My Techy Bone

Couple posts ago I talked about how I missed working with bones, hanging out in the anthropology labs, and really anthropology in general. I love geospatial science, I really do but I wanted to experience that anthropology world again. So what did I do? No I didn't drop out of Grad School or quit my job actually quite the opposite. Instead I decided that I was going to take my thesis from undergrad and turn it into my final project for the Spatial Database class that I'm taking now.

When I was at Penn State I created biological anthropology related exhibits for the anthropology museum. I thought it would be cool for my final to create a spatial model of the museum section where I had my exhibits. Then I will link it to a database that will hold the info for the artifacts in the exhibits (the artifact number, name, description, collection it came from, store room number it came from, etc).

Basically what this database becomes is a sort of spatial tracking guide for the museum exhibits (have different shapefile layers that layout the exhibit sections that once clicked on bring up the data of the artifacts in the exhibit). Essentially there will be about three tables that house the data from the three different exhibits I worked on. Since I worked closely in actually creating these exhibits I know that this is something that could very well be implemented at the Matson Museum of Anthropology at Penn State. It really peaked my interest when thinking of different project ideas for this class.

I'm excited to start working on it and finally getting back into the anthropology mindset. Obviously it's still the technical side of things but I can see it being extremely practical. This is a good way to take these technical skills I'm learning in the Master's Degree and apply it back to my Bachelor's Degree.