Digital Collections of Material Culture
- June 10th, 2009
- Arden Kirkland
- Tags: costume, material culture, museum, pedagogy, union catalog
Hello, everyone! I’ve been reading over everyone’s posts and comments, and letting it all percolate – but today’s my day to finally post my own thoughts.
Here’s my original proposal:
“Digital collections of material culture – how to make them, share them, and help students actually learn something from them!
– “quick and dirty” ways for faculty to develop digital collections for the classroom, without giving up on metadata. For the recent workshop we held at Vassar, I’ve been working on demo collections (see grou.ps/digitalobjects/wiki/80338 ) to evaluate 8 different tools, including Omeka. In each, you can view the same 8 historic costumes and their metadata, with 43 jpeg images and 1 QTVR. I’m developing my work as a template, with support documentation, for others to use.
-how students can use digital collections and contribute to them, without requiring a huge technological learning curve, especially for students with non-traditional learning styles
-the potential of union catalogs”
Of course these issues cross over in many ways with issues that have already been posted. So, I’m not sure if this needs to be a session, or if it’s more about bringing this material culture perspective to other relevant sessions. That probably depends on how many other material culture people are coming – anyone?
Deep Digital Collections / The Thing-ness of Things
Projects that successfully represent 3D objects are still pretty rare. Current systems of image representation are not sufficient – 1 image per object is not enough. Artifacts also continue to defy controlled vocabularies and metadata schema. For example, one of my current projects involves studying a historic dress inside and out – I have over 100 detail images and complex data (see a sample blog post that shows the complexity of the object).
I’m working to create digital access to the Vassar College Costume Collection, our collection of historic clothing, with about 540 objects dating from the 1820’s to today. Just to clarify, in the field of costume history, the term “costume” refers to all clothing, not theatrical costume. For about 7 years I’ve been exploring different ways of digitizing this collection, giving students access to a database of the objects, and then sharing their research projects, in a variety of digital formats, as virtual exhibitions.
“Quick and Dirty” Classroom Tools / Low Tech Digital Humanities
In my demos, you can view the same 8 historic costumes and their metadata, with 43 jpeg images and 1 QTVR, in Omeka, CollectiveAccess, Greenstone, Luna Insight, ContentDM, VCat, Filemaker, Excel, and GoogleDocs.
My inquiry has developed beyond the initial comparison of different available tools, to explore a kind of “division of labor” in the process. My approach has been very much on the DIY side, but couched in a collaborative experience. I initially created my demos for a NITLE sponsored workshop at Vassar this past March (entitled “Digital Objects in the Classroom”). Our workshop emphasized the importance of collaboration, and we asked participating institutions to send teams of faculty, librarians, instructional technologists, and media specialists. Perhaps ironically, the demos have mostly been my own work (with wonderful help from Vassar’s Systems Administrator and Visual Resources Librarian). I continue to search for the perfect compromise – for faculty and students to be able to quickly and independently get resources both into and out of collections, while administrators feel comfortable with the security and maintenance of the technology involved.
Student Contributions
Even if you’re not working in a traditional academic setting, I encourage you to view your audience as students. We can use technology as part of a suite of pedagogical tools to provide differentiated instruction for different styles of learners. What I imagine is a way for students to add to the conversation in ways beyond tagging and commenting – to contribute their own images and research. Our work in the last couple of years has reinforced this in a backward kind of way. We envisioned a large grant might allow us to carefully photograph and catalog much of the collection, which we could then present to students (on a platter?). Such a grant hasn’t come through yet, but the students have kept on coming! So, each semester brings us a new project, with new research about some of the objects, new photographs that students have taken to support their research, new citations of and links to supporting references. And the database grows. And I wonder, if we did present the virtual collection to students on a platter, would they be as inspired to work with the objects doing their own research? Would it seem as fresh to them? We need to keep the focus on our students and not on technology for its own sake.
