In late December of 2012, MATRIX Director Dean Rehberger and Audio-Visual Lab Consultant Mike Green traveled to Senegal at part of a Smithsonian-funded pilot project that focused on creating 3D, digital representations of cultural heritage artifacts from the Gorée  Island excavations. The team used a process called stereophotogrammetry to create the 3D representations, which will then be shared freely online in the Gorée Island Archeological Digital Repository.

Stereophotogrammetry is the practice of taking high-quality digital still photographs in a circle around an object. These photographs are then fed into a computer program that uses the photographs to define and triangulate specific geometric points on the object. These geographic points are then matched throughout all the photographs taken of the object (which can often range from between 50-100 images) and are used to create 3D representations of the artifact. Stereophotogrammetry is a relatively inexpensive and mobile process, making it ideal for Africa-based cultural institutions who typically have lower budgets and need the capacity to document objects both within the museum and in the field.

MATRIX’s trip to Senegal was intended to serve as a brief training session where Rehberger and Green taught local Senegalese students how to complete the work of stereophotogrammetry. This included instruction on how to use DSLR cameras, how to take high quality photographs, how to set up equipment, and how to manipulate images in the 3D photo creation software. During their one-week stay, Rehberger and Green were able to host three full days of training, which resulted in six Senegalese students now being trained in the art of stereophotogrammetry. These six students are now able to train other students, resulting in a multiplication of equipped personnel who can begin cataloging and preserving the extensive archives of archaeological artifacts that exist at Gorée Island (and in Senegal as a whole). In this way, the Senegalese cultural institutions are self-sustaining and are not dependent on outside help to complete importation documentation and preservation work.

The trip to Senegal was meant to serve as a test bed for future projects that will help create a larger, 3D digital repository of African cultural heritage materials as a way of both preserving the materials themselves and as a method of sharing these materials to scholars in an open-source, open-access digital environment. This project addresses dire needs in the African cultural heritage community, including a lack of best-practice-ready heritage institutions and personnel within Africa; a history of colonial bias in artifact description and preservation; and the rapid degradation of cultural materials in Africa due to politics, wars, environmental concerns, and time.

The Gorée Island Archaeological Digital Repository is made possible through active collaboration between MATRIX, Michigan State University,  AFRICOM, the Smithsonian Institution, the Association of African American Museums, and the American Association of Museums (now the American Alliance of Museums). MATRIX is excited to continue our tradition of international partnerships in order to preserve and disseminate these important cultural heritage materials in digital spaces.

On Monday, August 7^th, MATRIX launched a three-day workshop aimed at identifying preservation and dissemination strategies for born-digital dissertations. Generously funded by an NEH Digital Startup Grant, the workshop is organized by Liza Potts (Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at MSU and Director of User Experience Design Projects at MATRIX) and Kathie Gossett (Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Iowa State University)

The impetus for this workshop comes from the rising demand for born-digital dissertations and the accompanying storage and licensing systems to support them. Born-digital dissertations are scholarly research projects which incorporate interactive or dynamic digital media, such as moving images, hyperlinks, or Web pages. Being able to incorporate these types of complex media into their dissertations will allow student scholars to better explain and augment their research questions in ways that are not possible with traditional print-based media. The desire and demand for born-digital dissertations is becoming critical as areas of scholarly interest are being more significantly impacted by digital technologies. As Viginia Kuhn, a pioneer in born-digital dissertations has said, “If your research warrants it, than you can’t help but not move digitally. And really, in the twenty-first century- in a networked world- that’s getting to be more and more the case.”

The workshop is looking at ways these born-digital dissertations can be adequately archived and preserved. The workshop will begin with a landscape analysis of various content management systems and using actor-network theory to identify the necessary components, characteristics, challenges, and characters for a born-digital dissertation repository. Workshop attendees will also discuss how born-digital content can be open-sourced, a discussion that is framed around questions of access, copyright, and re-use/remixing.

The workshop’s main deliverable will be a white paper that summarizes the intellectual, pedagogic, and technological contexts for developing an open-source archive and will outline the steps necessary to produce a prototype. The white paper, which will be freely available online, will also serve as the basis for further efforts to secure funding, including future grant applications such as an NEH Digital Implementation Grant. To follow the workshop as it develops, or to contribute to the conversation, check out the Digital Dissertation Depository website or follow the workshop on Twitter #digidiss.

The Mexican state of Oaxaca has a long and complicated history that is recorded in an vast historical archive. These artifacts, some dating back to the late fifteenth century, chronicle Mexico’s transition from a colonial to post-colonial state. The papers detail the fairly tumultuous and complicated interactions between Spain’s governmental representatives and the sixteen indigenous people groups that comprised the state of Oaxaca. The archive is a unique one and holds vast potential for learning and scholarship.

