Showing posts with label cultural heritage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cultural heritage. Show all posts
Friday, December 13, 2013
Fall Projects in Digital Archives
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Summer School
My summer involved a full set of research courses, including Museums & Library Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Researching Local Histories and the Summer Map Institute at NYPL. The workload was a bit heavy due to the fact that the MetMuseum course was not actually a two week course, as noted in the bulletin, but two weeks of seminar followed by a month of intensive research. Ultimately it was a great experience, working in three very different kinds of research: museum artifacts, local landmarks and maps.
NYC Garden Maps, a WordPress site on community gardening in New York City
My map project on NYC Garden Maps is done. I am editing the final deliverables for presentation here, including a walking tour of the Bloomingdale neighborhood on the Upper West Side and a MetMuseum exhibition guide. Look for these shortly.
Also, I spent the summer with my linked data team refining our paper on "Linked Data for Cultural Institutions," which has been accepted to ACM's 2013 SIGDOC conference. This has been a challenging and extremely rewarding experience and I thank my teammates and co-authors, Julia Marden, Carolyn Li-Madeo and Jeff Edelstein of Pratt Institute. I celebrated the end of an intense summer with two weeks in the Massachusetts Berkshires.
NYC Garden Maps, a WordPress site on community gardening in New York City
My map project on NYC Garden Maps is done. I am editing the final deliverables for presentation here, including a walking tour of the Bloomingdale neighborhood on the Upper West Side and a MetMuseum exhibition guide. Look for these shortly.
Also, I spent the summer with my linked data team refining our paper on "Linked Data for Cultural Institutions," which has been accepted to ACM's 2013 SIGDOC conference. This has been a challenging and extremely rewarding experience and I thank my teammates and co-authors, Julia Marden, Carolyn Li-Madeo and Jeff Edelstein of Pratt Institute. I celebrated the end of an intense summer with two weeks in the Massachusetts Berkshires.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Exhibit Review - “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter” at the NYPL
“The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter” at the New York Public Library covers the history of children’s literature from three centuries of items in the Library’s collection, and explores how children’s literature exposes society’s understanding of how a child learns and the social and moral priorities of children’s education at a given period of time.
The question asked in the first hall is “Are children born innocent or sinful?” The earliest books for children included reading primers from the early Eighteenth Century, reflecting Cotton Mather’s view that children’s books should reflect moral ideals. This idea contrasted with alternative views by John Locke, who felt that children needed stories that would delight and entertain, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose idea was that children should be given only the bare truth. The question “What should children read?” is woven throughout the remainder of the exhibit as we are taken through the Library’s collection of children’s books into the modern day.
The second gallery presented a sampling of books that represented an evolution of thinking about children’s literature, “From Rote to Rhyme.” Examples included Eighteenth Century, British publisher, John Newberry’s, readers and his thoughts on equal access to children’s literature; and the Dick and Jane series, which promoted whole word reading but was later criticized as presenting white, middle class American values and identity that did not represent the diversity of experience in the United States at the time. Other examples, such as Dr. Suess’ The Cat in the Hat and James Stephens’ Irish folk tale, Carl of the Drab Coat, represented departures from more rote styles of reading, featuring fun and adventure in the texts.
The next gallery explores national and ethnic identity with works from Noah Webster, who championed a uniform American spelling system, to state run publishers from Russia and China, Japanese manga style readers for Japanese-American children during the WWII internment and post-colonial French West Africa. Twentieth century approaches such as The Bank Street School and Maria Montessori’s teaching methodologies are also explored.
As the rise of public libraries in the late nineteenth century led to greater readership among the masses, more and more titles, including young adult series and materials specifically published for gift-giving appeared. The exhibit explores popular characters, such as Winnie the Pooh, showcasing the original stuffed animals that inspired the stories, as well as Beatrice Potter and the Nancy Drew series. A brief presentation of movie and toy tie-ins and the commercialization of children’s literature came next. While the current exhibit is primarily about the Library’s book collection, rather than TV shows, an exploration of the impact of audio and video on education would have been interesting, as the Library’s collection contains a collection of children’s media in addition to books. Perhaps that would be an entire exhibit unto itself.
