The Library of Congress through The Signal: Digital Preservation blog recently posted an article about Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries. In the post, Boyd talks about using digital technology to collect, curate, distribute, and preserve oral histories.

Boyd recently partnered with MATRIX on the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) project, hosted by MATRIX and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site connects users to the latest information on digital technologies pertaining to all phases of the oral history process, including information copyright, ethical issues, microphone selection, lighting set-up, and more. To learn more about the intersection of digital technology and oral history, check out the LOC article and explore the OHDA site.

In October 2012, the Michigan State University’s Archives & Historical Collections, in collaboration with MATRIX, launched a new website entitled the Civil War Archives at http://civilwar.archives.msu.edu/. This website contains an online digital archive of hand-written letters and photographs sent from and to Michigan soldiers who participated in the Civil War. This website’s goal is to educate students and citizens about the Civil War and re-humanize the individuals who fought and died during the conflict.

The Civil War Archive is built using KORA, an open-source, browser-based content management system created and produced by MATRIX that allows organizations to build digital repositories that preserve both digital objects and their related metadata. KORA has a flexible and customizable metadata scheme, which allows it to be used with any data set. KORA also contains a record associator which gives MATRIX the capability to link a digital object with it’s corresponding metadata and/or related objects (i.e. letters and photographs from the same individual). This allows for the creation of complex digital objects that tell stories and continue MATRIX’s goal of re-humanizing big data.

Beginning in the spring of 2010, researchers at Michigan State University’s Archives & Historical Collections began digitizing their collection of hand-written letters and photographs sent to and from Michigan soldiers in the Civil War. The letters are addressed to soldiers’ friends, family, and sweethearts and describe some major battles (including the Battle of Gettysburg) from the soldiers’ perspectives.

The presentation of information in this archive is unique in that it displays both the digitized copy of the letter and a typed transcript of the document side-by-side. Having both views appear simultaneously on the screen allows users to toggle seamlessly between the two documents. The collections in this archive are grouped by both donating family and Michigan regiment to allow for the quick location of interested records.

To learn more about the archive and its creation , read this article by MSU News. Similarly, if you’re interested in learning more about MATRIX’s efforts to re-humanize big data, browse a recent blog post describing a Ethan Watrall’s talk on Big Data, Small Stories: Community, Collaboration, and User Experience in the Age of Digital Cultural Heritage or read about MATRIX’s participation in the Slave Biographies and Digging into Data projects.

MATRIX would like to take time at the beginning of this week to mourn and reflect on the recent passing of Zwelakhe Sisulu, a dedicated South African journalist, businessman, and activist. Son of ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu (Nelson Mandela’s friend and mentor), Zwelakhe Sisulu faced harassment and imprisonment during the struggle against apartheid as a result of his activities as an advocate for freedom of expression and a practitioner of alternative media.

Footage of Zwelakhe Sisulu’s activist work can be found on the Community Video Education Trust (CVET) website at http://cvet.org.za/index.php . In this video, taken on March 29, 1986, Zwelakhe Sisulu reviews and evaluates the South African government’s plan to institute a permanent State of Emergency in the country. Sisulu speaks passionately about the injustices this plan has imposed upon the people of South Africa and urges his listeners to understand the crucial moment they were living in:

I want to make it clear that these aren’t empty slogans. When we say that we’ve reached a decisive historical moment, we do not say so because those are the types of things that are said at conferences. We say it because we believe that indeed we have reached a decisive moment and this is based on a careful assessment of our current reality.

Segments from this rare footage were used by the Sisulu family to compile a video tribute of his life and work. Our experiences this past week have proven the importance and value of digitizing and disseminating cultural heritage materials online. Had this clip not been digitized and made freely accessible online, it is possible that the footage would have been stored in such a way that would have made its rapid discovery, sharing, and re-use in a memorial film on short notice impossible.

We are also thankful to our partners at CVET for allowing us to take part in the important and exciting work of preserving cultural heritage materials. We encourage you to visit the CVET website to familiarize yourself with the project and learn more about Zwelakhe Sisulu and the causes he dedicated his life to.

The MSU Museum (MSUM) is currently featuring an exhibit entitled “Patterns of Inquiry: Quilts in Research and Education.” The exhibit talks at length about how quilts— in addition to their traditional use as bed coverings— are used to tell stories, raise awareness, and make social commentary. Because quilts often have these deeper meanings and significance, they can be valuable tools for both researchers and educators. The exhibit invites visitors to look past a quilt’s aesthetics and discover the more nuanced knowledge-making activities that are sewn (literally) throughout the piece.

Patterns of Inquiry, curated by MSUM colleague Mary Worrall, builds heavily on artifacts, technology, and ideas developed through MATRIX’s partnership with the Quilt Index. MATRIX provides digital humanities technology, database platforms, and tools for the Quilt Index which seeks to create an online, digital repository for quilt and quilt-related ephemera around the world. The Quilt Index brings together a community of quilters, quilt enthusiasts, and quilt researchers to digitize, archive, and share knowledge about a wide-range of quilts. This information, and its corresponding metadata, is then stored in KORA— a digital repository system designed and maintained by MATRIX.

