During this week’s class, we began to explore the Omeka software that will power our Atlanta Rail Corridor Archive (ARCA). We also talked about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.  We discussed the difference between top-down ontological categorization and bottom-up tagging/folksonomies.  We decided to employ both methods internally as we develop the ARCA, using controlled vocabularies and careful procedure in our use of the Dublin Core metadata schema for the objects in our archive and giving ourselves more freedom to develop appropriate tags for our objects.

Below, you will find detailed notes for this week’s class.

Digital History Class Notes Week Five

February 10, 2015

4:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

• Fair Use Week
  • February 23 – March 1
• Oral History Assignment for next week’s lab class
  • It’s OK to use oral history content you’ve previously gathered
• Tagging assignment
  • Month assignments
    • January 2013, 2014 (Leslie)
    • February 2013, 2014 (Nick)
    • March 2013, 2014 (Julie)
    • April 2013, 2014 (Austin)
    • May 2013, 2014 (Susan)
    • June 2013, 2014 (Nathan)
    • July 2013, 2014 (John-Joseph)
    • August 2013, 2014 (Alexandra)
    • September 2013, 2014 (Kate)
    • October 2013, 2014 (Jennie)
    • November 2013, 2014 (Chris)
    • December 2013, 2014 (Caroline)
    • 2012, 2015 (Becky)
  • Choose articles and think about assigned tags and categories
  • Await further instruction clarification on Friday afternoon after History@Work editors’ conference call

5:00 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.

• Introducing Omeka
  • Examples
    • http://gvh.aphdigital.org/about
    • http://911digitalarchive.org/
    • http://www.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/jell-o

• User roles
  • http://omeka.org/codex/User_Roles
• Plugin system
• Collections
  • Example from the Greenwich Village Digital Archive
    • http://creatingdigitalhistory.wikidot.com/omeka-addcoll
  • On our blog site, we will have a category for collections and everyone should post their research repositories as blog posts under this category. Comment on others’ posts if you are also using the repository.
  • Please do this sooner than later
  • Exhibits
  • Dublin Core
    • Metadata schema for the whole site
      • http://omeka.org/codex/Working_with_Dublin_Core
      • http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/User_Guide/Creating_Metadata
    • Examples from the Greenwich Village Digital Archive Project
      • http://creatingdigitalhistory.wikidot.com/omeka-additem
    • Date field will be a drop-down delineating decades beginning with 1800 through the present.
    • Date available will be scan date
    • Date created will be original creation date for the item (map, photograph, diary)
    • Temporal coverage will also be a drop-down with decades
    • Coverage field will be a drop-down with the BeltLine quadrants
    • Spacial coverage
      • Neighborhoods
      • Quarry
    • Whither controlled vocabularies?
      • LoC Subject Headings
      • Simple vocabularies
      • When is freedom good, and when is freedom problematic?

6:00 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.

• Items
  • BeltLine Sample Items
  • Item #1 Belt Line – Atlanta
• Rights tracker
  • Please send google accounts so that Adina can share the rights tracker with you.
• Tags
  • Examples from the Greenwich Village Digital Archive
    • http://creatingdigitalhistory.wikidot.com/tagging-guidelines

6:45 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. (some of the below we didn’t quite get to cover in class, so we will revisit during our metadata lab on the 23rd of February)

• Taxonomies vs. Folksonomies
  • Nature of taxonomy
    • Ontology
  • Nature of folksonomy
  • Alternative futures for data structure
    • Discuss Clay Shirky’s viewpoints
      • Assumes no physical constraints — and really no constraints
      • de.licio.us and “market logic”
    • Discuss“Semantic Web”
      • Assumes need for more machine-readable content so machines can do more to access data on the Web
    • What is the role of the thesaurus?
      • “If all I’m doing is trying to find people who tag things the way I do, my exposure to the world of information is going to be awfully awfully constrained. If I’m a scientist, and I tag an article “bird flu,” well, yes, I might find all the other articles labelled “bird flu,” but I won’t find any labelled “avian flu.” In this case, a thesaurus (well, a synonym ring, but no mind) will increase the quality of the signal. And, contrary to Clay’s coda in that claim, you can utilize thesauri and not believe there is one right way to organize things. In fact, a strong, robust thesaurus works PRECISELY BECAUSE there is not one right way to organize things.”
  • Options for digital history sites running Omeka to create folksonomies
    • Scripto
    • Item contribution feature with tagging
    • Tagging plugin
      • https://github.com/Daniel-KM/Tagging
      • Still in beta
• Think about tagging, and we will make some choices during our metadata lab in two weeks!
  • Specifically, how should our tags relate to LoC subjects already included?
  • Should we be more abstract, general, or specific?