Unfortunately, while this archive is extremely rare and contains significant historical value, it has fallen into disrepair. The majority of these documents sit in boxes, on shelves, or just in piles. They are exposed to the open air, rodents, termites, and- in the rainy season- flooding. Some papers have even been burned by government officials who were either unaware or unimpressed with the document’s contents.

That’s why MATRIX is working with Dr. Benjamin Smith from the MSU Department of History to help preserve this endangered archive. With support from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, Smith will help provide equipment and training for six Mexican archivists in the best practices for digitizing and preserving the materials in the Oaxaca collection. The result of this work will be a digital repository of the Oaxaca information in both Spanish and English, as well as a fully equipped digitization staff that can remain in Mexico to continue the work of document preservation.

This is the third Endangered Archives grant MATRIX has received. Previous awards were for similar work in Mali and the Gambia. MATRIX is thankful for the support of the British Library and hopes to partner with them in future projects focused on using digital technology to protect historical archives.

The Vietnam Project Archive- a joint collaboration between MATRIX, Michigan State University (MSU) Department of History, and MSU University Archives & Historical Collections- has received $264,998 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Vietnam Project Archive is committed to the task of digitizing and archiving documents from 1955-1962, when MSU worked with the American government in South Vietnam with the goal of producing a stable, non-Communist country in the Cold War era. Although their efforts eventually failed, the Vietnam Project Archive contains rare and valuable data about life in South Vietnam immediately prior to the Vietnam War. Materials in this archive allow students and scholars to get an insider’s view of America’s university-assisted nation-building practices.

Included in this collection are contracts between MSU and the U.S. Foreign Operations Administration, reports on the rural economy and society in South Vietnam, personal communications between MSU staff and the president of South Vietnam, and audio recordings and films, which include images of MSU staff assisting in police training, ceremonies, and inspection tours. These documents are rare and available only in this archive, making its preservation and dissemination an important and necessary project. Project partners hope that the digitizing of the Vietnam Project Archive will allow new scholarship and understanding to develop about a country’s transition from a colonial to post-colonial society, nation-building strategies, and the history of South Vietnam.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $17 million in grants for 208 humanities projects, including a $25,000 grant to support a three-day workshop to explore relevant issues and identify requirements for the development of an archive for the preservation of dissertations that incorporate interactive or dynamic digital media.

Liza Potts (Michigan State University) and Kathie Gossett (Iowa State University) are co-PIs on this project. The proposed workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars (e.g., Humanities, Social Sciences, Library and Information Sciences, and Computer Sciences) to explore digital media and to examine the norms through which traditional modes of scholarship, like dissertations, are constructed. The proposed workshop seeks to be a launching point from which born-digital dissertations will receive the necessary technological support to encourage their development, deposit, and maintenance. The workshop’s main deliverable will be a white paper that will summarize the intellectual, pedagogic, and technological contexts for developing an open-source archive and will outline the steps necessary to produce a prototype. The white paper, which will be freely available online, will also serve as the basis for further efforts to secure funding, including future grant applications such as an NEH Digital Implementation Grant.

MATRIX is pleased to announce that Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellow Alex Galarza has won a Fulbright IIE Award for 2012-2013. Alex is a doctoral student in the Department of History whose research examines soccer clubs in mid-twentieth century Argentina. The award will fund nine months of research in Buenos Aires during which Alex will investigate archives, collect oral history interviews, and conduct ethnographic fieldwork. Alex has used his fellowship at MATRIX to develop a chapter prototype for his future open access digital dissertation that utilizes Kora as a digital repository and publishing platform. Alex’s project has benefited from the guidance of MATRIX’s Associate Director and Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative Director Dr. Ethan Watrall and the Director of Digital History Projects, Dr. Peter Alegi.

Matrix and the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History were recently awarded a National Leadership Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for ongoing development of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). The OHMS is a web-based system that provides word-level search capability, allowing users to search more easily for specific terms within recorded interviews, and time-correlated transcript or index to know exactly at what times in the interview these terms occur.

The project team, which also includes partner libraries at Baylor University, Oklahoma State University, and Cleveland State University, will further develop the OHMS into an open-source software tool that will be more compatible and interoperable with a variety of digital library and content management systems. The project team will also produce multimedia tutorials on the use, installation, and deployment of the OHMS tool. This tool will enable a wide variety of libraries and archives to enrich the use of digital oral history collections, inexpensively and efficiently enhancing access to and discovery of oral history online.

How do you preserve information of continuing value and make it available for anyone who might want to use it? Those are the challenges faced by archivists, and teaching students the craft and science of archiving is a tricky business. It has become even more challenging with trillions of digital objects – both born digital and digitized – needing persistence.

