Wired Humanities Project - University of Oregon
The Virtual Mesoamerican Archive (VMA) is work in progress. It is intended to be an extensive,
academic, portal website. It aims to codify, integrate, and provide Internet links to the vast and internationally dispersed collections of digitized cultural and historical materials of early Mesoamerica (1800 BCE to 1800 CE)
as provided by archives, libraries, museums, private
collections, and individual scholars.
The potential audience for this reference material
includes scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, secondary and elementary students and teachers, and a broad cross-section of the general public in many nations interested in Mexican and Central American history,
whether because of their own heritage and/or a
fascination with the cultural richness offered by the ancestors of these global neighbors (ancestors such as the Olmecs, Aztecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, Mayas, and others.).
Begun in 2002 by Stephanie Wood and Judith Musick at the Wired Humanities Project, University of Oregon, as a “proof of concept” effort, and currently only accessible in preview form, the VMA will allow users online access to thousands of records in five inter-related databases. We currently have over 5,500 records in these databases. The contents are selected by our subject experts, then gleaned manually from electronic and print sources, or solicited directly from institutions and individuals, with data entry performed by closely supervised undergraduate students. We are sorting this material into multiple categories, with extensive information and hyperlinks to:
• Repositories – museums, galleries, archives, and libraries – that hold Mesoamerican cultural heritage materials.
• Collections held by each repository, including
collection inventories when available.
• Digitized facsimiles of significant Mesoamerican cultural materials, with added keywords.
• Online articles and websites authored by scholars, with added keywords.
• Contact information, education details, publication
records, and career histories for scholars who
devote their time to Mesoamerican studies.
We have a number of tasks that remain, which we would
like to explore with our peers at this ACH poster
session.
• We aim to augment and expand content, not just manually, as we have been doing, but through the provision of online submission forms that would
feed into holding tanks for the contents to be
approved prior to being merged with existing
databases.
• We also wish to explore the possibilities of
automated data harvesting protocols, always with permission from targeted institutions. We can
envision a use for this with sites that have hundreds or thousands of items of cultural heritage materials already available on line, such as the Justin Kerr Precolumbian Portfolio of 1,618 images, or the Peabody Museum online collections, with 10,109 Maya pieces, among others.
• We plan to improve and expand our search
functionality, with better access to the materials we have accumulated. This will include embellishing our advanced search mechanisms and preparing for the browsing of preset bodies of data, anticipating users’ interests.
• This past summer we undertook a test migration of our database contents and their presentation on the web from FilemakerPro to MySQL. This was
successful, and we hope to fully realize this
transition when the databases are more complete, to ensure accessibility and longevity for the project. MySQL and PHP compatibility may also facilitate automated data harvesting and mergers.
• We also have yet to encode the texts we have either
authored ourselves, such as the biographical
sketches of Mesoamericanist scholars, or texts we have harvested and inserted into our databases, such as from museum websites (always with their permission). We plan to use TEI Lite for this, since these texts are fairly short and simple. Online essays and websites, on the other hand, will not be encoded because we do not actually serve these, only brief descriptions and links to them.
• We have already begun establishing a professional
advisory board, but we need to expand it. The board’s responsibilities will include the formalization
of editorial standards and procedures as well as the facilitating of inter-institutional partnerships to
sustain the VMA.
The URL for the VMA preview:
http://whp.uoregon.edu/vma_preview/
username = aza
password = PERSIA
If this content appears in violation of your intellectual property rights, or you see errors or omissions, please reach out to Scott B. Weingart to discuss removing or amending the materials.
Complete
Hosted at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne University)
Paris, France
July 5, 2006 - July 9, 2006
151 works by 245 authors indexed
The effort to establish ADHO began in Tuebingen, at the ALLC/ACH conference in 2002: a Steering Committee was appointed at the ALLC/ACH meeting in 2004, in Gothenburg, Sweden. At the 2005 meeting in Victoria, the executive committees of the ACH and ALLC approved the governance and conference protocols and nominated their first representatives to the ‘official’ ADHO Steering Committee and various ADHO standing committees. The 2006 conference was the first Digital Humanities conference.
Conference website: http://www.allc-ach2006.colloques.paris-sorbonne.fr/