The assignment
Imagine you are an intern at Imaginary Natural History Museum. Your supervisor is excited you’ve taken this course and tells you they want you to help digitize the collection. They gesture over at the Native American collection and tell you to pick something as your first item to put online with information and a 2d photograph of the object. Having taken this class, you tell your supervisor that you will need to collaborate with the communities of origin for any object, and that you will want to use Mukurtu. Yours supervisor says great — go to it, do whatever you need to do. Please write up a report about your plan for your first object before you install Mukurtu on the server.
For this assignment, you will imagine you are an intern and write the report; for the purposes of the assignment we are going to imagine that the following items are at Imaginary Natural History Museum. You’ll pick one item from any of these pages:
- National Museum of the American Indian
- Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa) Native American Anthropology Collection
You may need to refer to the Mukurtu resource page and videos to complete this assignment.
The report should include the following sections:
- The object
- describe it briefly (please use your own words; if you quote from the website entry then use quotation marks, cite, etc.)
- What people or communities do you want/need to collaborate with to include this object in a digital archive? (Be specific — find the community, find their contact information; saying “Navajo Nation” is not sufficient — where would you start? You may need to do some digging. You may need to contact more than one organization or person.)
- link to the source of the object
- Sketch out metadata you would include. What would you enter for the following metadata fields (taken from the list on Mukurtu’s site):
- Title
- Summary (may be the same as your initial description)
- Media Assets
- Communities (part of Communities and Protocols)
- Creator
- Original Date
- Original Date Description
- Description
- Key Words
- Publisher
- Source
- (you can add others from the Mukurtu list if you want to)
- For other metadata you will need to coordinate with the community(s) of origin; to prepare for these conversations, write up a section of the report with preliminary ideas, considerations, or questions for these conversations.
- Create your questions and considerations based on what you learned from the readings about digitizing and working with Native American and Indigenous Cultural Heritage
- You may not have a lot of information right now — how do you get that information? What do you need to discuss with the heritage community to be able to put this into a Mukurtu digital exhibit?
- This section of the report can be a paragraph holistically discussing the relevant issues/questions for the following metadata fields, or it can be a list of fields with comments/questions/considerations.
- Here are the metadata fields you should consider as you put together your questions/considerations:
- Mukurtu Cultural Protocols (which protocols might be relevant? what questions will you ask to determine this?)
- Item sharing (who should have access? Do you have thoughts or do you have questions you want to pose in order to come to a decision?)
- Rights (who has rights?)
- Traditional Knowledge labels (which might be relevant? what questions will you ask to determine this?)
- remember you may need to refer back to the Mukurtu site
Submitting the Assignment
Post your report to the *private class blog* not your own website.
I recommend you write up your report on your computer or Google Docs and then copy/paste over to the blog and touch it up.
Submit the link to your report in Canvas in the Lab D Assignment
Extensions, Revisions, Makeups
Students may use the Flexibility Token System outlined in the syllabus for extensions, revisions, and makeups.
Evaluation
The blog post will be evaluated by the following rubric.
Excellent: all criteria hit full marks
Satisfactory: at least 4 of the 6 criteria hit full marks; the other(s) are at least “partial”
Incomplete: doesn’t fulfill criteria for Satisfactory.
