Author Archives: Doing DH Team

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Day 3 / homework

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My ideal self

So, today I worked with Omeka, which seemed more attractive than the other content management systems. It is to put it in a way I can understand a platform designed to help people create collections, whatever that means. It seems the perfect tool for my project, since what I want to create is basically a collection of artists’ biographies.

With the very kind help of the instructors, I was able to create a collection and even an item type. This allowed me to have the fields in Spanish, which is clearly important for my project. I had considered the possibility of making the project bilingual, but that is clearly both difficult and useless (whoever wants to search the database I hope to create, understands Spanish).

What I am disappointed about is my inability to act freely and carelessly. I kept thinking: “I will break Omeka”. I wonder if this fear will dissolve into a more assertive attitude in the future.

After having heard the “Drupal” participants, I feel I should try to use it. It looks a little more difficult (I do not need that, to be honest). But I will try it now.

Source: Day 3 / homework

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CMS for Collections of Ceramics

The greatest benefit of omeka.net for my research project is its ability to organize collections and exhibitions. Because collections of ceramics that were originally commissioned or collected by a single family or patron were often later sold into numerous private and public collections,  the omeka platform offers a means of reunifying those collections either for private research purposes or more public online exhibits. Loading items into an omeka site is straightforward, but in order to create a worthwhile exhibit, the narrative and organizational structure would need to be well thought out ahead of time. Within an exhibition, it would be useful to add videos and zoom functions, but I have not learned to add these features yet.

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Pioneering a model

As museum collections increasingly become digitized on registrar databases with access to users on their websites, human interaction with material culture shifts to reflect our evolving digital capabilities. The aim of this project is to analyze how technological development can potentially redefine the mission of museums as producers, mediators, and interpreters of digital images incorporated in cultural collections.

One of the most troubling endeavors of such a project deals with simply defining what constitutes a digital art object. What is archived: the object’s hardware components? The digital software? What about considerations of user experience? Determining what is archived and why are considerations curators and stakeholders must contemplate as contemporary material culture becomes more and more digital. The interdependency between the digital interface and its supplementary hardware makes conservation and archival processes particularly complex and unique to traditional analog museum collections. As agents of collective memory and cultural materials, museums have traditionally presided over their holdings and administered user experience and access to them. The challenge going forward is how they will manage digital objects as they become incorporated into institutions and force museums to reevaluate their relationship with active users creating experiences through active contact with interactive digital spaces.

 

Sources thus far:

Digitalcraft

Moma 14 videogame collection

Computerspielemuseum, DE

Vigamus, IT

The Strong

Neoludica, Biennale, IT

Source: Pioneering a model

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Day 3: Omeka and Scalar and Drupal, Oh My!

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Today we chose one of three CMS platforms with which to play, adapting to the new environments and it quirks. I chose Scalar because I wanted to have multimedia content on my site, and it seemed this CMS was the best option. While it took me longer to adjust to the platform than I expected, once I “figured out” how to use it I was impressed and amazed out what I could do. I even audibly gasped once or twice. Not only did Scalar allow me to incorporate text and video in interesting ways, but I could annotate them as well. I became somewhat frustrated at how to annotate, finding the Help Guide not all that useful for this particular component. However, Celeste guided me in the right direction, and soon enough I was making my own. This is what I wanted to learn! Long have I annotated images in Photoshop or even Apple software, using permanent arrows and text. My previous system was a necessary evil, and it bothered me that I couldn’t make these annotations invisible. Even though Scalar’s annotation tools require me to look at the image online, I can click on a permalink and–presto! A lovely annotated image or video is projected on a screen. Time passed quickly once I became immersed in the details of Scalar. While there were certainly many quirks, some of which were odd and unnecessary, I look forward to plumbing the depths of Scalar more. I think it might be a useful platform for my project and certainly for teaching. Now I need to learn Omeka and Drupal Gardens, which I imagine will offer valuable ways to see data.

A final note: it seems useful to learn CSS and HTML for Scalar. There are few design options, none of which I really liked, but if I knew CSS and HTML I could make modifications at will. I am now determined to learn both.

Source: Day 3: Omeka and Scalar and Drupal, Oh My!

