The following Project Highlight was originally created for the DH@MSU Undergraduate Newsletter and was featured in the May 8, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
This is Indian Country
From the Project’s About Page
This is Indian Country is a digital cultural map of indigenous community issues worldwide.
This project began as a collaborative project in Spring 2016 with Dr. Heather Howard’s ANP 433: Contemporary American Indian Communities class at Michigan State University. Students all chose a specific issue affecting a particular community on which to write an analytical essay. They created the webpage for the atlas entry (using basic HTML, CSS, and some light JS if they felt ambitious), added the pin to the map by adding their site’s information (Latitude/Longitude, time period, brief site description) to a spreadsheet/CSV via Google Docs. Leaflet Om
nivore was used to pull the data out of the CSV and onto a simple Leaflet based map. In addition to doing focused research and writing on specific American Indian communities, students learned basic HTML, CSS and GitHub (forking, pull requests, comitting, etc.) during the course of the assignment.
The project had several goals. First, it allows the students to have focused, activist-oriented engagement with a specific issue concerning a specific community (and write about it). Second, students will learn valuable digital skills such as working with HTML, digital mapping, version control, and project management. These skills are not normally part of a senior level anthropology classes, but can easily be applied to many anthropological issues and projects. Finally, students will build something public, meaning they will contribute to the collective knowledge and resources available on the open web about various American Indian communities.
This project is a direct child of the Digital Atlas of Egyptian Archaeology (DAEA), a course project developed by Ethan Watrall. Both This is Indian Country and DAEA were developed in partnership with LEADR at MSU and especially through the efforts of Brian Geyer. Starting in January 2020 and ending in May 2021, Zach Francis has been responsible for both teaching new anthropology students how to add new issues to the map, and maintaining the code repository for this project.
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