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Unpacking Memories

  September 17, 2015 ,

I grew up in the Morningside-Lenox Park neighborhood, here in Atlanta. I walked home from Inman and Grady, nearly every day of the combined seven years I attended the schools, through the heart of Virginia Highlands. When I started my undergrad work at Georgia State, my group of friends stayed fairly local as well, with those who weren’t from Atlanta originally slowly becoming settled in the city in various neighborhoods. A constant in all of this, either as landmark I recognized while driving, a meeting place for food, or simply hangout after a late night on campus, was Manuel’s Tavern. Be it a friend’s improve group holding an event there, or just ending up there because it was central to nearly everyone in a group, the bar was a staple of my social life until I graduated in 2004 and moved to the hinterlands of Buford, Ga (or so it felt to me). But, even then, as I did my Masters and now PhD at GSU, Manuel’s held a cozy, wood paneled place in my heart. Fear and panic gripped my heart when I heard the news that the land surrounding the Tavern and the Tavern itself were being bought out by a developer to “renovate” and “upscale” the area along North Avenue. I had already seen what was being done to the area on Piedmont at Rock Springs and Cheshire Bridge Rd., and felt a small bit of what had made the area special was being lost to a … Continue reading

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Digital Curation at the Almanac Archives

  September 17, 2015

To kick off the year’s blogging, I thought I would highlight one of the lesser-known SIF projects, the Almanac Archive. The Almanac Archive seeks to build a virtual collection of British almanacs published between 1750-1850. These incredibly popular texts (along with the bible one of the most likely books for any given person to read and use) are incredibly rich and diverse sources for scholarship in many fields. Designed to be useful, almanacs included a vast array of information about civic and political events (the dates of university terms, holidays and feast days, significant historical events) and the natural world (including tide tables, zodiac charts, eclipses). And used they were. One of the neat things about almanacs is that they often show signs of active use and engagement, in the form of reader annotations and marginalia, noting for instance particularly unusual weather events, which days crops were planted or harvested, and otherwise interacting with and personalizing the text.   The goal of the Almanac Archive is to make a large number of these texts- and the annotations they contain — accessible to scholars in a single location. At the core of the project is building a database that will link to digitized almanacs owned by research libraries in the UK and North America, with the goal of providing digital access and finely-tuned search capabilities to negotiate and use this assemblage. The project is cool on a number of levels, but what I want to focus on here is how it … Continue reading

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First Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the School Year

  September 17, 2015 , ,

Today I attended the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup (DigPed Meetup) of the 2015-2016 school year. Hosted, by The Atlanta Connected Learning collegial network of university faculty and staff in the Atlanta area, ATLCL hosts DigPed meetups one time a month which aims to create a social face-to-face forum where various members of facutly, staff, and graduate student instructors can share, and discover what is happening cross-university and cross-disciplinarily in the greater Atlanta area. Each meeting is made up of two presentations, and discussions that occur during and after these presentations. Today, Jeff Greene and Pete Rorabaugh at Kennesaw State University gave a talk titled “Reframing a Degree for a New Media Ecosphere” in which they detail their reframing of the writing BA in their newly restructured KSU department after the merger. Jeff and Pete are teaching two courses, New Media I & II in which they teach a variety of composing skill that focus on content creation, interactivity and ownership. This kind of work is exciting, and necessary when we consider how quickly writing environments shift and change in today’s world where the digital is often emphasized. The second speaker was McKenna Rose at Emory, whose presentation was titled “Envisioning the Pechakucha: Strategies for Invention and Revision in the Literature Classroom.” McKenna explained her Pechakucha 20X20 assignment and showed a few examples of some of the work expected of her students. McKenna explained some of her techniques and processes as she asked her students to create and present their projects. What … Continue reading

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The Aftermath of Study Abroad

  September 17, 2015

This summer I had the pleasure of being apart of an 18-member group of students and professors that traveled to Turkey for a study abroad trip that has really impacted my life. Our goal was to study Turkish politics and the Syrian refugee conflict. The three weeks we were there, we engulfed ourselves with learning from NGO’s, think tanks, institutions and meeting directly with Syrians that had been displaced due to the war in their country. There are many stories that I can share, but for this sake of time in this blog, I will just share 2. Story 1:  One of the biggest surprises to me was my apparent celebrity status in Turkey. I identify as African American, and much to my surprise, that automatically made me a rarity for the Turkish people. Myself and a another women on the trip that originally is from the Caribbean, found ourselves being followed and asked to take pictures with random strangers throughout the cities we visited. The areas that it happened the most were around the historical sites. We would be walking with our group, if we stopped and stepped to the outer edges of the pack, people would start snapping pictures with their cel phones or coming up to us asking if we would take a picture. For the first few times we thought they were asking us to take a picture for them, but once we agreed they would hand the phone off to a friend and jump in the picture with … Continue reading

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Expanding 3d Atlanta through Geospatial research

  September 17, 2015 ,

As the new school year kicks off so too does the ambition and drive to continue our projects as SIF moving with that same force. A now year long standing process, the 3D Atlanta project has really begun to take form, with now a prototype that wows people. As the details and content is added to the interactive 3d game engine, Unity, and the technical side of the project proceeds at a slower pace due to its tedious and time consuming nature, the research group is moving ahead. As a part of the research team on this project, the purpose and mission has been to scour the internet or any other resources available to find any useful images or interesting facts of the surrounding area during the time (1930s). This has been a large task and as each researcher had previously taken off on their own journey for wholesome historical content, we began to note how chaotic and unruly all these files, images, articles, and data can be hard to manage. Through this struggle, I began to use a very well known tool, Google Maps. Through This I have been able to create layers of each time period and since the interactive environment is based on geographic accuracy to the time period, I began to place the images, if possible in the exact location where the image was taken, or the place of which the article was written about. Since this method the team has begun to realize how useful … Continue reading