Throughout the exhibit, the halls contain playful structures, representing featured stories, and included interactive features, such as audio, iPad presentations and hands-on manipulatives. The first of these, near “From Rote to Rhyme,” is a large display featuring Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and Jules Feiffer’s artwork. This interactive presentation includes a wall mural, a car that visitors can sit in and wheels where visitors can play with words from the story. In the next room, a display for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s Alice in Wonderland shows Alice’s neck comprised of a stack of books opening and extending toward the ceiling. A large gift box containing the Little Golden Book, The Pokey Little Puppy is located in a section on gift giving and a later room, a hedgerow represents Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. My favorite was the crown from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which was bright yellow on one side and dark fur on the other and had a doorway cutout of a wild thing.
It wasn’t until I had passed through these rooms and noticed these featured displays, however, that I tied the presentation of the book, The Phantom Tollbooth, in the second gallery to its interactive display. I recall originally thinking it odd that the book, The Phantom Tollbooth, was set off in a case by itself, though I understood it to be a representation of playful subversion of educational theories, which the gallery addressed. I went back to it to take a closer look. I realized that perhaps because I viewed the gallery beginning with the Newberry display instead of the Rote to Rhyme case that a jump to the mid-twentieth century might have been a bit incongruous. Also, the label for The Phantom Tollbooth display was somewhat hidden on the side of the glass case holding the book, instead of next to the interactive display.
The incongruity of The Phantom Tollbooth display was really the only major criticism I had of the exhibit as a whole. The library did a good job taking the visitor through a history of children’s literature through the evolution of educational theory to the rise of the public library and the democratization of reading to the commercialization of the book industry. A section on children’s book illustration, set apart in a side gallery, was a lovely exploration of artwork in children’s literature and the last gallery on New York City themes brought the visitor back to the local area just as they are about to step back out into the city itself.
The final room contained a video quiz on the entire exhibit, which was a clever way to circle back to the theme of children’s education and ask the visitor “What have you learned today?” Unfortunately, the library was closing so I didn’t have a chance to play with it.
“The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter” will be at the New York Public Library, Schwartzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 41st Street until Sunday, March 23, 2014. The exhibit is free and open from 10am to 6pm Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays and 10am to 7:30pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
The question asked in the first hall is “Are children born innocent or sinful?” The earliest books for children included reading primers from the early Eighteenth Century, reflecting Cotton Mather’s view that children’s books should reflect moral ideals. This idea contrasted with alternative views by John Locke, who felt that children needed stories that would delight and entertain, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose idea was that children should be given only the bare truth. The question “What should children read?” is woven throughout the remainder of the exhibit as we are taken through the Library’s collection of children’s books into the modern day.
The second gallery presented a sampling of books that represented an evolution of thinking about children’s literature, “From Rote to Rhyme.” Examples included Eighteenth Century, British publisher, John Newberry’s, readers and his thoughts on equal access to children’s literature; and the Dick and Jane series, which promoted whole word reading but was later criticized as presenting white, middle class American values and identity that did not represent the diversity of experience in the United States at the time. Other examples, such as Dr. Suess’ The Cat in the Hat and James Stephens’ Irish folk tale, Carl of the Drab Coat, represented departures from more rote styles of reading, featuring fun and adventure in the texts.
The next gallery explores national and ethnic identity with works from Noah Webster, who championed a uniform American spelling system, to state run publishers from Russia and China, Japanese manga style readers for Japanese-American children during the WWII internment and post-colonial French West Africa. Twentieth century approaches such as The Bank Street School and Maria Montessori’s teaching methodologies are also explored.
As the rise of public libraries in the late nineteenth century led to greater readership among the masses, more and more titles, including young adult series and materials specifically published for gift-giving appeared. The exhibit explores popular characters, such as Winnie the Pooh, showcasing the original stuffed animals that inspired the stories, as well as Beatrice Potter and the Nancy Drew series. A brief presentation of movie and toy tie-ins and the commercialization of children’s literature came next. While the current exhibit is primarily about the Library’s book collection, rather than TV shows, an exploration of the impact of audio and video on education would have been interesting, as the Library’s collection contains a collection of children’s media in addition to books. Perhaps that would be an entire exhibit unto itself.
