MATRIX is extremely happy to welcome this year’s cohort of Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellows. Hosted by the Department of Anthropology in partnership MATRIX, the CHI Fellowship program offers MSU graduate students (in cultural heritage focused departments) the theoretical and methodological skills necessary to creatively apply information, computing, and communication technologies to cultural heritage materials. In addition, the fellowship provides graduate students with the opportunity to influence the current state of cultural heritage informatics and become leaders in the future of cultural heritage informatics. During the course of their fellowship (which lasts an academic year), fellows will develop a significant and innovative cultural heritage informatics project.
This year’s fellows show great promise, and we are very much looking forward to their projects and their contributions to the field of cultural heritage informatics.
Jennifer Bengtson
Jennifer is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. She is primarily interested in the bioarchaeology of Late Prehistoric Midwestern peoples – specifically in issues of gender, health, and social complexity in the Lower Illinois Valley Late Woodland-Mississippian transition. Jennifer has worked extensively on the excavation of the Morton Village site, a late prehistoric village in the central Illinois River Valley near Lewistown, Illinois.
During her fellowship, Jennifer will be developing a digital repository for Mississippian archaeology and archaeologists. The project will involve the collection, digitization, and organization of materials such as maps, photographs, field notes, publications, gray literature, bibliographies, websites, and raw data within a single digital repository, which will be generally organized by site. The repository will function to preserve materials in a digital format while improving scholarly accessibility and providing an integrated, searchable network of relationships between diverse types and sets of information.
Katy Meyers
Katy is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. Before coming to MSU, Katie received her Masters of Science in Human Osteoarchaeology from the University of Edinburgh. In addition to being a CHI Fellow, Katy is also a MSU Campus Archaeology Graduate Fellow. Katy also writes regularly on bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology at her site www.bonesdontlie.com
During her fellowship, Katy will be working on The Bone Collective, a Wiki where methods and theories for bio- and osteo-archaeology can be easily accessed and updated by the academic public (in the domain), but moderated by a group of noted content experts in the field. The project is particularly exciting as it addresses and explores (and even challenges) some of the characteristics of traditional scholarly communication and publication.
Jennifer Lee Sano-Franchini
Jennifer is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing (in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures). Her research interests lie in the areas of modern rhetoric theory, cultural rhetorics, Asian & Korean American rhetorics, transnationalism, digital rhetoric, research methodologies, popular music, intellectual property, and composition studies. In addition to being a CHI Fellow, Jennifer is Historical Archivist Representative for the CCCC Asian/Asian American Caucus. In this capacity, she works on the Writing and Working for Change: A Digital Archive of Social Activism by Teachers of NCTE project.
During her fellowship, Jennifer will be developing a resource for teaching and learning research. While the primary goal of the project is to serve as a resource to facilitate student research as well as writing instruction in college-level composition courses, the larger purpose of the project is to facilitate more collaborative understandings of writing, research, and knowledge-making.
Micalee Sullivan
Micalee is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History. She is primarily interested in international labor and working class history with an emphasis on South Africa and Chicano history. Her dissertation research focuses on a comparative analysis of colonial systems and working class community formation in both South Africa’s diamond mines and Arizona’s copper mines at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. During her fellowship, Micalee will be working on a digital archive based on her research: “Sixteen Tons”: A U.S. and South African Mineworkers’ Archive. The project is not only intended to provide materials for scholars interested in international labor and working class history, but act as an educational tool for teachers and students who are interested in studying a range of topics in history including labor, migration, community, gender, citizenship, colonialism, and comparative history.
