives proper attribution (especially citation) and all subsequent works carry the same license. We chose a Creative Commons license primarily because of our deep concerns in the sustainability of sharply escalating costs in scholarly publishing. These costs make it increasingly difficult for educational institutions, our col- leagues in commercial archaeology, students, and members of the interested public to (legally) obtain peer-review publications. Please note that the Creative Commons BY-SA license allows for commercial use, as well as free distribution both inside and out- side of the Academy. Permissions for commercial reuse does not, however, mean commercial appropriation. The “copyleft” philosophy embodied by this license enables this work to move in many contexts, but any adaptation or enhancement of this work must be shared back, openly, with the community. Finally, because this license requires proper attribution in any subsequent duplication or adaptation, we hope this volume helps build exposure and recognition for our contributions, and that our colleagues follow in this example. With enough accessible and open data (“data” that includes content like this book), we open up more opportunities for text-mining, tagging, aggregating, linking, visualizing, and hopefully better understanding. 

The print edition of the volume will be available for purchase from UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

MATRIX: The Center for the Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences is currently seeking an experienced and talented student user experience designer to start immediately.  The successful candidate will work on a wide variety of digital projects for deployment on the the web and mobile platforms.

Required

• Excellent demonstrated experience with modern principles of visual design, user interface design, and layout.
• Excellent demonstrated experience with standards-based HTML and CSS
• Experience with PHP and MySQL
• Experience with Javascript, including JS frameworks and techniques such as AJAX, JQuery, and/or Mootools.
• Experience designing and developing WordPress templates
• Ability to work well collaboratively or independently
• Ability to take initiative and meet deadlines.

Beneficial, but not required

• Mobile design and development experience (iOS or Android)
• Experience with HTML 5 and CSS3
• Knowledge of source code/version control software
• Experience with WordPress plugin development

To apply, please send your resume, cover letter, and online portfolio link via email to Ethan Watrall (watrall@msu.edu).  The position will remain open until filled.

How do you preserve information of continuing value and make it available for anyone who might want to use it? Those are the challenges faced by archivists, and teaching students the craft and science of archiving is a tricky business. It has become even more challenging with trillions of digital objects – both born digital and digitized – needing persistence.

Professor Steve Cohen, who works at MATRIX and specializes in learning design and assessment, has been collaborating with Professors David A. Wallace and Beth Yakel at the University of Michigan School of Information to integrate digital archiving tools into their graduate courses. The project, PAVEL (Preservation and Access Virtual Education Laboratory) is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for two years. Recently Professors Cohen and Yakel presented results from the first year of the project at AERI (Archival Education Research Institute). To date UM students have found learning and using the tools an insightful experience. They report gaining insight into the complexity of the digital world that will be home to archived digital objects, and feel that knowing the tools will help them once they once they complete their Master’s degrees. Ultimately the PAVEL will produce a curricular models and an assessment strategy ,  for archiving programs around the world to follow when integrating these tools into their courses.

MATRIX is very happy to host the Michigan State University Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool.

Taking place from May 31st to July 1st on the campus of Michigan State University and offered by the Department of Anthropology, the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Fieldschool, which is part of the MSU Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, introduces students to the tools and techniques required to creatively apply information and computing technologies to cultural heritage materials and questions.

The CHI Fieldschool, which is taught by Ethan Watrall (MATRIX Associate Director and Assistant Professor of Anthropology) 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 will 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.

The CHI Fieldschool is built firmly on the principle of “building as a way of knowing” (of “hacking as a way of knowing as some have called it), a model in which students develop a far better understanding of cultural heritage informatics by actually building tools, applications, and digital user experiences than they do with passive analysis and commentary. The added benefit is that by building tools, applications, and digital user experiences, students also have the opportunity to make a tangible and potentially significant contribution to the cultural heritage community.

For more information on the CHI Fieldschool, please visit the Fieldschool website (http://sites.matrix.msu.edu/chi-fieldschool/)

Africa Past and Present is co-hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by Matrix.

This fiftieth episode marks over three years of a podcast that is now downloaded monthly by nearly 20,000 listeners in over 80 countries. Matrix is proud to be part of such an ongoing success, and hopes the show continues to expand in scope and audience.

Horace Campbell

Episode 50: Political Change in Africa and the Diaspora is now live at http://afripod.aodl.org

Horace Campbell (African American Studies and Political Science, Syracuse U.) on political change in Africa and the Diaspora. Focus is on the revolution in Libya, popular revolts, war, peace, and neo-liberalism in Africa and beyond. Campbell also shares insights from his new book: Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA.

MATRIX System Administrator and Architect, Joseph Deming, is working with Michigan State University’s The Online Interaction Laboratory (TOIL) to rework and improve the systems that drive their long-running web service.  This system restructuring will enhance their research capabilities while providing valuable information for online research, as well as standardize and further stabilize the online environment which the system hosts.

