Author: moriahstewart

For most of my artifacts it was easy to map because it had the general location of West Chester State Teachers College. For example, the news articles I published. There was one other one that took place at Temple University for a Temple vs. Bucknell football game. Which I assumed because the ads in the program had Philadelphia street addresses. Another artifact was a program for a theatre in Philadelphia. The other artifacts however did not give a narrow enough location for me to figure out where to place them yet. For example, one of my artifacts is a cutout of a womans head promoting an ice cream shop/brand. All it says is the name of the shop and “excellent french ice cream.” Therefore, I don’t think I will be able to map that one as there seems to have been more than one location. Another one I think might be unmappable is a program for a ballet recital. It says, “State Teachers College presents Ruth Page and Frank Parker” with the date of the show being below. Other than that, I cannot seem to find anything else on the program that hints at where exactly the show takes place.

This week I enjoyed being able to look at how students that attended the same college experienced it so much differently. During this week’s classes we became more comfortable with Omeka and learned how to properly enter metadata. Prior to this I was still not 100% sure about what they were or how they worked, but now feel like I have a clear understanding of both. We now know that metadata isn’t the information itself, but rather the information about the digital data. Entering metadata isn’t as hard as I had previously thought and when already given the artifact information it is quite simple to complete. Because of this we are able to search things using keywords to find a variety of things from images to music. It also allows us to upload historic artifacts so they can be searchable for others, such as what we’re doing in class. Now that I fully understand, I realized this is not my first experience with metadata. Last semester I took a Plan class which covered urban planning and geospatial data. For a project we had to use ArcGIS software, GIS meaning geographic information systems, which is filled with geospatial metadata. This is how we were able to access any maps, location based data, and location based statistics for any state, city, or county in America. One thing I wondered afterwards is how our phones suggest ads and content based on our algorithms. When we share user data with apps are we basically sharing metadata? Such as our location to suggest specific places or the times you are most active. It may be something completely different, but I was wondering if there was a connection there other than the metadata from things we post.