I’ve been working on hard on the Northfield Historical Society website recently and am excited about the progress there! Here’s what I’ve tackled recently.
Transferred the hosting of the domain to my own bluehost account.
Created a subdomain to archive the current website.
Set up a redirect to provide access to the existing content while I build out the new website.
Successfully installed Omeka on the Northfield domain.
Next steps:
Add the appropriate plugins.
Upload the metadata I created (using the Northfield metadata guide)
Upload the file images to the omeka site.
Create new email addresses on that domain?
Actually transfer the ownership to my bluehost account.
I’m working on updating and uploading my thesis to an new, online home. I’m particularly interested in the metadata and how moving from analog to digital offers new opportunities and challenges. I’ve been working on this project for a while now and think it’s time to get somewhat more serious about it. Sometimes my idealist and dreams get in the way of actual, productive work so I wanted to address them both head on here and now.
Ideals
Ideally, I’d like to use my thesis as the basis of an exploration in linked data and the semantic web. My grandest visions involve creating a “Wikipedia of Covenant history” that allows raw data (names, dates, etc.) to be incorporated into meaningful narratives as well as stand alone as definitive data sets. The narratives I have in mind would be analogous to the text of my thesis – interpreting the bare facts of the history – and the data sets would be somewhat analogous to the bibliography.
The data sources I have in mind are ambitious; they include:
Books. Given my interest, this should be obvious. But I’d also love to include other information resources: tracts, pamphlets, videos, and blog posts. Perhaps even tweets and news stories.
People. Obviously all authors and editors but also all ordained Covenant clergy, including basic biographical information. Former Covenant archivist Timothy Johnson compiled a wonderful resource that I’ve used many times – I’d love to transition that data online and mix it with other datasets
Churches. A list of all Covenant churches of all time. Ideally, this would include information such as location, date of founding, etc.
Dates. This is pretty easy – link all of these events to a standard calendar.
Events. Catalog covenant events like CHIC, Midwinter, the Annual Meetings, etc.
These would be the different data sets – at least the ones I’m currently imagining – and they would be linked by different connections. I’ve done a little dreaming and research about different taxonomies and schemas but am having a hard time (1) determining what schema/structure makes the most sense and (2) what the technical challenges would be in implementing such a thing.
Additionally, there is the question about how I would generate and manage these different datasets. I have a relatively complete lists of books…but in that process I realized how incomplete that list was and how arbitrary certain distinctions seemed in practice. For example, certain articles in The Covenant Quarterly were much more influential to Covenant life than certain books. Yet cataloging all the periodical – Covenant Quarterly, Covenant Companion, weekly newspapers! – seems like an overwhelming and daunting task but ultimately one that would be very beneficial.
I’m going to spend sometime in the next few days exploring other examples of linked data set so that I get a better sense of how these things can related, what relationships already exist, and what tweaks I would need to make locally.
I’m imagining both a site where these different entities are linked to each other (much like my current sites in Omeka) but also where the user could browse and filter so as to ask relatively complex questions and get back hard data in response. For example, a list of pastors that served at a given church, list of churches started in a certain decade, books written by North Park grads, etc. I think this falls squarely in the “digital humanities” ball park and I’m excited to continue thinking about it.
Used under CC license – https://flic.kr/p/8agsb6
Practical
I’m going to start building an omeka site that will import the Zotero for my thesis and create items for each book. This will also allow me to generate: a small set of names to begin thinking about people and some items to plot on a timeline (to see what features are available there). I think it will also be nice to get the data into a “better” format – i.e. a format where a limited amount of metadata is structured in such a way that it can move moved to a different system.
At this point, I’m thinking of these datasets much like tables in a database but I think there are alternatives (XML, JSON, etc.) that are worth exploring and a sample set of this size – and a project with no real consequences! – is a perfect test run.
I also think practically about how I will generate the datasets that I need to complete this project. That is a bit daunting but the raw data is available in the Covenant Yearbooks. Ideally, I’d build on existing works but that’s a start.