TOIL is a research center, located in the Telecommunications building at MSU, currently being funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  TOIL explores “the ways by which identity, perceptions, group process, and supporting offline environments enable individuals and groups to use and design tools to meet their goals.” TOIL houses the home-grown web application “www.everything2.com“.  This site started as a publicly editable, semi-anonymous site for posting information covering topics on anything and everything, developed by a University of Michigan School of Information graduate student named Nathan Oostendorp.  It has evolved into a heavily used, high-traffic site where new content is added from all over the world, constantly covering any imaginable range of topics.  TOIL is now using this website to track trends and make research observations on people’s use and habits of “social networking” sites.

www.everything2.com has grown into a site that has outlived the hardware on which it was founded and needs a background re-work to bring it up-to-date and keep it stable in its current and future capacity.   Deming will use his expertise in systems management, virtualization and programming to restructure the systems driving www.everything2.com creating a simplified build, managed-configuration, automated-updating system to manage and stabilize their systems.  This system will be based on the similar, homegrown, larger-scale management system he has created to drive the 40+ server systems at MATRIX.  This project is expected to reach completion and implementation by late February.

A new version of KORA has been released, version 2.1.1. It has been approximately one year since KORA 2.0 Beta was released and 2.1.1 builds upon it and the production version of 2.0 greatly. This version includes many new features such as public ingestion support, XML import/export, advance search, and some user interface tweaks. The full information is available at the KORA Sourceforge site. Developer and user documentation are included as always in the ‘docs’ folder. The next version (KORA 3.0) is currently under development and will include some performance gains as well as an improved version updater.

Much thanks to the entire MATRIX Programming team and the many users of KORA for giving lots of feedback and continually working to improve KORA!

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by Matrix.

In this episode, Prof. Terence Ranger (Emeritus, University of Oxford) discusses his many contributions to African Studies and African History, how these themes have developed, and also his 17th book, Bulawayo Burning (2010). This is the first of three podcasts recorded at the‘Making History: Terence Ranger and African Studies’ conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign October, 2010.

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries, announces that 13 institutions are receiving National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants (NLG) totaling $763,715. Grantees will contribute $491,995 in matching funds. There were 62 applications to the program with requests totaling $3,752,309.

Michigan State University Museum is one of two organizations in Michigan to receive funding and the nearly $100,000 grant will be used to expand technology and access for its innovative online resource, the Quilt Index. (The other institution in Michigan to receive a grant is the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum for a partnership concerning literacy in rural communities.)

The NLG program includes two types of collaborative planning grants, which enable multi-institution project teams to work together to either plan a single project or to produce a white paper that will encourage multiple projects; and project grants, including both research and implementation grants, for which that preliminary work has already been done.

The MSU Museum project encompasses:
Award Amount: $98,173; Matching: $54,136
Grant Category: Library-Museum Collaboration–Level II Collaborative Planning Grant
Project Title: “The Quilt Index: Collaborative Planning for Internationalization”
The Quilt Index is a popular online scholarly and cultural resource that is growing increasingly global in its content and the communities it serves. Internationalization is encouraging, but it presents new challenges, such as supporting multilingual indexing, searching, and retrieval of information. The Michigan State University Museum, partnering with the MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, the Alliance for American Quilts, and the International Quilt Study Center will identify key challenges for globally constructed and shared online resources, and develop a model plan that responds to those challenges.

“National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants provide opportunities to conduct research and develop the framework to support future projects that have the potential to generate new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances that will positively impact museums, libraries, and the communities they serve,” said IMLS Acting Director Marsha L. Semmel. “These projects encourage partnerships that address national issues of importance impacting education, scholarship, and public service and encourage the broad application of standards and models to improve professional practice.”
IMLS National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grants position museums and libraries as partners with other community institutions — from medical centers to gardens and nature centers — in ways that explore assess community needs, solve problems and share data more widely.  For a state-by-state list of grant recipients, see:  http://www.imls.gov/news/2010/073010b_list.shtm#MI .

About the Quilt Index
The Quilt Index (http://www.quiltindex.org) launched seven years ago, and was developed at Michigan State University by the MSU Museum and MATRIX, the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online. The third primary partner is the Alliance for American Quilts, based in Asheville, N.C., a non-profit organization comprised of a broad range of key scholars, curators, librarians, and quilt artists in the U.S. dedicated to the study, preservation, and sharing of American quilt history. Over the years, the Quilt Index’s growth and expansion has been supported by grants from IMLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Quilt Index merges tradition with technology and springs from the work of a uniquely-specialized team of researchers and experts who are committed to making significant quilt-related data accessible for research and teaching as well as developing replicable applications of technology in the humanities.

The online resource extends understanding and use of the museum’s textile collections. The MSU Museum’s Great Lakes Quilt Center has evolved from the sustained and significant quilt-related activities and resources at the Michigan State University Museum and the museum’s long-standing interest in and commitment to preserving and presenting traditional arts history. More than 700 historic and contemporary textiles in the MSU Museum’s collections are used for exhibition and research, and the Quilt Index, in part, helps make these collections – and others — more connected to repositories and users worldwide.

About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, D.C., is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more about the Institute, please visit www.imls.gov.