Dot Porter Digital

Today was the Day of Digital Humanities 2014, and I spent it blogging on the DayofDH main site. My day was spent in a seminar on medieval manuscripts, which as it turns out is a really fitting way to spend this day.

Link to my DayofDH site

The individual posts:

• Understanding the Medieval Book
• Starting the Day
• Kalendarium
• Overhead cameras are fabulous
• Books of Hours

Last week I figured out how to batch-download MODS records from the NYPL Digital Collections API (http://api.repo.nypl.org/) using my limited set of technical skills, so I thought I would share my process here.

Continue reading “How to get MODS using the NYPL Digital Collections API”

A: You don’t! But you can provide a substantial introduction to the concept of the TEI, and explain how it functions.

On June 4 I participated in PhillyDH@Penn, a day of workshops and unconference sessions sponsored by PhillyDH and held in my own beloved Van Pelt-Dietrich Library on the University of Pennsylvania campus. I was sick, so I wasn’t able to participate fully, but I was able to lead a one-hour Introduction to TEI. I aimed it at absolute beginners, with the intention to a) Give the audience an idea of what TEI is and what it’s for (to help them answer the question, Is TEI really what I need?) and b) explain enough about the TEI so they will know a bit of something walking into their first “real” (multi-hour, hands-on) TEI workshop. I got a lot of good feedback, so hopefully it did its job. And I do hope to have the opportunity to follow this up with more substantial workshops.

Slides (in PDF format) are posted here.

EDIT: Need to add that these slides owe a ton to James Cummings, with whom I have taught TEI and to whom I owe much of what I know about it!

I have a new job! As of April 1, I am the Curator, Digital Research Services, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Special Collections Center, University of Pennsylvania.

Now say that five times fast.

In this role, I’m responsible for the digital initiatives coming out of SIMS. I’m also a curator for the Schoenberg Manuscript collection (as are all SIMS staffers in the SCC), and I manage the Vitale Special Collections Digital Media Lab (Vitale 2). It’s also clear that I will have some broad role in the digital humanities at UPenn, although that part of the job isn’t so clear to me yet. I’m the inaugural DRS Curator, so there is still a lot to be worked out although after three weeks on the job, I’m feeling really confident that things are under control.

I report to Will Noel, Director of the SCC and Director of SIMS. Will may be best known as the Project Director for the Archimedes Palimpsest Project at the Walters Art Museum. Will is awesome, and I’m thrilled to be working for him. I’m also thrilled to be working at the University of Pennsylvania, in a beautiful brand new space, in the great city of Philadelphia.

I plan to blog more in this new position, so keep your eyes here and on the MESA blog.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything; I just haven’t been doing anything here.

In June, Tim Stinson at NCSU and I were awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance, MESA, and since we started preparing metadata for indexing in, oh, about mid-September, all of my technical energy has been going into that work. MESA is a node of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), and follows the model of scholarly federation spearheaded by NINES and followed by 18thconnect, using Collex as its underlying software support.

What does it involve? It involves taking metadata already created by digital collections or projects (like, for example, the Walters Art Museum, Parker on the Web, or e-Codices), mapping their fields out to the Collex and MESA fields, and then generating RDF that follows to the Collex guidelines. It’s these three collections (and, just in the last week and with a ton of help from Lisa McAulay at UCLA, the St. Gall Project) that I’ve spent the most time on, and here are some key things I’ve learned so far that might be helpful for people considering adding their collections to MESA (or to any of the other ARC nodes, for that matter)… or for that matter, for anyone who is interested in sharing their data, any time ever.