The MSU Museum exhibit also explained and built on the Digging Into Data project, which seeks to create search algorithms that can look through the wealth of visual and textual information contained in the Quilt Index and locate specific patterns, stitch types, and colors. This will help researchers quickly identify quilts and quilt ephemera that will be important to their research. This intersection of quilts (a traditionally non-digital medium) with digital preservation and scholarship creates an intriguing juxtaposition of old-world crafts and twenty-first century technologies. Perhaps the greatest example of this apposition is the quilt featured on this article. The quilt was created by Beth Donaldson and is also a fully functional QR code.

Patterns of Inquiry is a phenomenal exhibit that challenges traditional views and uses of quilts and encourages their use as research and educational tools. MATRIX is proud to be a part of this exhibit and will continue to promote both the endeavors of the Quilt Index and the MSU Museum as they explore new challenges and opportunities in the digital humanities.

Liza Potts, MATRIX Director of User Experience Design Projects, recently traveled to Paris, France in order to perform research and planning work for an upcoming project centered on the emerging idea of participatory memory.

Participatory memory examines the ways in which everyday people memorialize events outside of the officially sanctioned observations. Instead of accepting what government or authoritarian sources proclaim about “what really happened,” there is a rising tendency for people to add their own imprint to these spaces, sharing their own recollections of past events— especially the tragic. Participating within these official and often unofficial spaces, everyday people can offer additional commentary about the significance and meaning of those events. While these spaces may be seen as outside of the more “official” or sanctioned activities, there is great value in understanding how people react, inscribe, and cope within these spaces of memory.

Paris is a city that bursts with examples of this kind of activity— and for good reason. The city contains public spaces that house memories of tragic events, including the tunnel where Princess Diana was killed, the grave sites of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde, and memorials for several air crashes. There are also many signs of commemoration, whether it is marking spaces on the Eifel Tower or leaving behind a padlock signifying a romantic relationship on one of the city’s many bridges. Paris has cultivated a culture where active participation in contributing to public memorials is expected and somewhat accepted. The city is filled with spaces in which citizens and visitors have felt comfortable contributing to memorials: whether that be leaving flowers at a grave site, spray painting a messages to a lost idol, or leaving a kiss to a literary hero.

Although these creations of participatory memory are exciting and useful in revealing a new depth to our public remembrance of what happened at these sites, they are also temporary. Time and nature are not kind to chalked messages, taped up photos, or bouquets of roses. And government officials are increasingly investing more money in “cleaning up” these memorial sites. (At last count, the amount of money invested in “restoring” the Princess Diana memorial was over €60,000).

Potts is working on a way to digitally preserve these types of participatory memory activities. Her project focuses on ways to make connections between the physical spaces where these memories are being documented and a new digital space where those same memories could be preserved and shared. She hopes to build an interface that would allow contributors to these memorial sites to share their memories online and then explore the collective memorial through space (“How is this space physically constructed? What does this space look like?”) and time (“How does my memory fit into what others have contributed before me?”). Potts plans on leading a researched study abroad to Paris next summer that will work with students to address these questions and design and test an appropriate user experience.

Potts’ project in participatory memory fits in well with her work at MATRIX and with MATRIX’s larger commitment to the digital humanities and cultural heritage. Although MATRIX has worked to create archives previously, Potts’ attempt to create what she terms a “participatory archive” that digitally documents constantly changing, intrinsically transient, and inherently non-digital objects is a fairly new concept and one that pushes boundaries in the digital humanities. We are excited about this project and look forward to benefiting from the lessons learned about archiving participatory memory.

MATRIX is pleased to announce the launch of the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) website at ohda.matrix.msu.edu. The website features numerous essays, articles, and videos about best practices in collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital oral histories.

The OHDA project represents a partnership between MATRIX, the Michigan State University Museum, the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, the American Folklore Society, and the Oral History Association. Seven interdisciplinary working groups composed of experts and practitioners from museums, libraries, and scholarly societies worked to produce recommendations around core topics including intellectual property, transcriptions, digital video, technology, scholarship, preservation, and access. Final recommendations from all groups were compiled and published on the OHDA website as a guide to conducting digital oral history.

The need for this project stems from the way in which twenty-first century, digital technologies are transforming oral history. As mobile devices, digital recorders, online repositories and the like become more prevalent, oral historians need to be educated as to  new methods available— as well as the risks and rewards of those methods. The OHDA essay collection is a valuable and timely resource and one that MATRIX is proud to be a part of. We welcome you to investigate the sources listed at ohda.matrix.msu.edu and learn more about the project at the OHDA planning site.

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.

On May 26^th, the Haaretz Daily Newspaper, a popular Israeli news outlet, released a full-length article focused on the Samaritan Archive project, a collaborative endeavor lead by two U.S. researchers and universities: Dr. Jim Ridolfo of the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Dr. William Hart-Davidson of Michigan State University (MSU).

