Walking Harlem: Creating an Archive and Working with Metadata (10/22)

This class day will be devoted to the first part of our second in-class project, Walking Harlem. The class will divide up into 5 groups to cover the 5 tours suggested in Walking Harlem: The ultimate guide to the cultural capital of Black America. During class, we will enter the content of the tours into an Omeka Curatescape project, create and assign tags, and find images for each stop.

To do before class:

  • In the #general channel on Slack, share a stop on your assigned tour from the Walking Harlem book along with an image related to that stop that is covered by fair use. 

Readings due:

Projects to Review

Aims of the Walking Harlem Project

Through the Walking Harlem project, students will gain:

  1. Experience with digital storytelling and public DH as method
  2. Experience with metadata creation and tagging
  3. Practice finding and citing images
  4. Experience with creative commons and copyright
  5. Experience working with historical maps
  6. Exposure to working with collections and creating exhibits
  7. Exposure to Omeka and Curatescape
  8. Exposure to georectifying maps using Mapwarper
  9. Exposure to raster files with Mapbox

During Class on 10/22, we will:

  1. Create Items in Omeka
    1. Create items for each of the stops on the tours (as you add an item, mark your name by it in the Items List spreadsheet)
    2. Create text and descriptions for the items in Omeka
      1. You should quote directly from the book for the description
      2. How to cite: Taborn, Karen Faye. Walking Harlem : The Ultimate Guide to the Cultural Capital of Black America. Rutgers University Press, 2017, pp. [pages].
    1. Add location information for each of the stops
    2. Begin assigning tags to the items (tags list to work with)
      1. What will users find important about these sites?
      2. What do you want users to come away with?
      3. What is appropriate to use as a tag, and what isn’t?
  2. Images
    1. Learn how to find and cite images
      1. How to cite: Creator’s Last name, First name. (Or username if you can’t find their full name) “Title of the image.” Title of the website where you found it,  Publication date, URL.
      2. If you can only find a username or handle for the creator, use that instead of their name.
    1. Places to find images:
      1. Digital Public Library of America – https://dp.la/ 
      2. NYPL Digital Collections – https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/
      3. Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
      4. Creative Commons Image Search – https://search.creativecommons.org
      5. Internet Archive – https://archive.org/
    2. Begin searching for and adding images to items in Omeka
      1. Add the citation for the image to the item description
      2. To consider when finding an image: What would Taborn want users to see at this stop? (check the description) ; How can we recreate (to the best of our ability) the physical experience of being at this stop? ; What does the digital platform enable us to show that the physical tour outlined in Walking Harlem would not?
  3. Continue adding material to the site. By the end of the class session, we want to ensure AT LEAST that all of the items (tour stops) have been created. Once the items are all created, then 1 group member for each tour needs to create the Tour in Omeka and add all of the items to that tour.