Sustainability and standards: two important concepts that came out of our discussions today (which traversed ground from the social and political ideologies of DH, to Zotero, to Google-Fu, to metadata and back again). While the range of topics had relevance to Mapping Paris, the important take-aways from today focused on conceptions of metadata and the foundational (relational) database that the whole project will be based upon. While I began to think about the theoretical implications of database design (writing about it for my presentation at the Arts, Histories and Complex Networks/Leonardo Satellite Symposium and thinking about it through Crone and Halsey’s “On Collecting, Cataloguing and Collating the Evidence of Reading: The ‘Red Movement’ and Its Implications on Digital Scholarship.” [1]), it is only at Rebuilding the Portfolio that I have begun to seriously think about such concepts in their practical application and implementation in Mapping Paris.

We were introduced to the importance of schema for metadata, in other words, ‘a standardized set of fields used to describe an object, field or identity.’ [2] Examples include the Dublin Core, MARC standards, VRA core and CDWA. In addition, Sharon kindly responded to a question that I had about sustainability DH tools and platforms, and in doing so, circled back around to the importance of establishing your descriptive information, from the get-go, in a series of fields that can easily shared, scraped or migrated from platform-to-platform. Such ideas are of the utmost importance in this process of thinking about/designing/implementing the database for Mapping Paris to ensure that the data is publicly usable and accessible (as well as the website – but that is a story for another blog post), that the project is conceived in a spirit of open access and that the data is not irretrievable, but rather accessible and migratable (is that a word?) in the future permutations of D(A)H.

[1] Crone, Rosalind, and Katie Halsey. “On Collecting, Cataloguing and Collating the Evidence of Reading: The ‘Red Movement’ and Its Implications on Digital Scholarship.” In History in the Digital Age, edited by Toni Weller, 95-110. London; New York: Routledge, 2013. (Note that this was pulled from Endnote, as I have not yet made the formal jump to Zotero, nor do I currently know how to properly footnote in a blog.)

[2] Loosely quoted from Sharon Leon’s talking points today (8 July 2014) @ Rebuilding the Portfolio.

Source: Homework Day_2: Project Planning