Blog Post 7: Curation Team Planning

    The group that I am a part of is working with the Maine MILL Museum on their digital memorial to the Lewiston Shootings that occurred in October of 2023. Specifically, we are asked to focus on video and print media, with the video preference being late night shows, and the media preference being large newspapers. To split up the work, three of us are searching for video clips, and four of us are searching for print articles. I am a part of the team looking for print materials. The process for this that I have found most effective is to search "(name of large newspaper) Lewiston Shooting", and all of the relevant articles from that source pop up. Once I have found my article, I go check it against the master spreadsheet to make sure that previous students didn't choose this same article. Then, I download it as a pdf file and input the data in the spreadsheet. We are also required to include any pictures from the article onto the spreadsheet, converting those into pdfs as well. Our goal on the print team is to find ten articles each. I see my individual role as just helping out with finding print articles, and making sure the data is inputted properly into the spreadsheet.

    This project relates to digital humanities as it is a digital memorial. As for tying in information from chapters we've read, I would say this project is super relevant to Chapter 4. Specifically, we are using descriptive metadata through almost every step of this process. In our spreadsheet, we must list what each article and photo are representing. I'm sure this will be important for when these materials are eventually presented on the digital memorial. We are working with both structured data (our articles) and unstructured data (the photos), as discussed in Chapter 2. With the unstructured data, it is important that we include the descriptive metadata to eliminate any confusion on what the picture might be showing. The purpose of this project is to provide a place for all of this media surrounding the shootings to live. On our meetings, the creators behind this project mentioned their hopes that this memorial could be a reference point for people to explain the situation to future generations. That being said, the audience is anyone who wants to learn more about this project, but mostly people of Lewiston. The significance is certainly to pay tribute to the victims by keeping their stories alive forever.