Union Catalogs / Federated Searches
For each of our collections we’re working hard to structure our metadata and to define controlled vocabularies. But most of the time we aren’t taking advantage of the sharing that structured metadata allows. Either collections aren’t having their data harvested, or if they are, they’re going into giant collections like OAIster where it can be hard to find them. We need more union catalogs for material culture objects that are oriented for specific disciplines. By harvesting for a more specific kind of union catalog, we can transcend the “dumbing down” of data for Dublin Core standards and create variations that allow for richer data in each of our fields. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but building on Dublin Core or VRA or CDWA can really benefit our specific fields. For collections that have a strong visual component, some form of image needs to be a part of what is harvested and shows up in the federated search.
I look forward to reading your comments – and to meeting you all in person later this month!
June 12th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Arden, these are great ideas. The material culture perspective is a really important intervention into digital humanities work. How do we digitally empower visitors to have intimate experiences of objects? How can we represent artifacts online? These are questions museum folks are also working on. I look forward to talking about this soon!
June 14th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Now that a lot of smartphones are coming with digital compasses, GPS, and acceleratometers built in, we need to be giving more thought to exploring the application of augmented reality in the digital humanities. Here is some background info:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
Just imagine adapting the Google Earth app for the iPhone to objects and artifacts in museums. Just by tillting and rotating their phone, a person could view the object from all angles, zoom in for closer looks, or take a virtual walk through the museum.
If this kind of rich visualization was available for this costume project, students just might become more interested in tagging the virtual objects, which could help speed up (but not replace) the cataloging process, and contributing in other ways to the project.
I have also heard good things about this award-winning open-source software platform for archivists:
www.archiviststoolkit.org/
You might find it useful for data standardization and customized search.
For some of the latest discussion of open-source alternatives for union catalogs, check out the following links:
altpress.slcpl.org/unioncatalogsoftwareoptions
seattle-zine-unconference.wikispaces.com/Union+Catalog+Sampler
June 14th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Last comment disappeared. Here are links and brief comments:
3D visualization ideas for digital humanities (which are increasingly possible on smartphones):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
Prize-winning software that could help with data standardization and custom searching:
www.archiviststoolkit.org/
Union catalogs:
seattle-zine-unconference.wikispaces.com/Union+Catalog+Sampler
altpress.slcpl.org/unioncatalogsoftwareoptions
June 14th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Now that a lot of smartphones are coming with digital compasses, GPS, and acceleratometers built in, we need to be giving more thought to exploring the application of augmented reality in the digital humanities. Here is some background info:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
Just imagine adapting the Google Earth app for the iPhone to objects and artifacts in museums. Just by tillting and rotating their phone, a person could view the object from all angles, zoom in for closer looks, or take a virtual walk through the museum.
June 14th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
If this kind of rich visualization was available for this costume project, students just might become more interested in tagging the virtual objects, which could help speed up (but not replace) the cataloging process, and contributing in other ways to the project.
June 14th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
I have also heard good things about this award-winning open-source software platform for archivists:
www.archiviststoolkit.org/
You might find it useful for data standardization and customized search.
June 14th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
For some of the latest discussion of open-source alternatives for union catalogs, check out the following links:
altpress.slcpl.org/unioncatalogsoftwareoptions
seattle-zine-unconference.wikispaces.com/Union+Catalog+Sampler
June 14th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Sorry for the fragmented comments. It was the only way I could get around the spam filters.
June 16th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Sterling – thanks for all the links – sorry you had to work to get them past the spam filter!
These are all really interesting – but I specifically wanted to respond to the idea of augmented reality/mixed reality. I can imagine the type of iphone app you describe would really supplement, and in some cases be superior to, a visit to a physical exhibition, where objects are often behind glass in dim light and can only be seen from one angle. Approaching this idea, Drexel and Cornell both have very successfully used QTVR for costume. The eAnthro sites from the University of Texas at Austin are also doing this with bones, and KMODDL at Cornell is doing this with kinematic models.
When all of those sites were presented at our workshop on Digital Objects at Vassar last March, we also heard about some exciting projects that take these ideas to new levels.