1. If your metadata is in an XML format, put unique identifiers on all the tags. Just do it.
2. Follow best practices for file and folder naming. In this case, best practice probably just means BE CONSISTENT. My favorite example for illustrating consistency is probably the Digital Walters at the Walters Art Museum. One of the reasons that it’s a great example is that their data (image files and metadata) has been released under Open Access licensing, with the intention that people (like me) will come along and grab them, and work with them. What this means is that everything was designed with this usage in mind, so it’s simple, and that all their practices are well-documented, so it’s easy to take them and run without having to figure a lot out. Their file and folder naming practices are documented here.
3. Be thoughtful about how you format your dates. Yeah, dates are a big deal. The metadata of one of the projects (I won’t say which one) had dates formatted as, e.g., “xii early-xiii late (?)”, and with no ISO (or an other even slightly computer-readable) version in, e.g., an attribute value. I ended up mapping every individual date value to a computer-readable form. As always, I figure there was a better way to do it, but at the time… well, it took a while, but in the end it did what I needed it to do. If you are in the process of setting up a new project, consider including computer-readable dates in your metadata. Because Collex/MESA includes values for both date label and date value, you can include both a computer-readable date to be used for searching, and a human-readable version, which may have more nuance than can be included in a computer readable value. For example, LABEL: xii early-xiii late (?); VALUE: 800,900.
4. Is whatever you are describing in English? Great! If it’s not, find someplace in your metadata to indicate what language it is in. Use a controlled vocabulary, such as the ISO 639-2 Language Code List, and as with dates it helps to include a computer-readable code in addition to a human-readable version. (This is less important for MESA, as we can map between the columns in the ISO 639-2 Language Code List, but it’s a good general rule to follow)
5. You can actually do a lot with a little. In the past few weeks the metadata I’ve worked with range from really amazing full manuscript Descriptions (in TEI P5) from the Walters Art Museum to very simple and basic descriptions in Dublin Core from e-Codices. Although the full descriptions provide more information (helpful for full-text searching), the simple DC records, assuming they include the basic information you’d want for searching (title, date, language, maybe incipits) are just fine. So don’t let a lack of detail put you off from contributing to MESA!

I would also encourage you to release your data under an Open Access license (something from the Creative Commons), and to make your data easy to grab (either by posting everything online, as the Walters Art Museum has done, or by releasing it through an OAI provider, as e-Codices has done).

I had some time tonight to figure out how to get the manuscript-level records into Omeka.

I’d already worked out the (very simple) XPath needed to pull out the few bits of information I wanted from the TEI msDesc: siglum, title, URL to the Walters data, BookReader URL, and URL to the first thumbnail image in the ms (which I’m just using as an illustration, a placeholder for the full ms). This evening I did the final checks to make sure the output was right, then just ran the XSLT against all the msDesc files and created .csv files for each one (there’s an Omeka plug-in that will accept CSV input, in order to bulk ingest metadata and files). I used the “insert file contents” function in TextWrangler (bless that program) to pull all of the individual CSV rows into a single document, then ingested that into Omeka. There were a few bugs, of course, but generally it was smooth. I’ve made a few of the records live, just those that already have illumination records tagged in Omeka too. What this means is that you can now go to the Omeka site, go to “Browse Items by Tag” (http://www.dotporterdigital.org/omeka/items/tags), and click on one of the larger tags (each ms and illumination is tagged with the ms siglum; the more illustrations there are, the larger the tag will appear in the browse list). At the moment the first entry in the list will be the record for the manuscript, followed by the record for the illuminations… although I don’t know if that’s just because the manuscript records are newer.

I would like to include each illumination in the ms records (HasPart) and the ms in the illumination records too (IsPartOf), but I am not certain that’s something I’ll be able to do programmatically. Anyway, I think that is the next thing on my list. That and tagging all of the other illumination records with the siglum (so they will be browseable with the manuscript).

This evening I spent some time thinking about the best way to organize the Digital Walters data into Omeka.

I’ve already experimented with bulk ingesting all of the illuminations (pulling all the decoDesc tags from the TEI manuscript descriptions, and creating a record in Omeka for each one). You can see these in the Omeka instance (although it’s not very pretty). I realized that, as fun as that experiment was, in order for it to be useful I need to take a step back and reevaluate how best to move forward.

I created a record for one of the manuscripts: http://www.dotporterdigital.org/omeka/items/show/2618. It’s basic, including the Title (and the siglum under Alternative Title), links to the manuscript’s home on the Digital Walters site and its Bookreader version on this site (both under Description), and under Has Part, links to an illumination record in Omeka, an illumination that appears in that manuscript.

I want to do a few things to start out:

1) Create one record for each manuscript. I will do this using Omeka’s CSV plug-in… I’ve figured out how to pull all of the information I need from each of the TEI MS Description files, now I need to figure out how to pull all of it into one file and make that file a CSV file. Ithink I can use Xinclude to do that but I need to try more than I had time to tonight.

2) I would like to have a way to automatically attach the illumination records that are already in Omeka to the new manuscript records. The link that’s in the test record is one I added by hand, but Omeka has a collection hierarchy and I need to play with that to see if there might be something in there that can be used for this purpose. What I fear is that the hierarchy is only at the full level – that is, I can say that all of the illuminations are under all of the manuscripts, but I can’t say that some subset of the illuminations are under some particular manuscript. I will need to find out more!

It’s good to be back in the site. I still have an article to finish (and another already started) but I would like to make some progress on the Omeka catalog in the next month or so.