13 Thursday Sep 2012
Posted in Programming for Historians
One little piece of sql code that I’d been trying to make work was bringing data into my join tables from the appropriate rows in the tables to be joined. After some struggles, I had success! The steps (and successful result) are behind the cut, mostly for my memory and the possible benefit of my classmates. Continue reading »
18 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Clio Wired Fall 2011, Digital Humanities, museums
I enjoyed reading the various essays from A List Apart regarding design and usability, but the piece for the week which most engaged me was the article by Elings and Weibel regarding shared metadata standards for museums, archives, and libraries.
My job at the historic house and what I am now doing with CHNM both came down to assigning keywords, metadata, to historic documents and (at the house) objects. One of my roles at the House was to propose, evaluate, and define new keywords for our relational database. As a result, I’m aware of the benefit of a controlled vocabulary, as well as the challenges which accompany it.
As I think about it, the challenges fit well with the readings about design and architecture of websites. Both situations force the builder or implementer to look at the audience, or audiences, they plan to serve, and how the audience(s) will interact with the data they provide.
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