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Day 4: Drinking from the Firehose?

Confession: There was a moment today when I felt like I was drinking from the firehose. While the embedded video below doesn’t entirely capture the feeling, it does allow me to showcase my newfound abilities:

I left today’s institute meeting feeling like a giddy child, one who has boxes of chocolates and sugary candies and who doesn’t even know where to begin delighting in the sugary sweetness. After learning about Scalar, Omeka, and Drupal Gardens yesterday, I woke this morning hoping we’d have time to explore them further. The day turned out so much better than I imagined, as we discovered numerous tools to annotate images and videos. Thinglink became my new favorite tool (scroll over the images here). I enjoy annotating images, especially those that are unfamiliar to students (e.g., the Aztec “Calendar Stone”).

Operation_Crossroads_Baker_EditI’ve always done it in Photoshop or some other image editing software, where I draw arrows and include text, but it is always somewhat messy. Thinglink allowed me to annotate with not only text, but also links and videos. And it was easy to use. Come Fall semester, I will use this in my classes and ask students to annotate images. It will be a wonderful way to encourage close looking at images, even if it is a different type of close looking than we might normally expect. I know that I will also employ this tool for my project on Mexican deathways for the same reason that I will use it with students. I can embed these annotated images into my websites as well. For all these reasons, Thinglink ranks as my number one tool of the day.

We also explored Animoto. I must confess that I am normally dismissive of videos made from powerpoints or the like–I find them distracting. Yet Animoto has potential for both my teaching and project on Mexican deathways, particularly because it limits text, focuses on the visual, and displays a clean finished product.

Learning to annotate in Youtube was also wonderful. I feel sheepish that I didn’t know how to to this before today. And what wonderful possibilities it has. I can also download (for free) my Animoto videos and then upload them to my Youtube channel.

Surprisingly, by 4 PM I felt energized and ready to keep exploring all these new tools. They were all simple enough to guide students and colleagues who might want to use digital tools for their own projects or research.

A final note about today’s learning: the new Omeka 2.2 platform that we installed is much better than the earlier version I used yesterday. With a few changes to the hex color codes and a header image, I had a decent looking website in a couple of minutes vs. the earlier version. I plan to use this new version for the deathways project. In particular, it will work well to create exhibitions of objects.

Resources at Brooklyn College and CUNY

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There are a few helpful resources at Brooklyn College beyond Artstor, WorldCat, etc. I found some excellent resources on fair use, as well as some individuals who might be willing to help me get clearances. Within the CUNY system, I imagine the CUNY Commons will use useful for making connections with people interested in digital humanities and digital art history, finding different platforms (or at least others who use them), and experimenting with other platforms and tools. I also discovered that Brooklyn College has a list of OERs that could aid my project. I didn’t find anything about specific CMS platforms, but it is possible that this information is not well represented online. I’ve no doubt that CUNY Graduate Center has amazing resources for those interested in digital humanities. Now I just need to find and access them.

Source: Day 4: Drinking from the Firehose?

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Platforms, Functionality, Usability

omekascreenshot_smWell, platforms. I guess “out of the box” is helpful & gets your project off the ground quickly. But it boxes things up, too. I experimented this afternoon with Omeka.net. It has an impressive structure that yields some astonishingly quick results and offers simple-to-activate plug-ins. I created a collection & tried adding a few items manually and by ingesting from a csv file, then created an exhibition. It seemed as if the easiest way to pull data from Zotero in (at least according to the Zotero forum discussion that @magpie found, you can export Zotero data as a report (html), then open that file in Excel, then save as CSV. Fine, but the table needed a 90 degree rotation, and I’m Excel-phobic enough to let that deter me. So I ended up hand editing the table, but was able to save it as a CSV and pull the data into Omeka. I’m sure there’s a better way to do that, but it was worth investigating. Omeka.net was, however, a bit disappointing from a visual and usability standpoint. Not sure why each item needs to proclaim so loudly its metadata format. And when navigation is largely verbal, rather than visual, it affects usability. The template styles, while limited, definitely work. Apparently, Omeka.org solves all these issues with lots of customization options, as is clearly apparent in the stunning Peacock Room site. There is much more that can be done with omeka.net, of course, and a two-hour experiment gave only time to explore it briefly—hoping for more hands-on soon!

Perhaps Drupal would provide a more flexible, tabula rasa-style platform for my project. My experience with Drupal has been from a “consumer” point of view, managing the construction of (and providing content for) a web site developed by others with time constraints, rather than from the “producer” perspective, from which all things are possible.

 

 

Source: Platforms, Functionality, Usability

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Omeka?

Finally played with Omeka for the first time after seeing presentations at conferences and considering it as a possibility for our digital project. Pluses and minus. Thinking about how to organize the information gave me a headache, but it wasn’t Omeka’s fault! To collection or not to collection?

450px-Shelves-of-file-folders

 

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“If the platform fits, wear it.”

“If the platform fits, wear it,” with these words Megan Brett assured me that using Pinterest to store blog posts was not a shameful thing.   In fact “no shame” has been a constant phrase of reassurance as the participants in the Rebuilding the Portfolio Institute continue to explore Digital Art History.

There may be no shame but there is plenty of chagrin (at least on my end)… chagrin for the fact that I had no idea what platform the Illinois Women Artists Database uses.   I still don’t but at least I can now make an educated guess:  Omeka.

 

Source: “If the platform fits, wear it.”

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Blogging Guidelines for Institutions

In case my colleagues at Doing DAH are interested, below is a link to the blogging guidelines that my museum’s blog team created. There is some guidance about best practices and image use. Feel free to download.

Blogging for The Phillips Collection_Updated 2013

Also, not to toot my own horn, I published an article on institutional blogging in Art Documentation, Spring 2014. It is available with a JSTOR subscription.

History, Identity and 21st Century Skills: Experiments in Institutional Blogging

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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