The article contained an extensive interview with Ridolfo, who is studying the Samaritan people’s attitudes towards the circulation of their books through a Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Fulbright fellowship. The Fulbright is split between the West Bank Fulbright program and the Israel Fulbright program, due to the fact that the Samaritan people live half in the Palestinian Authority, West Bank and half in Israel. Ridolfo talked about how he became interested in the Samaritan Archives during his time as a graduate student at MSU and how that initial interest grew into the dynamic and internationally acclaimed project it is today.

The Samaritan Archives project seeks to digitize thousands of ancient, sacred Samaritan texts and make them available to the Samaritan community that produced them. You may ask why, if the texts are Samaritan in origin, they are not already available to the Samaritan people. The answer is rooted in the Samaritan’s complex and chaotic past. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Samaritan people faced a growing state of poverty. To counter this, they sold their ancient texts and manuscripts to foreign collectors in exchange for monetary goods.

One of these foreign collectors was a Michigan industrialist and philanthropist named Edward Warren. He bought a number of ancient manuscripts that were later donated to MSU by his children. It is these papers that have now become known as the Samaritan Archives.

In the Haaretz article, Ridolfo focuses on how this digitization effort has a strong user-experience component that goes along with it. The goal of this project is not just to make an online repository of Samaritan texts for scholarly purposes, but to create a digital tool that current Samaritans can use to reconnect with their ancient texts and culture. This could eventually include things like Facebook tools, websites, and cell-phone applications. The article focuses on the novelty of this approach saying, “This is an innovative approach that places an emphasis on the users of digitized data— in this case, the Samaritan community— while the project is being planned and designed.”

The Samaritan Archives project is another example of MATRIX’s commitment to digitizing endangered texts, designing user-centered interfaces, and building international partnerships. We are encouraged and excited that this work is being recognized by international news media and hope to engage in many more of these projects in the future. Says Ridolfo of his experiences in Israel, “I’m confident that the work I’ve done here will help make the ongoing grant work with MSU MATRIX and MSU WIDE that much more rewarding for the Samaritans. I’ve collected data that shows how such a cultural-digital infrastructure will matter to the lives of community members.”

To learn more about the Samaritan Archives, please read the Haaretz article (in both Hebrew and English), visit Jim Ridolfo’s personal website, or check out other international media that has also focused on this story— including the A.B. Samaritan news, the Samaritan’s only newspaper. Also, be on the lookout for Digital Samaritans, Ridolfo’s upcoming book on the Samaritan Archives project.

In May 2009, Dave Bing was elected mayor of Detroit. But, before he became mayor, Bing had a long-standing career as both a member of the Detroit Pistons and the owner of Bing Steel, one of the largest black-owned businesses in the U.S. during the 1980s.

It was during his time as owner of Bing Steel that Bing was interviewed by Ed Gordon on the Detroit Public Television program, American Black Journal. That interview, now available on the American Black Journal Online website, gives insights into Bing’s views on government, business, affirmative action, and the city of Detroit.

The full interview with Dave Bing can be accessed here, along with an older interview from Colored People’s Time (1969) that discusses a leg injury Bing suffered while playing for the Detroit Pistons. These artifacts on Dave Bing represent a small fraction of the interviews, audio, and video clips that MATRIX has archived in the American Black Journal collection. The ABJ contains original footage of other well-known individuals such as Eartha Kitt, Stevie Wonder, Jesse Jackson, and Nelson Mandela. We invite you to browse through those shows to learn more about American history as told from an African-American perspective.

It isn’t likely that a lot of us will ever get to personally meet Samuel Mahoko (photo at right), a displaced farm laborer from Rammolutsi, a poor community in northeastern South Africa.

But while we will probably never have the chance to shake his hand, thanks to the African Oral Narratives project, we have the opportunity to hear his voice. Since 2009, the African Oral Narratives team has been collecting and digitizing life stories, interviews, folklore, and songs from sub-Saharan Africa. Samuel Mahoko’s everyday life as a farm worker in post-apartheid South Africa is one of those stories.

Drawing on examples from his life and the lives of family and friends, Mahoko sheds light on the racial, economic, and political tensions between unions, farm owners, and farm workers. He also reflects on his childhood in South Africa, the forces that have shaped his adult life, and his hopes and aspirations for his children.

Mahoko’s story is ordinary and yet remarkable, and is just one of the many interviews collected, digitized, and offered online through the African Oral Narratives project. You are encouraged to visit this rare online archive and listen to the oral histories. When Samuel Mahoko was asked what message he would like to relay to those who would hear his story, he said: “My message is that we have to look at both sides–where we come from and look forward. The main thing is forward.”

Access to Dale McKinley and Ahmed Veriava’s “Forgotten Voices in the Present” collection in African Oral Narratives is the result of a fruitful collaboration between SAHA (South African History Archive), Michigan State University’s Department of History, African Studies Center, and MATRIX.