This week, we are working on completing a deliverable inventory to MITH, as well as getting into the contributor guide and the final report. In the process of polishing the inventory, I’ve monkeyed around in OpenRefine, which is indeed a usefull tool for crafting and editing a controlled vocabulary quickly and applying it to existing documents. The facets provide an easy-to-parse list, while existing side by side with the main sheet. It is an interesting contrast to Airtable. Airtable has invested much more in its GUI and so looks slick. But Airtable expects users to follow certain pathways, and does not easily allow for deviate without considerable backtracking. OpenRefine is so much more flexible and in some ways, intuitive. It lets you process the data simply to extract what you want. Still, despite it’s limitations in data manipulation Airtable presents a variety of visualizations that are useful for presentation and searching the finished product. The subject tags in particular shold be powerful search tools, and possibly useful in nudging future contributors toward conformity with the existing collection. By using both tools, I’m satisfied that the files I’ve processed are pretty close to (or at) their final form to turn over to MITH and LCHP.

Jenny and I are also preparing to talk to Prof. Sies tomorrow morning. I’d like to talk about how the Omeka site was set up, the function of the Collections that seem to have fallen into disuse, and the instructions received by the students about how to ingest their records into the collection. The Folklife Guide and the eBlackCU manual emphasize the importance of clearly articulating the goals of the project, and of understanding the community that your collection represents. From working with the Omeka collection, it is clear that Prof. Sies’s class has played a foundational role in the creation of the records. It may not do so in the future, but the shape of the repository has been set by these outsiders to the community.