Wesley Fishel, from MSU, built a close relationship with then president of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem. This is one of the photographs contained in the Vietnam Project Archives.

The Vietnam Project Archive- a joint collaboration between MATRIX, Michigan State University (MSU) Department of History, and MSU University Archives & Historical Collections- has received $264,998 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Vietnam Project Archive is committed to the task of digitizing and archiving documents from 1955-1962, when MSU worked with the American government in South Vietnam with the goal of producing a stable, non-Communist country in the Cold War era. Although their efforts eventually failed, the Vietnam Project Archive contains rare and valuable data about life in South Vietnam immediately prior to the Vietnam War. Materials in this archive allow students and scholars to get an insider’s view of America’s university-assisted nation-building practices.

Included in this collectionare contracts between MSU and the U.S. Foreign Operations Administration, reports on the rural economy and society in South Vietnam, personal communications between MSU staff and the president of South Vietnam, and audio recordings and films, which include images of MSU staff assisting in police training, ceremonies, and inspection tours. These documents are rare and available only in this archive, making its preservation and dissemination an important and necessary project. Project partners hope that the digitizing of the Vietnam Project Archive will allow new scholarship and understanding to develop about a country’s transition from a colonial to post-colonial society, nation-building strategies, and the history of South Vietnam.

Episode 63 of Africa Past and Present was released Wednesday, May 16 2012. The episode features a conversation with Professor Tom Turner, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Country Specialist at Amnesty International USA.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by MATRIX. Subscribe to the podcast on the Africa Past and Present website and on iTunes.

This quilt, called "Grandmother's Flower Garden" is one of the quilts that is now accessible from the Quilt Index.

 MATRIX is pleased to announce that The Quilt Index, one of our primary collaborations, has succeeded in becoming one of the first international online quilt and quilt ephemera repositories with their recent posting of historic quilts from the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton. The Quilt Index has been using KORA– an open-source, database-driven, online digital repository application developed by MATRIX– to provide centralized access to more than 60,000 quilt records.

What makes the addition of the Royal Alberta Museum’s quilt particularly exciting is the impact their addition has on Canadian heritage studies and on the future of the Quilt Index as a whole. The quilts, according to Lucie Heins, Assistant Curator of Western Canadian History for the museum, are an important part of the museum’s collection and help tell the story of its settlement and historical development. The craftsmanship displayed in these quilts is quite spectacular, and making them easily accessible online will help foster new scholarship and community engagement.

TheRoyal Alberta Museum is the first Canadian contributor to The Quilt Index and is one of the most significant international contributors to the project so far. The addition of these 45 quilts is a landmark for The Quilt Index, which has been aspiring to go international ever since its inception in 2003. In addition to the Canadian quilts, The Quilt Index contains digital records of quilts fromSouth Africa and plans to add quilts from many more countries in the upcoming years.

MATRIX is excited to see how The Quilt Index is combining KORA technology and archival traditions to create a quilt repository that is cutting-edge and innovative. We look forward to continuing to work with The Quilt Index to advance preservation and access to these artistic and historical cultural heritage materials for research, teaching, and public audiences.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $17 million in grants for 208 humanities projects, including a $25,000 grant to support a three-day workshop to explore relevant issues and identify requirements for the development of an archive for the preservation of dissertations that incorporate interactive or dynamic digital media.

Liza Potts (Michigan State University) and Kathie Gossett (Iowa State University) are co-PIs on this project. The proposed workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars (e.g., Humanities, Social Sciences, Library and Information Sciences, and Computer Sciences) to explore digital media and to examine the norms through which traditional modes of scholarship, like dissertations, are constructed. The proposed workshop seeks to be a launching point from which born-digital dissertations will receive the necessary technological support to encourage their development, deposit, and maintenance. The workshop’s main deliverable will be a white paper that will summarize the intellectual, pedagogic, and technological contexts for developing an open-source archive and will outline the steps necessary to produce a prototype. The white paper, which will be freely available online, will also serve as the basis for further efforts to secure funding, including future grant applications such as an NEH Digital Implementation Grant.

