The Nuts and Bolts: How an Omeka-Based Digital Edition Works
Panel
4A: Editing Jane Addams in a Digital World
Abstract
This portion of the panel will focus on how the Jane Addams Papers is using Omeka for digital editing. Sciancalepore will show the administrative view of the digital edition, discussing how the project converted its ideas into functional metadata. What was critical for the Project was to create an interrelated digital edition that matched some of the work done by the microfilm editors and extended it. The Jane Addams microfilm was all but unique in its time for including a limited subject index that not only tracked letters to and from people, but also ones that they were named in. We were committed to expanding that in the digital publication. She will discuss how the Addams Papers developed five different item types (texts, people, organizations, publications, and events). Texts include documents: letters, articles, speeches, and enclosed materials. For these, metadata included basic bibliographical information, but also a short description of the content of the text, a transcription of the text, and both subjects and tags that describe key themes in the text. One of the more time-consuming, but rewarding aspects of our metadata policy is creating the links, using Omeka's Item Relations plugin, between documents and between documents and the people, organizations, publications and events. We track drafts and final versions, as well as looser relations between writings, material that are enclosed in correspondence, and the authors and recipients of the letters. We ensure that we capture information about the companies and organizations that individuals write for, so that, for example, you can generate a full listing of Addams's correspondence with her publisher, no matter which official is writing her. We then look for the people, organizations, events, and publications mentioned in the text and link them as well. This allows the reader to click on these linked names to get a short biography of the person, and to look at biographies and immediately find the texts that they wrote, received, or in which they were mentioned. Sciancalepore will detail how we create transcriptions in a digital edition--specifically looking at how we deal with irregular text and formatting so that it best works in a digital setting. Jane Addams' handwriting is extremely difficult to read, so transcriptions were essential to making the records usable. With the images of the original letter accessible to the reader, we determined that text searchability was more important than rendering words exactly as written. Thus, we standardize misspellings, British spellings, and archaic spellings, but signify that they have been corrected. Readers will be able to check the original in case they are interested. She will talk about project workflow. We have anywhere from six to thirteen undergraduates working on the project at one time, with only two full-time staff members. We train students to specialize in creating document metadata and transcriptions and in researching and writing identifications for people, organizations, publications and events. Students are assigned sets of microfilm frames, or a group of identifications; they follow the guidelines in our project wiki-based guide on how to enter metadata correctly, and then work is checked by the full-time staff before being cleared for publication. In our first two years, we have described over 4,000 documents and are researching some 3,200 names. The site, once completed, will enable researchers of all ages to enter the world of Jane Addams.
The Nuts and Bolts: How an Omeka-Based Digital Edition Works
This portion of the panel will focus on how the Jane Addams Papers is using Omeka for digital editing. Sciancalepore will show the administrative view of the digital edition, discussing how the project converted its ideas into functional metadata. What was critical for the Project was to create an interrelated digital edition that matched some of the work done by the microfilm editors and extended it. The Jane Addams microfilm was all but unique in its time for including a limited subject index that not only tracked letters to and from people, but also ones that they were named in. We were committed to expanding that in the digital publication. She will discuss how the Addams Papers developed five different item types (texts, people, organizations, publications, and events). Texts include documents: letters, articles, speeches, and enclosed materials. For these, metadata included basic bibliographical information, but also a short description of the content of the text, a transcription of the text, and both subjects and tags that describe key themes in the text. One of the more time-consuming, but rewarding aspects of our metadata policy is creating the links, using Omeka's Item Relations plugin, between documents and between documents and the people, organizations, publications and events. We track drafts and final versions, as well as looser relations between writings, material that are enclosed in correspondence, and the authors and recipients of the letters. We ensure that we capture information about the companies and organizations that individuals write for, so that, for example, you can generate a full listing of Addams's correspondence with her publisher, no matter which official is writing her. We then look for the people, organizations, events, and publications mentioned in the text and link them as well. This allows the reader to click on these linked names to get a short biography of the person, and to look at biographies and immediately find the texts that they wrote, received, or in which they were mentioned. Sciancalepore will detail how we create transcriptions in a digital edition--specifically looking at how we deal with irregular text and formatting so that it best works in a digital setting. Jane Addams' handwriting is extremely difficult to read, so transcriptions were essential to making the records usable. With the images of the original letter accessible to the reader, we determined that text searchability was more important than rendering words exactly as written. Thus, we standardize misspellings, British spellings, and archaic spellings, but signify that they have been corrected. Readers will be able to check the original in case they are interested. She will talk about project workflow. We have anywhere from six to thirteen undergraduates working on the project at one time, with only two full-time staff members. We train students to specialize in creating document metadata and transcriptions and in researching and writing identifications for people, organizations, publications and events. Students are assigned sets of microfilm frames, or a group of identifications; they follow the guidelines in our project wiki-based guide on how to enter metadata correctly, and then work is checked by the full-time staff before being cleared for publication. In our first two years, we have described over 4,000 documents and are researching some 3,200 names. The site, once completed, will enable researchers of all ages to enter the world of Jane Addams.