In my realm of costume history, I’m very excited about a project Kathi Martin (Drexel University) is working on (and trying to get funding for). In costume history, one of our laments is that the artifacts we work with are far to fragile to be worn, so they function as static objects on display – very different from how clothing follows the moving body in real life. But Kathi’s working with some software developers who are combining flat clothing patterns with animation – so you can see clothing on a moving virtual model. I’d love to have students making realistic avatars of themselves and then “trying on” clothing from 400 years ago. For the last few years there has been some interest in Second Life at Vassar, and given the thriving fashion world there (so I hear), I thought that might be a potential space to view historic fashions on (animated) moving bodies – but I was turned off by Second Life’s proprietary nature – and steep learning curve for users (students). I had a feeling that better stand alone tools would evolve – and sure enough, Kathi’s working on one!
On a different note, Hod Lipson from Cornell University talked about 3D printing as a part of his presentation. We know that many students benefit from hands on interaction with 3D objects, but many schools don’t have access to models that students can work with. Digital surrogates can help to fill that gap, but ideally they are combined with at least a few actual 3D objects for students interaction. Hod’s working on a project for educators to share their virtual models, which others can then download and “print” out their own model.
Both of their presentations really helped me to focus my attention on the 3D, sensory characteristics of the objects I’m working with. For now, that’s taking a non-digital form for me, as I work with fabric and paper to recreate the flat pattern of a costume, which I then will digitize so that anyone can reproduce it. But not long from now, my students will be able to visualize the construction and motion of objects through animation and 3D printing!
June 17th, 2009 at 11:44 am
I’m also interested in hearing more about how material culture scholars are using digital collections in ways that are different than more textually-based scholarships. Sometimes I feel that people see the IMLS DCC as a big stock photo site (if they see it at all) to locate illustrations that compliment their texts – but not as a place to do focused research of the materials themselves. There are lots of good reasons for this from our side – the early phases of the project focused more on the challenges of aggregation and less on providing services on top of those aggregations.
The Sheet Music Consortium (digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/) is probably one of the better examples of a specialized harvesting network. I’d say that OAIster was always more about testing out the OAI protocols, and I don’t think that good balanced collection development was ever their plan.
I do think there is a place for the kind of specialized repositories (and metadata schema) that you mention, but I worry that they would just be building on the foundations of old content and disciplinary silos. We’re hoping that Opening History (imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/history) can be a place to find a broad spectrum of collections of different types that is narrower in scope than OAIster (see the Collection Development policy here: is.gd/14yNu).
The other question is whether more finely tuned standards are better or worse for large scale aggregations. One one hand, the simplicity of Dublin Core means that it is locally interpreted in extraordinarily creative ways. This makes reliably bringing resources together in useful ways (more than just search and browse) more difficult than you’d think. Maybe more tailored approaches for particular communities would help, but they could breed even further challenges to bringing things together (e.g. did we *really* need two similar standards for art historical materials? I know there’s long and interesting story there…)
Well, plenty more where this came from…look forward to continuing the discussion at Camp!
June 20th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Arden, this sounds like a fascinating topic. Two things crossed my mind as I read your post and the comments.
1.) In the absence of a grant supporting the “collection on a platter” and in the presence of enthusiastic work being generated by and for students, have you all considered harnessing their efforts into a carefully-constructed digitization initiative so that the students actually do all that work themselves? Seems like you’re close to doing so, but I wasn’t sure if it had been formally laid out.
2.) WRT to the idea of modeling cloth digitally and Kathi Martin’s work at Drexel, I might suggest getting in touch with folks at (believe it or not) Pixar Animation Studios. In a chapter on the production of Monsters, Inc. in The Pixar Touch: the Making of a Company (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), author David A. Price wrote:
Maybe you or Prof. Martin can get in touch with Kass, Baraff, or Witkin to learn more about what they’ve been doing with Fizt and the realistic digital modeling of cloth. Monsters, Inc. was from 2001, so they’ve probably made significant strides since then.
June 28th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
[…] today at THAT Camp was on material culture (led by my friend Arden Kirkland – see her blog post and […]
February 1st, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Here is the page in the THATCamp wiki about our session on Material Culture.