Humanities Data Management (LIB 410), spring 2023, University of Oregon Instructor: Kate Thormhill GE: Michele Pflug
Course Description: "This course provides students with theoretical and practical experience in collecting, processing, archiving, and publishing humanities data (images, video, sound, text, maps, etc.) gathered from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). With the goal of building thematic digital collections as researchers, students will learn digital methodologies focusing on the technical, legal, ethical, and social aspects of working with humanities research data throughout its curation lifecycle. This includes hands-on experience finding, assessing, organizing, and reformatting data; creating and remediating descriptive metadata; evaluating and determining copyright and licensing; writing a data management plan using the standards set by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and sharing thematic research digital collections using GitHub and the open- source platform CollectionBuilder"
Project Contributers: Claire Matucan, Regan Robinson, Daveena Williams, and Jackson Scharf
Asian Heratige in Oregon Throughout History Description: A digital thematic collection created by Regan Robinson, Daveena Williams, Jackson Scharf, and Claire Matucan. Our digital collection focuses on the immigration of Asian populations to Oregon from 1850 to 1980, with a focus on primary sources to help narrate the important and complex story of Asian immigration during a century of turmoil for these populations in America. Included in our collection are photographs, letters, artifacts, art, legal documents, newspaper articles, and more to formulate a thematic and chronological history of these vast and diverse populations within Oregon. We consciously chose to focus on a more broad population as we feel it’s important to acknowledge the histories of all Asian communities as important historical events rooted in racism and xenophobia had massive effects on Asian populations in particular. We seek to shed light on these events and their impacts on the work and lives of the populations in which we are researching. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was an extremely important event impacting Asian communities in Oregon and internationally. The act initiated an absolute 10-year ban on immigrants coming from China, despite this, the act has had massive impacts on all Asian immigrants due to racism and prejudice that targeted all Asian populations. With this project, we hope to shed light on these underrepresented populations and their contributions to culture and the overall development of Oregon as many of the Asian immigrants that arrived here worked in mines, factories, and assisted in the growth of cities across the state. Repository Link
Data Managment Plan: Throughout the course of creating our thematic digital collection we accumulated mostly images of artifacts, documents, and photographs all in the form of jpegs and jpgs. In total we collected 27 objects varying in size from 33 KB to 6.95 MB. Our metadata was transformed into CSV files so it could be easily uploaded into Github. We intend to share our data for educational and research purposes under the correct copyright laws. We managed our data by creating multiple sites for them to be shared between group members. We had copies of our object jpegs/jpgs in addition to our metadata in our group Sharepoint, our individual Dropboxes, Exel, GoogleDrive, and in our own personal folders. We also standardized and organized our data by following the Metadata Application Profile standards, and standardized file naming conventions so we could easily find and access our data. We created archived pages with the wayback machine, of all the original sites in which we found our objects. The archived pages ensure information is preserved for future use. We then published the archived pages onto our Collection Builder site. DMP Page