Category: Lab

Mukurtu is a project and platform that empowers communities to manage, narrate, connect, label, and share their digital heritage materials, history, knowledge, and stories.

Mukurtu has several metadata fields that are unique to it in comparison with Omeka. The fields I found that were unique were Media Assets, Communities and Protocols, Category, Cultural Narrative, Traditional Knowledge, Traditional Knowledge Labels, Licensing Options, People, Transcription, Location Description, External Links, Collections, Community Records, and Book Pages. There were also a few that were not precisely labeled or described the same but seemed to be similar metadata fields between Omeka and Mukurtu. The field of coverage within Omeka covered the space and time of the items while in Mukurtu, it was separated into original date and original date description, geocode address, latitude, longitude, and location description. One of the fields in Mukurtu, Item sharing settings, seemed similar to the public checkbox when an item is added in Omeka but it had different access settings. Keywords in Mukurtu seemed similar to the tags in Omeka.

Omeka is very generalized and compared to Mukurtu, it does not have very many fields or places to really document details. I think in comparison, Mukurtu is more focused on the item, the cultural details about the item, and the cultures and communities. It has more categories and where Omeka combines metadata like time and space into a single field, Mukurtu separates it into a very specific location and time or has a text boxes for additional description.

Mukurtus metadata are media assets, communities and protocols, item sharing settings, category, creator, contributor, original date, original date description, cultural narrative, traditional knowledge, description, keywords, publisher, rights, traditional knowledge labels, licensing options, format, type, language, identifier, source, subject, people, transcription, geocode address, latitude, longitude, location description, and external links. Mukurtu empowers communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange digital heritage relevant to culture and ethically minded ways. Omeka uses Dublin Core metadata. Not all metadata in Mukurtu are in Omeka. Omeka had less metadata and do not have specific information on it.

This week’s lab consisted of exploring the Dublin Core metadata fields on the Omeka platform and comparing those to the Mukurtu platform metadata fields. The Mukurtu platform organized the metadata fields into major categories such as Essentials, Core, Rights and Permissions, Additional Metadata, and Relations. Mukurtu matched Dublin’s Core fields; however, there were many more specific fields that included: Communities and Cultural Protocols where each digital heritage item had to belong to at least one community; Item Sharing Settings for the Cultural Protocols; Categories which were high-level descriptive terms for Digital Heritage items; Cultural Narratives and Traditional Knowledge that are community specific; Keywords to make items more discoverable; Traditional Knowledge Labels that are non-legal, social and educational tags for indigenous communities; Licensing Options that specify how a work may be used; Community Records and Book Pages that allow multiple media assets to be presented within a specific Digital Heritage item as well as more specific metadata such as People, Transcription, Geocode Address, Latitude, Longitude, and Location Description. I can clearly see how Mukurtu caters to specific cultural communities with these additional metadata fields.

I believe that the Mukurtu platform assumes it users will have an abundance of very specific and unique cultural, social, and indigenous Digital Heritage items that some users may want to protect from public manipulation but may be shared within a specific community (which would explain the Communities and Cultural Protocols field). On the other hand, Omeka assumes that the Digital Heritage items will be accessed and shared by the public at large, which explains the more general and broad metadata fields.

There are two different DH projects that we looked at this week that I would be interested in doing, either a 3-D modeling project or a mapping project. The topic of my project would probably be an archaeological site, either related to the classical period or maritime archaeology.

The data I would need for these projects would depend on the type of project I ended up doing, although there is some overlap. In general, for either one of the projects, I would need academic journals and books, photographs, the locations of features in the site, historical texts related to the site, and several maps from different time periods. I could get some of this data through academic journals, other online sources, and the library.

Given what we have discussed in class so far, I am interested in looking at different ways to organize folklore for a particular culture or religious group.  Since this is such a broad area of study, I think it would be most fruitful (and least overwhelming) to focus on a specific group to maximize the amount of relevant material sourced.  I would like it to be a multimedia analysis that could include visuals, audio, and images …sort of like the DH project we looked at with the sounds and images.  Due to my interests and comfortability with topics I will most likely look at Celtic folklore and try and organize it in a way that the plethora of material is more easily accessible. The data required for this project would be pretty much any and everything that I can find.  I think that the more included in this project the more beneficial it will be to whoever is using it.  Folklore covers a lot of different mediums so anything that is accurate and relative to Celtic folklore I intend to include in the project. My initial thoughts on where to find the data would be the National Folklore Collection or accessible images…as long as they don’t cost $400 to use.

I am being completely honest when I admit that I was a little overwhelmed by the thought of writing my digital humanities essay. However, after reading the required resource from our class textbook (Drucker Chapter 1, Part B) this week, I felt a little more confident when the steps were outlined very clearly about how to approach a digital humanities project. There were also many different options for analyzing and presenting data in Miriam Posner’s online reference article “How Did They Make That?” Based upon all the references and resources, I think I would be most likely interested in creating a map or analyzing text for my essay. I enjoy working with maps and finding patterns in texts (searching for common words and phrases) seems straightforward.

I am a double major in Geography and Religious Studies, so subjects relating to these fields would be within my comfort zone. For example, I might be interested in mapping visitation patterns in the most popular national parks (Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Glacier, or Yosemite). Should I choose to analyze text for my essay, I would likely focus on the Bible as a reference. For example, maybe research texts related to biblical covenants or the influence of women in the Bible. I have worked with both of these subjects before and think it would be great to research these topics from a digital humanities perspective.

I am familiar with data relating to the national park system and would be able access websites for park visitation easily. I would be interested in seeing if there are any other resources for national park visitation outside of the government databases. I have used a few different Bible reference sites, but I now know, after collecting information in this course, that there is data in many different forms that I have not even thought about that would be helpful for this essay should I choose to go in the text analysis direction. I will be thinking about choosing a specific direction and clearly defining my topic.