Throughout the exhibit, the halls contain playful structures, representing featured stories, and included interactive features, such as audio, iPad presentations and hands-on manipulatives. The first of these, near “From Rote to Rhyme,” is a large display featuring Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and Jules Feiffer’s artwork. This interactive presentation includes a wall mural, a car that visitors can sit in and wheels where visitors can play with words from the story. In the next room, a display for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s Alice in Wonderland shows Alice’s neck comprised of a stack of books opening and extending toward the ceiling. A large gift box containing the Little Golden Book, The Pokey Little Puppy is located in a section on gift giving and a later room, a hedgerow represents Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. My favorite was the crown from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which was bright yellow on one side and dark fur on the other and had a doorway cutout of a wild thing.
It wasn’t until I had passed through these rooms and noticed these featured displays, however, that I tied the presentation of the book, The Phantom Tollbooth, in the second gallery to its interactive display. I recall originally thinking it odd that the book, The Phantom Tollbooth, was set off in a case by itself, though I understood it to be a representation of playful subversion of educational theories, which the gallery addressed. I went back to it to take a closer look. I realized that perhaps because I viewed the gallery beginning with the Newberry display instead of the Rote to Rhyme case that a jump to the mid-twentieth century might have been a bit incongruous. Also, the label for The Phantom Tollbooth display was somewhat hidden on the side of the glass case holding the book, instead of next to the interactive display.
The incongruity of The Phantom Tollbooth display was really the only major criticism I had of the exhibit as a whole. The library did a good job taking the visitor through a history of children’s literature through the evolution of educational theory to the rise of the public library and the democratization of reading to the commercialization of the book industry. A section on children’s book illustration, set apart in a side gallery, was a lovely exploration of artwork in children’s literature and the last gallery on New York City themes brought the visitor back to the local area just as they are about to step back out into the city itself.
The final room contained a video quiz on the entire exhibit, which was a clever way to circle back to the theme of children’s education and ask the visitor “What have you learned today?” Unfortunately, the library was closing so I didn’t have a chance to play with it.
“The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter” will be at the New York Public Library, Schwartzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 41st Street until Sunday, March 23, 2014. The exhibit is free and open from 10am to 6pm Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays and 10am to 7:30pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Friday, May 10, 2013
SILS Student Showcase
I was nominated to present three projects at the Pratt SILS Student Showcase on May 10, 2013, including a review of technology platforms for a digital humanities skillshare application; a group project on linked open data at cultural heritage institutions in which I studied the Australian War Memorial, EU Screen and the Deutsche National Bibliotek; and a group project on folksonomies and social tagging in museums, which was presented at the 2013 Information Architecture Summit.
A Survey of Digital Humanities Skillshare Applications, nominated for the Pratt SILS Showcase:
The DH skillshare website is available here: DH Skillshare
Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage, group project nominated for Pratt SILS Student Showcase. Poster, presentation and paper below.
LOD for CH Poster:
LOD for CH Presentation:
Paper: Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage
By Jeff Edelstein, Lola Galla, Carolyn Li-Madeo, Julia Marden, Alison Rhonemus, Noreen Whysel
Abstract: This paper surveys the landscape of linked open data projects in cultural heritage, exam- ining the work of groups from around the world. Traditionally, linked open data has been ranked using the five star method proposed by Tim Berners-Lee. We found this ranking to be lacking when evaluating how cultural heritage groups not merely develop linked open datasets, but find ways to used linked data to augment user experience. Building on the five-star method, we developed a six-stage life cycle describing both dataset development and dataset usage. We use this framework to describe and evaluate fifteen linked open data projects in the realm of cultural heritage.
Download the paper: Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage
Poster: Folksonomies and Social Tagging in Museums, created with Kathleen Dowling and Dana Hart and presented at the 2013 Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore on April 5. This poster was nominated for the Pratt SILS Student Showcase on May 10:
The companion presentation, Folksonomies in Museums and other recent presentations are available at Slideshare.
Monday, April 08, 2013
IA Summit Poster Session
My poster: Folksonomies and Social Tagging in Museums, created with Kathleen Dowling and Dana Hart was presented at the 2013 Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore on April 5. This poster was also nominated for the Pratt SILS Student Showcase on May 10:
The companion presentation, Folksonomies in Museums and other recent presentations are available at Slideshare.
The companion presentation, Folksonomies in Museums and other recent presentations are available at Slideshare.
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