Fred Quivik will be presenting “Managing Underground Development from Afar: Anaconda’s Walker Mine in California, 1915-1941″ on Friday, September 25, 2015 at 3:00 p.m. in Room 610 of the Dow Building as part of the Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences’ Geoseminar presentations.
PDF Flyer: QuivikGeosem-1
Don Lafreniere (SS/GLRC) has received a $193,008 partnership development grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a project titled, “Canadian Historical Geographic Information Systems Partnership.” This is a two-year project.
From Tech Today.
From Tech Today:
The second year of community seminars/discussions at the Carnegie Museum of the Keweenaw were announced this week by emeritus professors Bill Rose and Susan Martin. The initial discussion is September 15 and will be led by Nancy Langston (SS) and the GLRC: Sustaining Lake Superior. The museum’s doors will open at 6:30 p.m. for refreshments and introductions, and the lecture will begin at 7 p.m. The series will run through April 2016, with a guest speaker featured on the third Tuesday of each month.
Rose and Martin, Carnegie Museum board members, say they have lined up distinguished senior researchers from Michigan Tech to address topics of interest to teachers, students, residents and the larger community.
For more information, see the Carnegie Museum website.
From Tech Today:
Melissa Baird (SS), published, “Heritage Ecologies and the Rhetoric of Nature” in The Rhetoric of Heritage (Kathyrn Lafrenze Samuels and Trinidad Rico—editors, University of Colorado Press).
On the weekend before orientation, the Industrial Archaeology Program (SS) made a graduate-study tour to Milwaukee. Five Social Sciences faculty and five graduate students (SS and HU, both MS and PhD) investigated industrial production, adaptation to industrial decline and how urban patterns have been affected by industry, both historically and today.
The five-day trip, partly underwritten by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, included factory process tours, museum visits, and a day at Chipstone discovering explanatory and interpretive strategies for material culture, primarily using the history of the ceramics industry as the focus for the day.
Visits included the Kohler Company, which produces ceramic and cast iron bathroom fittings; Caterpillar Global Mining (formerly Bucyrus-Erie), which builds some of the largest earth-moving machinery on the planet; Harley-Davidson Powertrain Operations, where we saw engines and transmissions being assembled on a state-of-the-art assembly line; La Lune designer rustic furniture company, where small-batch artisanal woodworking is still practiced; and the Falk Foundry (Rexnord Industries) in Milwaukee, which has sadly been decommissioned in the last six months, but which offered a glimpse of active deindustrialization.
Museum visits included the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers (WI), the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, which has an extensive collection of artwork depicting industrial work, and the Iron Mountain (MI) Pumping Museum. The final stop of the whirlwind tour was the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Herrling Sawmill in Greenbush (WI), a reconstructed 1850s vertical sash sawmill. The historically accurate sawmill has been reconstructed on the basis of archaeology done by Michigan Tech’s Industrial Archaeology Program in the 1990s. Sadly, the day we visited the saw blade was misaligned and a main bolt had sheared, so it was not running, but it was wonderful to see the final result of our archaeology of 20 years ago.
Taken from Tech Today.
From Tech Today:
Trials and Trails Tonight
The Carnegie Museum hosts tours of Huron Creek. Carol MacLennan (SS) and Alex Mayer (CEE) will host a pair of tours tonight. Begining at 5:30 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. the tour of Huron Creek travels from its rerouted home behind Walmart to its entry into the Portage Canal. You will learn about how area mines and other development changed the route and the ecology of Huron Creek. $25.00 per ticket ($20 members) includes guided tour and refreshments at Museum.
Seats are limited, reserve tickets by calling 482-7140 or email
From Tech Today:
Professor Barry Solomon wrote an opinion piece on clean power plants that was published in the Battle Creek Enquirer.
Professor Emeritus Larry Lankton will present “1,900 Lives — The Human Cost of Mining Copper” at Fort Wilkins Historic State Park in Copper Harbor on Monday, August 17, 2015 at 7:00 p.m at the West Barracks.
Professor Emeritus Larry Lankton will present “150 Years of Paternalism, 1840-1990” at the Keweenaw Heritage Center at St. Anne’s in Calumet on Tuesday, August 11, 2015 at 7:00 p.m.
In October 2011, heavy rainfall poured down the sides of El Salvador’s San Vicente Volcano, nearly four feet of water in 12 days. Coffee plantation employees, working high up on the volcano’s slope began noticing surface cracks forming on steep slopes and in coffee plantations. Cracks herald landslides—places where the wet, heavy upper layers, saturated with water, slide over the less-permeable rocky layers underneath. The workers radioed downslope, keeping close tabs on the rainfall gauge network.
Luke Bowman was also there, helping direct radio calls and conducting fieldwork. Bowman, who recently defended his doctoral research in geology at Michigan Technological University, studies geohazards on San Vicente. The Journal of Applied Volcanology recently published some of his research, co-authored by Kari Henquinet, director of the Michigan Tech Peace Corps Master’s International Program and a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences. Their work combines traditional hazard assessments with social science techniques to develop a more in-depth understanding of the risks present at San Vicente Volcano in El Salvador.
Ethnography
Incorporating social science techniques—like ethnographic interviews and participatory observations of community meetings—is no easy feat for physical scientists, who have not been trained to think that way. Collaboration is important, and Henquinet worked with Bowman on his volcanology research to round out his social science data gathering methodology.
“The ethnographic approach is immersion,” Henquinet says, explaining researchers have to learn in the field and adjust their work accordingly. “It’s an approach that’s exploratory, grounded in reality and the context that people live in, so you’re not isolating or manipulating an experiment in a lab.”