Author: marissavilanova

When we first started discussing mapping this week, I never realized how much research goes into finding the correct location of the artifact. I was under the impression the item either had an obvious location or no location of importance at all. While figuring out the locations of my items during class though, I realized that one needs to research to make sure it is accurate as possible. The one item in particular that required more research was a ticket to a football game a Temple University Stadium. When you search that on Google now, Lincoln Financial Field shows up, however I knew it might have been wrong to put that address because the street names on the ticket did not match up with the address for Lincoln Financial Field. In order to find the correct address, I searched “Temple University Stadium 1949”, which led to a Wikipedia page about the 1949 Temple Owls football team, which then had a link to the Temple Stadium embedded in the page and took me to the wiki page that had address I needed, which is not the same as where the current Temple University Stadium is located according to Google. Just this one example shows how important it is to fact check your addresses because locations are always changing. There were some items that I was unsure what location to put because I know it has one, but I’m unsure if the items provides enough information for me to figure out the location. These items consist of Joyce Murrow’s room inspection card, as I’m unsure which dormitory she was living in, and a Lafayette vs Gettysburg basketball game program, because it doesn’t state where the games were held. Some items also may hold no location at all, like a tissue paper bow in Joyce Murrow’s scrapbook. From what I’ve gathered, it’s something she or a friend made, and has no location tied to it all from what I can gather. By looking at the map of collective metadata, I noticed most of it was centralized in one place for both Joyce and Beryl, which is what to be expected. I did notice that Joyce had a few items on the West coast, which could allude to her having traveled there or a friend brought them back for her. Beryl on the other hand stayed basically just in the North East. I also noticed there were no physical objects mapped, which could either mean a lot of the objects could be artwork the two created or it’s hard to ascertain location from objects because they don’t provide as much information as text without more knowledge.

Throughout this week, we’ve been working in the digital humanities for the first time, at least for me. During this experience, I’ve been thinking back to the first week of class when we were trying to define what the digital humanities really is. I was brought back to one definition I got on the website that basically stated that DH wasn’t a real area of study. If I’m being honest, I was beginning to think along this track of mind during the beginning of week when we first started working in Omeka. We were really just documenting artifacts through photos and descriptions, which one could say is simply just a means of research for say the humanities in this case as well look at a West Chester student from years past. However as the week went on, especially after Wednesday’s class, I began to return to the idea that the digital humanities really is it’s own area of study. The work that goes into documenting these artifacts isn’t as simple as one might think. There is a certain method that comes to documenting artifacts in terms of how we describe them, date them, photograph them, etc. Learning the process that goes into documenting artifacts like we are doing is an area of study in its own right as there is so much to learn in order to be beneficial to education and research. It’s not just the process that makes it an area of study either, but also how this process itself will be a learning source and even an artifact itself in the future. People in the digital humanities will look back at this field in some years to see how the field as changed in terms of documenting artifacts and that will become a research topic of its own.

When metadata first came up in this class, I would be lying if I said it didn’t confuse me immensely at most. I think I was overthinking what it could possibly be, but by watching the intro to metadata video, I realize the definition of metadata isn’t the confusing part, but the application of it can be. Trying to figure out how to tag the subjects of an item takes a lot more thought then most would think. When I was coming up with the subjects for my own item in Omeka, a parking permit, I found myself overthinking if a subject was too similar to another or if it didn’t even describe my item correctly at all. This process sort of reminded me image descriptions, which is something I learned how to do in a digital publishing class I took a couple years ago. Similar to the process of inputting metadata, I think a lot of people would believe image descriptions are extremely easy, but they actually take a lot of thought. For people who don’t know, image descriptions are really just an explanation of what an image is depicting and it is coded into an image; it’s often something you will see on Twitter or other social media if the poster has used that future. When it comes to image descriptions, one has to realize what the purpose is for—people with vision impairments. Something I remember my professor specifically pointing out is that a descriptor like color is useless in an image description because it is useless to blind people who are the main users of this feature. When writing an image description, you really need to take the time to think about what is essential to describe and what is able to translate to the audience it is for, and I found metadata to follow the same criteria. When thinking of subject tags, you really need to think about the most important identifiers of your item and make sure the tags you do use are as accurate as possible so as not to confuse users who are looking for a specific subject.