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On platforms

I do not yet feel clear about whether one of the platforms introduced today—Omeka, Drupal Gardens, and Scalar—is solely appropriate for the project. Capabilities that the eventual platform will need include the following:

• The various elements for study—script, image, decorative motifs, textual sources and general manuscript catalogue information—all require separate areas of the site, as well as an area in which terms can be set to pull from across these discrete bodies of material for comparison, mapping, and possibly visualization.

• The separate areas must each offer the possibility for participants’ comments and working assessments.

• The site probably requires an inbuilt Viewer capability similar to the Courtauld Gothic Ivories or the Stanford Mirador to facilitate work of comparison.

• Some maps may be static, to illustrate fixed historical points, but others will primarily be useful for demonstrating movement across time and place, and for comparing categories derived from the primary elements of study.

 

At the moment, then, it looks to me as though Omeka-style collections would be suitable for the individual working areas, provided that flexible comment and comparison are possible; but I am not sure about the functions that would need to work cross-collection and generate various types of presentation and combinations.

Source: On platforms

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Day 3

We delved (briefly) today into a discussion of how power structures are built into our data structures. Our guest speaker Kimon Keramidas, Assistant Professor and Director of the Digital Media Lab, Bard Graduate Center, referenced briefly a project by Aaron Glass on Franz Boas that deals with indigenous knowledge systems and databases (must look that up). Someone gave an example of a person working on a digital project to make a database of First Nations objects publicly available on the internet, consulting with a First Nations person, and discovering that the typical systems of classification (Dublin Core) often lead museum professionals and others to replicate colonial systems of knowledge/power. Granted, the very idea of making a catalog of objects from another culture publicly available is very embedded in Western European civilization! But how do we catalog objects in ways that allow us to understand their original purposes or to see them anew instead of perpetuating stereotypes of knowledge?

I thought, wow, the power of the internet: One could catalog a small group of objects in various ways, according to various cultural values, and compare them, side by side! A way to visualize how differently various cultures think/value. (Even that project smacks of the desire of the Western mind to master all areas of knowledge though, right?) Of course, that would require a complex, relational database. Omeka wouldn’t cut it for a project such as that. Which brings me to Omeka.

Today’s assignment is to blog about differences between various platforms for content management that we’ve been introduced to (Omeka, Drupal Gardens, and Scalar). Sadly, we didn’t have much time for hands-on exploration of these. I only poked around Omeka myself. It’s amazing that this resource is available to scholars for free! And it is fairly easy to use (although I did not find it to be intuitive). But extremely limited, too. Just trying to enter a few “items,” I began to hate the Dublin Core. Several other participants observed that it would be nice to have the option of using the VRA core, instead (thanks to JJ Bauer for pointing to me to the link). But standards for classification aside, Omeka is a flat database, not relational. I have been spoiled by my earlier experiences with Filemaker Pro–I expect great flexibility from my data management systems. At any rate, I think Omeka will be a great tool for pedagogy. I look forward to playing later with Drupal Gardens and Scalar to see what they can do.

Source: Day 3

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Offer some feedback about the institute so far

I have learned a great deal thus far regarding the origin of the Digital Humanities, how the DH are being practiced, a range of opinions about the DH, some practical applications, and it has been especially rewarding to meet art historians who share similar interests. The workshop organizers and graduate students are founts of knowledge and assistance%u2013bravo and brava. Considering the amount of information disseminated and the learning curves of the participants, all is going well. I do have a few suggestions, though: perhaps if programs were downloaded in the mornings we could save some time for hands-on work, as some downloads have been very slooooow; the six hours of workshop time are simultaneously exhilarating and draining%u2013is there any way to (sometimes) flip the discussion and hands-on time so that the latter can be done when we are more alert in the mornings? the readings, examples, etc., are geared toward Western art and culture, and at more modern periods%u2013a bit of consideration for earlier periods and non-Western cultures would be appreciated, because these present issues and questions that sometimes are so different that they require divergent strategies (some suggestions provided upon request).

All in all, the first three days have been tremendously educational. This is like summer camp for adults%u2013the new skills, knowledge, and contacts will help to keep me charged during the next academic year.

Source: Offer some feedback about the institute so far

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Apps vs. web

On the bus to class today, the topic of web content for our students came up: what would students use in their courses, apps or websites?

