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.

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.

MATRIX developers participated for the second year this weekend at Lansing Give Camp, held at Impression 5 Science Center in Lansing, MI.  Give Camp is a great event put on to connect local web developers with non-profit groups who need assistance developing their websites and enhancing their ability to conduct various aspects of their daily operations.  In total over 100 developers participated with 13 non-profit groups.  A conservative estimate of over $100,000 of work was donated by the coders taking the time to give back.

The weekend was filled with coding with technologies for the MATRIX developers such as Ruby, HAML, CSS, and Sinatra, as well as development techniques such as test driven development and behavior driven development.  The developers were also exposed to GIT, a decentralized versioning control system that is very popular currently in the open source community.  Events such as this allow the developers at MATRIX to network with great people as well as learn new technologies that they can then apply in their daily work.  The group included Matt Geimer, CTO of MATRIX, and a special thanks goes out to the MATRIX developers who participated:

• Chelsea Carr
• Sarah Godoshian
• Lisa Kelly
• Cassi Miller
• Tim Miller
• Madalyn Parker

A very special thanks goes to the generous event sponsors and organizers as well – it wouldn’t be possible without them!  Thanks for the great swag and prizes that were offered up (and some wonderful dev tools were won by MATRIX folks)!

A new version of KORA has been released, version 2.1.1. It has been approximately one year since KORA 2.0 Beta was released and 2.1.1 builds upon it and the production version of 2.0 greatly. This version includes many new features such as public ingestion support, XML import/export, advance search, and some user interface tweaks. The full information is available at the KORA Sourceforge site. Developer and user documentation are included as always in the ‘docs’ folder. The next version (KORA 3.0) is currently under development and will include some performance gains as well as an improved version updater.

Much thanks to the entire MATRIX Programming team and the many users of KORA for giving lots of feedback and continually working to improve KORA!

KORA-2.0.0 is now available on the SourceForge website at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/files/KORA/.

The new version includes:

• PHP 5.3 (and PHP 6.0) compatibility
• Improvement of KORA_Search sorting – sorting by KID and date now work as expected
• Additional checks performed at install to ensure compatibility
• Fixed interaction between presets and the hidden timestamp control
• Closer compliance with XHTML standards

With the new features, enhancements, and fixes, it is recommended that all users update to this version as soon as possible. Details on this version are available in the full release notes at https://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/files/KORA/KORA-2.0.0/2.0_release_notes.txt/view.

KORA-2.0.0-beta is now available on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/kora/

From the release notes…

KORA-2.0.0-beta is the next major release of KORA. It includes multiple improvements and bug fixes, which are listed in the change log. Those upgrading from a previous version should make sure they read and follow the upgrade instructions. Those installing KORA for the first time can follow the standard install instructions. The README also contains the specific extra step(s) for updating.

New/Updated Features:

*A new geolocation control has been included. This allows a user to input a Google Maps API key into KORA and then choose controls from a scheme to use as query material to return the geographic location. This control is still in beta.

*koraSearch.php has been updated. The search functionality in this file used to retrieve data from KORA had major performance issues as logical operations in queries grew, specifically with AND operations. The updated search algorithm uses PHP for union and intersection operations instead of MySQL which has effectively fixed any performance issues. OR operations were not nearly as slow as the number of clauses were increased, but improvement was also seen in this category.

*An general purpose XML importer has been added, allowing users to upload XML files and then choose how the XML schema is translated into an existing KORA scheme. Files can also be uploaded using a zip file along with the XML file – the XML file must have a XML tag that relates to what file belongs with that record. More documentation on the XML importer will be available with the 2.0.0 production release.

*OAI-PMH framework added. KORA now has the beginning of an OAI-PHM data exchange interface implemented. Final touches need to be added, but programmers should be able to use the existing code for creating services for others to use at current time. More documentation will be available when the feature is fully implemented, planned for KORA-2.1.0.

*A timestamp has been added to each record. This was added for the OAI-PMH code specifically, but does allow the user to see the last time the record was updated. The timestamp is not editable by users.

Matthew Geimer, CTO at MATRIX, attended Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, CA.  The conference focused on many aspects of new technologies involving web development, as well as mobile application developlment and the Google APIs and toolkits available.  MATRIX is excited with the new features available in HTML 5 showcased at I/O 2009 as well as the many other products showcased.  The keynote speeches are available at the I/O 2009 website and many of the sessions are available on YouTube.