Week 6

11 (M 8 Oct)            Conversation with guest speaker: Robert Parthesius (Dhakira/Heritage Studies, NYUAD) “Authorized heritage nominations” and our Wikimedia visual content creation.  

Please have your 10 images ready each and uploaded to the course drive.  Be prepared to discuss the pros and cons of the inclusion of your images in Wikimedia. 

      

12 (W 10 Oct)            Creating the structure for a draft of our own exhibits

Guidelines for planning an Omeka exhibit here and here.

  • What is/are the source(s) of your data?
  • Are they already curated in their original location?
  • Are the data sources open for reuse? Can you find an explicit CC license? If not, are you able to contact the organization to obtain permission for non-commercial reuse?
  • Where can you located the metadata about your objects?
  • What additional value are you bringing to them?
  • How does your site design add to that meaning?

Week 7

13 (M 15 Oct)             

Open discussion about your draft Omeka exhibits 

Please upload at least 5 items to your Omeka site. We will sketch out by hand what the site might look like and plan its execution.  You will choose an initial research subject based on what is available in open cultural data.   Why?  Where?  What?  How? You might want to consult these tips as well as these.

And this guide to gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web.  Or this one.

 

14 (W 17 Oct)             Neatline and building a map interpretation using your items

For today’s class, have 5 items uploaded into your Omeka site and describe them as fully as possible. 

 

Fall Break 22-26 October!  Take your camera with you where ever you go and take images for your visual data curation exercise.  

Over the break, please increase your wikimedia data to 20 images and your items in your personal exhibit to 10. 

 

15 (Sat 27 Oct) 4-8pm  Meet outside the Welcome Center. Trip to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. You do not need a ticket. Transportation is provided. 

In preparation: Remember that we are going to the Louvre Abu Dhabi as a Community-Based Learning event, that is, an official event from NYUAD.  Please dress respectfully as you would in any event in Abu Dhabi off campus. 

Before we leave, please download the Louvre Abu Dhabi – Guide app for Android or IPhone.  Make sure that you bring (or borrow) a pair of headphones so that you can listen to the multimedia guide without disturbing others.  You will have a blog posting to write about the visit, so feel free to bring a small pad to take notes on, or to take notes on your phone. 

Feel free to explore the app, especially the “EXPLORE” section to see the way that the museum objects form the center of the larger narrative of the museum.  Set up this way, the experience of the LAD could be very solitary–feel free to stop, take off your earphones and talk with other members of the class and continue later. 

Blog 2:  Please write a blog posting in which you discuss your trip to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. You might frame your answer by thinking about some of the following questions:  What did the app add to the experience of the art museum? Did it distract you? Did it add to your experience? What was the relationship of the textual content in the app and the content in the museum? If you have been to the LAD before, did the experience of the museum change with the app? If so, how? If you used the ipad guide before, was it different? Are there differences in the curation of objects in the app and in the various galleries? Are the app objects somehow exemplary?  What would an app with all the objects in the LAD look like? Would it be possible? What would be needed to arrange the experience?” (due 10 November)

Week 8

When returning from Fall Break, please make sure that you have 25 images in your personal folder for consideration of WikiMedia creation.  For a selection of them, go to Wikipedia and suggest articles in which they might be reused.  What tags (categories, sub-categories) would they be given?  (due 6 Nov)

 

15 (M 29 Oct)           Review of individual visual data curation “Having Reuse in Mind”

We will be asking questions about the quality, appropriateness, interest, “tagability” and potential discoverability of the visual data we are each curating for open reuse on Wikimedia.  

 

16 (W 31 Oct)           Guest speaker: Nora Barakat (ACS/History, NYUAD)  “Who was Lorimer? What is Lorimer?”

Computer-assisted close reading the text of Lorimer.  AntConc and Voyant Tools

Map of the places we will search through today.  The 9 text files for the exercise in class are in the data folder in the class Drive. 

Blog 3:  Review a handful of your favorite Omeka exhibits. What makes them (un)interesting to you? Be sure to cite specific examples– even include screenshots if possible.  How can you adapt what they do well to your topic of interest?   You might want to consult this list of projects, this one or this one. (due: 20 November)

Week 9

17 (M 5 Nov)              Introduction to the Writing Center

                                     Forming groups for collective exercise and choosing topics

                                     We will take all of the geographical sections (zipped in the data folder in Drive) and analyze them using AntConc (Voyant tools won’t handle 818 files efficiently).  What are major themes that could be used for an exhibit?  You can use the online edition to guide yourself if reading in AntConc is too complex.   Searching for fish* fisher* date*

Possible exhibits: animals/livestock (the geographic section has a large amount of information concerning the numbers of animals in specific locations–perhaps with maps); tribes of the region ; islands; mountains; regional crops; mud and sand; pearls, pearl diving and pearl boats; fishing; date groves, orchards and plantations ; irrigation, wells and canals; ports; religious sects; telegraphs; etc.

 

18 (W 7 Nov)              Introducing Omeka S –  Collective work on exhibit

Introducing the open source version of CurateScape: Omeka for mobile phones.

 

Blog 4: Based on what collections and on what topics will you be creating your individual web-based exhibit?  What specific aspect is most interesting for you to research and “curate”?  What kinds of objects do you want to include-image, sound, maps? Consider this blog posting a general presentation of your individual exhibit, its challenges and general goals. (due 24 November)