Blog 8: Curation team processing
My team's project is collecting data for the Maine Mill memorial of the Lewiston Maine mass shooting that took place one year ago. For the memorial, they are compiling an array of media, both print and digital, to archive and preserve the articles, photographs, and videos that were captured that followed the shooting. Our group is contributing to their project by assisting them compile forms of media into an excel spreadsheet. Each piece of data, whether an article, image, or video, must be accompanied by metadata. As noted in the textbook, metadata data is essentially data about data. The metadata we are using is qualitative, as we are putting in the article/ video name, the source, keywords that describe the media, and a description of what the article or video includes. We have split our team up into two groups: a video team and an article team. I am part of the video team.
So far, the process has been very smooth as the meetings with our clients has provided us with less confusion and a clearer direction. In our last meeting, some of our specific questions were answered, such as what to put in the "notes" section in the video page, how long is too long of a video to put in the archive, and what specific videos we should be searching for. They directed us to look for footage of the press conference that spanned over three days. Individually, I downloaded and archived videos from each day or session the press conference took place.
Through the process of this project, there has been an increase in recent media covering the shooting. This is due to the fact that the anniversary of the mass shooting was October 25. This project has been difficult as it is a very sensitive topic. This goes into digital humanities when it comes to "ethical data". As a group, we are making sure to include multiple points of views from a variety of sources. Specifically, I came across videos of a news center interviewing victims of the deaf community. I had no idea a large number of people in the deaf community were affected during the shooting- and the lack of ASL interpretations in the press conference continued to hurt their community.
This digital memorial will take a while for the finished project to be uploaded onto the Maine Mill's website. However, I am excited to see our work of the media we archived as part of their finished project. If we were to continue our work, I think it would be nice to begin to archive media that is being released now- at the anniversary of the shooting. It would be interesting to see how the coverage changed and what is being highlighted more so at the one-year mark versus immediately in the aftermath. I think the victims and people affected are being more recognized as the one-year mark approached. The initial aftermath of the shooting consisted mostly with identifying the shooter and making sure no one else was to be harmed by his doing.
This week, I have continued to add to our project by searching the internet, grabbing videos, and putting them into one area. Much like Julia said, as a group, we have two different angles for this project: video and photo. We need to grasp many different perspectives through this project because of how many others it affected.
ReplyDelete"Data mining is an automated analysis that looks for patterns and extracts meaningful information in digital files (Underwood 2017)....It has become a part of research methods in text, music, sound recording, images, and multimodal communications studies with tools customized for these purposes." This quote speaks to me because of how data mining, in theory, is applied to a project like this, even without the automated factor. The concept of extracting information and grabbing parts and pieces you need for an external project.
This upcoming week, the video team and I must transcribe the videos we have pulled from the internet. Along with that, there is room for improvement in the amount of content that we can add.
This week, as a part of the print group, we continued finding materials and uploading them to our spreadsheet. We have been applying our own kind of data mining whilst searching for articles. We must compare the articles that we find with those already uploaded, and then read them for relevance. It is most important for my group to find articles that were uploaded around the time if the shooting, so descriptive metadata regarding date of posting has been incredibly important. We are working to make the data accessible, a key goal of digital humanities as a discipline. We are converting all articles and photos into pdfs, so that they can be accessed by all. This work is very fulilling, and we will continue to look for relevant articles to preserve this event.
ReplyDeleteconsidering how sensitive this Lewiston shooting is to so many people , your team's effort on the Maine Mill memorial project is both so important and impactful. Documenting all the evidence and material, whether it's an image, video, or paper article, with qualitative metadata adds crucial context and makes the archive readily accessible and keeps the information relevant. It's so important for this project to be well represented so its great to see that client meetings have made it possible for precise elements, such as the proper content length and use of a "notes" section, and that the process has been expedited by the divide into article and video teams. I think it is very important to note the recent media frenzy surrounding the anniversary of the massacre, but your staff is handling it carefully, especially by making sure that many viewpoints, like those of the deaf community, are included. By using voices that might otherwise be shut down or ignored, this approach to "ethical data" gives the project a crucial new dimension. the recommendation to keep archiving current anniversary media is something I completely agree with since it would document changes over time, from early coverage of the incident to a more better understanding of the events of the victims, adding layers to the memorial's story.
ReplyDeleteOver the past few weeks, my group and I have been collecting articles and videos regarding the Lewiston Shooting. In order to collect these materials in the most efficient way possible, we decided to divide ourselves into two groups, one who would focus on print articles and the other would focus on finding videos. I am part of the group collecting articles. Recently, with the anniversary of the shooting being October 25th, lots of new articles have come out regarding remembrance events that have taken place in Lewiston and other areas in Maine. Therefore, while still searching for media from a year ago, I have been also gathering new articles that were published this week. Due to me looking for more recent articles, I have been having an easier time finding media that hasn't been already uploaded to the google sheet. Our goal is to memorialize all of the media that has covered this topic so that the victims and their stories are never forgotten.
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