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Historical Data at the Enslaved Conference

On March 8th and 9th, Michigan State University hosted a conference titled Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade. The conference brought together scholars using databases to research the lives of individuals connected to slavery and the slave trade. The list of presenters can be found here, and videos of the presentations can be found on the Matrix YouTube channel. Most presenters at the conference focused on the lives of enslaved people in the Americas as captured in archival sources. The two dominant geographic areas for this type of research included the United States and Brazil. Other presenters drew from archaeological methods to explore the material pasts of slavery. Oral history and biographies also featured as methodologies used to build databases. Two themes emerged early in the conference and persisted throughout the presentation sessions: First linking different types of data and second developing best practices for data collection and management.

Metadata, Metadata, Metadata

My project entails the creation of a digital library for the management and public outreach of archaeological cultural heritage. The initial work towards this goal has entailed the building a metadata scheme. That is, finding the right data to describe data. There are a number of factors that go into describing data, but the most important and obvious goal should be its usefulness. There are three things I have done so far that I think have helped to make my metadata scheme useful:

1. Researching established metadata schemes
2. Utilizing metadata schemes already in use for the collections.
3. Learning the collections management system, KORA, to better build my metadata scheme.

Established metadata schemes already exist to describe resources. Utilizing one or more of these uniform systems to describe data has many benefits. First, it makes it easier to compare and search through different collections from different organizations if the entities for describing those collections are the same. Secondly, it does some of the work for you by providing a useful list of possible terms to use that you may not have thought of. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, for example, provides standard metadata entities and their definitions for describing resources. These include 15 “core properties” such as contributor, coverage, creator, date, description, identifier, etc. These entities are included in my metadata scheme, especially for the description of documentary resources like articles, newspaper clippings, and journals.

Using established, international metadata schemes is an important way to clearly organize and describe your data in a way that can be compared and clearly understood. But it is also important to transfer data that is already in the books. These collections are already being managed, and as such, have established metadata describing these collections. Transferring data already on record into the digital library will be much easier if the entities from both systems are somewhat analogous. To that end, I am using entities from collections management software already being utilized on campus to influence my choice of entities and the organization of the metadata scheme. ARGUS is one such software system.

The organization of the metadata scheme is also being heavily influenced by KORA; the collections management software program I am utilizing to build the digital library. The structure of KORA is organized around projects, forms, pages, fields and records.  The project will likely contain many forms which will be equivalent to the individual collections within the digital library. The metadata scheme will then be put into pages which will contain fields where data can be entered. The pages and fields will be the metadata scheme. A record will be the actual data describing an object that has been entered into the metadata scheme. The goal for my next blog post is to better describe the actual organization of my metadata scheme after putting it into KORA.

Transforming Historical Data into Visualizations

A central component of my CHI project is working with historical data. The creation of a database from historical documents is a long and tedious process, so I have decided to use one already available online. A group of economic historians published the African Commodity Trade Database (ACTD) by working with the Rural Environment History Group at Wageningen University. One of their datasets includes more than nine thousand commodities exported from Africa from the early nineteenth century to World War II. I plan to build from their work by transforming some of their data into visualizations on a website. This process includes several decisions that will shape my final visualizations and the historical contextualization I will contribute to explaining them. I’ve described part of that process below by highlighting some of the decisions I’ve made in selecting which data to use.

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Africa’s Imperial Commodities

Europe’s exploitation of Africa is a common narrative in African history. Scholars continue to use archival records to investigate the movement of enslaved persons and commodities from Africa to the Americas and Europe. In the past ten years, scholars have also produced digital projects that enhance economic, social, and cultural studies related to the transportation of African slaves to the Americas. However, there remain few digital projects harnessing the possibilities of Africa’s commodity data. Economic historians of Africa, more so than others, have contributed to the collection and publication of product-based datasets. While some of them publish their data online, it remains in digital formats requiring knowledge of data analysis software. The goal of my CHI project, then, is to re-purpose the available data as part of interactive visualizations that facilitate access for students and scholars.

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Shaking Off the Dust: Building a Digital Library For My CHI Fellowship Project

The baffling amount of data in archaeological collections makes their management a daunting task. Subsequently, material culture can sit on shelves for years, collecting dust long after removing the original dirt of excavation. My project for the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellowship will attempt to address this issue by using KORA to build a digital library for the archaeological collections curated by the MSU archaeology department. KORA is a digital repository and publishing platform that I will use to facilitate easier management of collections and bring some of their unique cultural heritage into the public eye. The Schmidt Collection will be the first collection I attempt to do this with.

Walter L. Schmidt was an avocational archaeologist who collected a large number of artifacts from his farmland in southern Michigan. During the middle of the 20^th century, Schmidt discovered hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts ranging from Paleoindian to historic time periods. A detailed cataloging system describing these artifacts and where they were found on his land was developed.  Many newspaper clippings, correspondences with archaeologists and other documents associated with the collection of artifacts have likewise been saved. Walter Schmidt believed in the cultural value of these artifacts and the significance of his land as an archaeological site.