Professor Steve Cohen, who works at MATRIX and specializes in learning design and assessment, has been collaborating with Professors David A. Wallace and Beth Yakel at the University of Michigan School of Information to integrate digital archiving tools into their graduate courses. The project, PAVEL (Preservation and Access Virtual Education Laboratory) is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for two years. Recently Professors Cohen and Yakel presented results from the first year of the project at AERI (Archival Education Research Institute). To date UM students have found learning and using the tools an insightful experience. They report gaining insight into the complexity of the digital world that will be home to archived digital objects, and feel that knowing the tools will help them once they once they complete their Master’s degrees. Ultimately the PAVEL will produce a curricular models and an assessment strategy ,  for archiving programs around the world to follow when integrating these tools into their courses.

The Quilt Index launched a survey today to gather descriptions of quilt collections across the globe. The survey is part of a collaborative planning process to expand the Index, funded by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services.

The survey will help develop international partnerships, as well as build on a public listing of international collections of quilts and quilt documentation.

Results will be added to a resource page listing quilt collections on the Quilt Index Wiki.

If you know about, own, or serve as custodian for quilt documentation, individual quilts, or quilt collections located outside the United States, we would love to hear from you. Click here to participate in the survey.

The Quilt Index is a partnership of MATRIX, Michigan State University Museum and The Alliance for American Quilts. The collaborative planning process also involves the International Quilt Study Center & Museum.

The Quilt Index, an online archive of more than 50,000 documented quilts, plans to begin adding quilts from outside the United States to its robust database.  To design a blueprint for creating a truly international digital quilt collection, the Index received a significant planning grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Already, the audience for the Quilt Index is global, but the plan is for its online collections to be global as well, a logical but not simple next step. Users of the Quilt Index range widely, including historians, librarians, curators, quiltmakers, quilt collectors, genealogists and fabric designers, and all will benefit from making the archive international, with an enhanced capability for interchange and cross-cultural collaboration.

Quilt made by a member of the Mzansi Zulu Quilt Centre, located just outside of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Loaned to the Michigan State University Museum, photograph by Pearl Yee Wong, MSU Museum.

The one-year grant of about $100,000 will help the project’s organizers solve problems such as “supporting multilingual indexing, searching and retrieval of information,” according to the IMLS. In short, the Index wants to build a collaborative virtual museum across dozens of countries and cultures that share a passion for quilting.

The Quilt Index is run in partnership by the Michigan State University Museum, MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at MSU, and the Alliance for American Quilts. All three partners are dedicated to using new technologies to preserve and share the stories of quilts and quilters online. Jointly, the three partners, along with the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln -a new partner for this project– will use the grant to assess the challenges of going global, and then develop a plan to respond to those challenges. It is expected that this project will provide lessons to other museums and libraries working on international projects.

The IMLS, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums, has provided vital support in previous efforts to build and enhance the cutting-edge tech tools for which the Quilt Index is justly lauded.  Regarding this new grant, the IMLS said it believes that museums and libraries “play a vital role in helping us experience, explore, discover and make sense of the world. Through building technological infrastructure and strengthening community relationships, libraries and museums can offer the public unprecedented access and expertise in transforming information overload into knowledge.”

The Index is already a trusted resource used by scholars and quilt enthusiasts all over the world, but the images and data currently online all come from U.S.-based museums and state documentation projects. However, the quilt revival that blossomed across the U.S. beginning in the 1970s is now spreading throughout the world. Both contemporary and vintage quilts are basking in a new glow of appreciation for their worth as both artistic and historic artifacts. The Quilt Index has always endeavored not just to preserve and show significant quilts and tell their stories, but to create multiple tools that allow scholars and historians to study and compare quilts from anytime and any place, and to actively collaborate online.

This new grant will help the Quilt Index prepare to add international quilts to that mix. Among other things, the Index staff will create an extensive online list of international institutions that own important quilt collections and then will help those institutions prepare plans to add their quilts to the Index. The Index is building an international advisory board of 12 representatives knowledgeable about quilt collections in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
It is not settled yet which country’s quilts will be the first  documented on the Index, but Marsha MacDowell, curator of folk arts at the MSU Museum, who returned recently from a study trip to South Africa, sees great possibilities for the project’s global future. “After visiting textile collections in over 21 museums in South Africa in early 2010, there is real excitement on the part of the staffs of those museums to be able to compare and contrast their own holdings with collections not only around the world, but also within their own country,” she said. “And I am already excited to see how those South African collections are related to the history of world economics, trade, migration, politics, religions, art and cultural traditions.”

For further information about this grant please contact any of the experts listed at the top of the release.  To visit the Quilt Index and study its current resources, go to www.quiltindex.org.