My students, most of whom are non-traditional, older students who have recently returned to school and claim that they are not “comfortable” with technology, all carry phones and most carry the newest, shiniest, bells-and-whistles iPhones. They may not have computers, iPads, or printers, but they do have phones. They may not care about “pretty” sites, but access to phone apps do appeal to them. (See  this graphic at http://www.edudemic.com/apps-graphic/; it seems that most students, traditional or non-traditional, use apps, not websites.)

So I was excited about reviewing a phone app for my homework assignment, the phone app, Timeline Art Museum. Bad, sad and very irritating. It has the worst aspects of Corbis (you pay for high quality images, even if they are in the public domain), unclear functionality (until you click on the short biography, you don’t know that images by the artist are included in the app), and it focuses on those aspects of art that my students cling to like a lifeboat: biographical details and the canned analysis of the thumbprint description. The image is too small to encourage real analysis by the students, the descriptions encourage shallow understanding, and the argument of the app’s design, as Kimon Keramidas’s presentation pushed us to consider, is the wrong argument. And, as Lauren  Kilroy-Ewbank asked, if this isn’t for students, for whom is it designed?

I don’t know. Not for the audiences that I see at the Art Institute of Chicago; it is much too naive and uninformative. It certainly wouldn’t engage those who aren’t interested in art to become interested in art. And, as I said above, it ain’t for my students.

It does highlight the question of argument for a page and how visual elements contribute to the argument of the page. i want to talk more about this as I discuss the various tools to which we were introduced today. But tomorrow is another day.

The big takeaway, however, from today’s class for me: I need to dress up my WordPress site. It looks shabby, neglected, and woefully skeletal compared with my esteemed colleagues. Let me play some more.

 

 

 

Source: Apps vs. web

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Platform Test Drives

Our afternoon was devoted to hands-on time with one- or more- of the presented platforms for our projects: Omeka, Drupal, or Scalar. I chose Drupal, but ended up spending much of the work time waiting for my site to generate. I got an email on my way home that the site was now available. So this evening, on my own, I gave it a try.

I chose Drupal because I liked the idea of doing something more like the hmtl websites that I had done in the past as opposed to my perception of Omeka, which seemed like more of a one-to-one presentation type tool. My institution has adopted Drupal for it’s content management system and I have attended one rudimentary training session. I found the session to be uninformative, despite Drupal being billed as akin to WordPress which I feel very comfortable with. I thought that starting on my own and using drupalgardens.com that I would find it easier to use. I did not. I was able to make one entry on something that I wanted to be a static page- simply text, and image, and an image caption. I knew there must be a way to format my image caption, but it was not readily evident to me. I also had a problem with word wrapping in my central column. I explored different control elements in the dashboard and felt pretty lost. I decided to try Omeka to get more momentum for my project and to keep from feeling discouraged at this early stage.

Omeka would be a good platform for a photo project that I have started. I am scanning photographs that I will then catalog at item level in MARC in my library catalog. I can then export those records as a CSV, crosswalk my MARC fields to Dublin Core, then use the Omeka CSV plugin to import them. I decided to experiment with a set of ten objects from our permanent collection, all collected in 1919, whose description data I happened to have in a spreadsheet already. I watched the screencast on using the CSV plugin and learned that I will need help setting up my FTP client to upload my spreadsheet. Moving on, I thought that maybe I could import the images that I will later attach to that data. I made the mistake of adding all of the images as one item, realizing that the best method is probably to upload the data, then upload and link the image files.

Scalar, which I saw demonstrated at the American Art History and Digital Scholarship symposium in the fall, was clearly not appropriate for my topic, at least at this stage. Perhaps as I continue to collect and analyze the collection data I’m interested in and a narrative is formed around my observations, Scalar could be a way to present the entirety of my project. But for now, I’m not dealing with a lot of content and I am not working on a narrative.

Source: Platform Test Drives

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Omeka!

After a dizzying morning exploring the world of Omeka, Scalar and Drupal Gardens created sites, I was happy to spend the afternoon getting some hands-on time with Omeka. Truth be told, I have tried to use Omeka before, though it was such a disaster that I am not sure I should even mention it. In my desperate search for ways to create online exhibitions in my classes, I stumbled upon Omeka last spring (after an even more disastrous attempt at using Google SketchUp).

Source: Omeka!