MATRIX is pleased to announce The Gradhacker Podcast, a recent addition to the Gradhacker project launched by Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellows Katy Meyers and Alex Galarza. The podcast is co-hosted by Galarza and education technology PhD candidate Andrea Zellner. MATRIX has provided support for the Gradhacker blog, now featured on Insidehighered.com, and continues to incubate projects like the podcast. The podcast is produced and hosted via MATRIX’s Digital Lab. Episodes feature interviews, discussion of recent Gradhacker blog posts, and news/stories related to graduate school. Episode 1 includes an interview with an MSU faculty member who has experimented with ‘flipping’ his classroom and Episode 2 features MATRIX Associate Director Ethan Watrall explaining the importance of THATCamp. The podcast URL is podcast.gradhacker.org and you can also now subscribe on iTunes.

MATRIX is pleased to announce that Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellow Alex Galarza has won a Fulbright IIE Award for 2012-2013. Alex is a doctoral student in the Department of History whose research examines soccer clubs in mid-twentieth century Argentina. The award will fund nine months of research in Buenos Aires during which Alex will investigate archives, collect oral history interviews, and conduct ethnographic fieldwork. Alex has used his fellowship at MATRIX to develop a chapter prototype for his future open access digital dissertation that utilizes Kora as a digital repository and publishing platform. Alex’s project has benefited from the guidance of MATRIX’s Associate Director and Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative Director Dr. Ethan Watrall and the Director of Digital History Projects, Dr. Peter Alegi.

In Episode 60 of Africa Past and Present, Historians Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Hawthorne discuss the Atlantic Slave Data Network — a digital history project of Matrix and the MSU History Department funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. They discuss the origins of the ASDN, intellectual and technological challenges, and the wider significance of building a freely accessible web database on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by MATRIX. Subscribe to the podcast on the Africa Past and Present website and on iTunes.

MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences is seeking an experienced, creative, and talented individual to fill the position of Assistant Director.

The Assistant Director will be primarily responsible for directly overseeing MATRIX’s project infrastructure. This includes managing MATRIX’s development team (programmers, web designers, graduate assistants, and interns) as well as project development and management (including creation of deadlines for all project deliverables, project and task tracking, and reporting). In addition, the successful candidate will lead the continued development of KORA (kora.matrix.msu.edu). The successful candidate will be expected to work both independently and with MATRIX senior leadership to develop projects, identify and pursue sources of extramural funding, and publish work in appropriate venues.

The successful candidate must have significant experience with web programming, including scripting languages (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby) and with some knowledge of compiled languages (Java, C++). Ability to work in a Unix/Linux based server environment is required, and preference will be given to candidates with database, XML, and web services expertise. Strong demonstrated organizational and project management skills as well as excellent communication abilities are mandatory. A background in digital humanities, informatics, information science, computer science, library science, or cultural heritage (especially archaeology, history, classics, or museum studies) is especially desirable. Bachelor’s degree required; MA, MLS, MIS, or Ph.D. preferred.

The Assistant Director is a full-time, 12-month professional staff position at the University. Salary is commensurate with experience. The University also offers a competitive benefits package. Candidates should submit application materials through jobs.msu.edu (Job No. 5746). Review of candidates will begin immediately, and position will remain open until filled. For more information, candidates are encouraged to contact Ethan Watrall via email at watrall@msu.edu

Founded in 1996, MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online is a globally renowned research center focusing on digital scholarship, the digital humanities, and cultural heritage informatics. MATRIX enjoys productive collaborations with numerous campus units, including the MSU Library, University Archives and Special Collections, the MSU Museum, The Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, African Studies Center, The WIDE Center, and The Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Beyond MSU, MATRIX has extremely strong ties with world class museums, archives, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions both nationally and internationally.

Michigan State University actively subscribes to a policy of equal employment opportunity and will not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, age, gender, color, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, religion, national origin, or political affiliation. Women and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.

In this episode, Layering Racial Oppression in South Africa, Jacob Dlamini, South African author, journalist, and historian, discusses his best-selling book Native Nostalgia, a memoir that challenges conventional struggle narratives.  He also talks about the social and political history of Kruger National Park and a new research project on collaborators of the apartheid security forces.

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Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by MATRIX. Subscribe to the podcast on the Africa Past and Present website and on iTunes.

The print version of Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration was released this week by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. Edited by Eric Kansa (Lead Developer of Open Context), and Sarah Witcher-Kansa (Executive Director of Alexandria Archive Institute), and Ethan Watrall (MATRIX Associate Director & Assistant Professor of Anthropology)the volume is the first book in the Cotsen Institute’s new Digital Archaeology Series. The book can be purchased from the David Brown Book Company. An open acces version of the book is also available at the University of California’s eScholarship repository.

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.