Mr. Schmidt had originally planned on preventing serious excavations on his land until professional archaeologists could begin excavating. Circumstances, however, did not allow. After passing away in the 1970s, land development in his area likely made the curated artifacts at MSU all that will come of Walter Schmidt’s effort. Since his passing, Walter’s collection has changed hands several times, luckily ending up here at the archaeology department. The loss of the Schmidt site and the lack of useful provenience data are tragic events, but the artifacts that were saved still have massive potential to inform us about our cultural heritage.

KORA will be the engine for unlocking the potential of the Schmidt’s artifacts and documents. This will require the development of a metadata scheme to describe these data. This includes descriptors such as catalog number, document type, site location, artifact type, etc. This is not an insignificant task. The scheme will have to be carefully constructed considering how I am attempting to also build a digital library for additional unknown archaeological collections in the future. After finishing this critical task, the metadata will have to be mapped into a KORA repository which will then allow me to enter the relevant data from the collection. This will be the essence of my project for the CHI fellowship.

But what about getting this information into the public eye? This goal of the project may be beyond the scope of the CHI fellowship. Fortunately, I will have the luxury of combining this project with my continued duties as the museum research assistant in the next academic year. This will allow me the time and resources to publish a digital image library also using KORA.  A major difference between a digital library and a digital repository is in how it makes our collections accessible to the public. A library will take the information I have entered into the repository and display it on a frontend website that will be accessible from the MSU anthropology department website.

There is more to making a collection accessible than building a frontend website, however. A digital library should go beyond displaying the simple metadata and tell a narrative. Consequently, a major goal will be to develop “digital exhibits” within the website which showcase an essay or research about particularly interesting artifacts or the collections themselves. It is my hope that digital exhibits will unlock the potential of these documents and artifacts for the public to see. This will involve quite a bit of effort to produce narratives worthy of engaging the public. Or I can make undergrads do that research for me. By that time, I am sure I will be willing to shoulder off some of the work. Either way, I hope to do my part to make interesting sources of cultural heritage like the Schmidt Collection more accessible, and hopefully shake off a bit of dust.

Kicking off the project

With the new semester kicking off, I am shifting my focus from practicing various digital tools and enhancing technical skills, to working on my own research project, depicting immigrant players on the German national football team since 1990. As I mentioned in my first CHI blog post, I’ve taken interest in how the sociological phenomenon of football influences German national identity. As one of the most popular sports in the world, football is more than just a sport that people watch and play in their leisure time. As a cultural product, football could represent the sprits of certain region as well as a country (nation). In the meanwhile, football also provides its audience a platform to express their emotions with their peers. Football received enormous attention during the World Cup every four years. World Cup attracts not only football fans, but also general population especially when their national team perform well. One of the reasons behind this collective fanaticism roots in the competition form of World Cup. Players fight for their own countries and people who share the same origin stand behind and cheer for them.

In recent years, some people pointed out that the German national football team is no longer “German” anymore. Statement as such triggers me to think what does it mean to be “German”. In my second post, I mentioned the dilemma Einstein had to face, where in Germany people identify him sometimes as “German scholar” and sometimes as “Swiss Jew”. His nationalities are interchangeable based on his academic performance. After nearly a century, the biased judgement of one’s nationality based on one’s performance remains the same. Özil, one of the most famous professional football players in the past five years, explicitly expressed the discrimination he experienced during his time playing for the German national football team. Writing this post provided me an opportunity to really get to know a player’s life trajectory, to try to understand why some players struggle to “fit in” the society even they are no different from other players besides their outlook. This process eventually helped me to make a decision on my project: studying players with immigrant backgrounds who play for the German national football team.

After settling in on the topic, I start to think about how can I make the knowledge I learned from the previous semester applicable for my own project. In my last post, I briefly mentioned that using mapping tools could help depict players’ heritage in a more intuitional way. After a few weeks of thinking, I finalized my research project Vision Document where I describe various aspects of this project, including project description, outcomes, functionality, Audience, etc. This project depicts and summarizes the personal profile of the players who played for the German national football team in the World Cup since 1990, with a specific focus on football players who have immigrant backgrounds. The end result of this project will be a website where audience could learn about the national football team members from 1990 to 2018, and read narratives of certain players, such as Özil, Boateng, etc. This research will ideally address and challenge the notion of an “un-German” national team, as multicultural identity has long been and will continue to be part of the team. As part of my doctoral dissertation “The German Football Team and National Identity,” this project will serve as the foundational function of presenting historical facts.

At the end of this blog post, I would like to say that writing blogs is beneficial for me in terms of figuring out what I want to present and how I could present my ideas. This writing process encourages me to consistently ask myself what my research interests are and how I could turn them into a presentable project with the help of the technologies I acquired through last semester. I am looking forward to working on this project and hopefully present the final website before the summer comes to Michigan.