Comments on: Geo-tagging oral histories

By: Arjun Sabharwal

Arjun Sabharwal — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:49:46 +0000

Thanks. I agree that DC is not robus enough, but DSpace — what we use for the OhioLINK DRC can be configured to make certain fields hyperlinked, and if we add the geospatial data in a way that let’s say Google Maps provides, it might just be a step. More tomorrow. I am looking forward to this discussion and learn from participants.

By: rush.140

rush.140 — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:44:45 +0000

I’m definitely interested in this topic. In my project I’m dealing with the issue of long video recordings of oral histories by elderly storytellers, who tend to talk about a wide variety of places in different temporal and topical contexts. I clearly can’t pin these to a single location. Getting the various places and times from the stories is already tricky, but presenting the information in a usable way is another thing.

I’m also wondering what the most flexible and portable way to encode this information once we have it. DC doesn’t seem to be robust enough, and coming up with my own format won’t make the information likely to be reused.

By: Arjun Sabharwal

Arjun Sabharwal — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:18:29 +0000

Thanks. Your topic sounds fascinating, and you are on the right track by adding the geographical locations. At some point, they should be mapped to coordinates that can be interpreted by ESRI’s ArcGIS, QGIS (open source), HistoryPin, Google Maps, etc. Have you worked with social scientists on mapping the movements of immigrant groups?

By: sschwinghamer

sschwinghamer — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:12:47 +0000

This would certainly be a useful discussion for me! I work out of an immigration history museum, so locating our oral history (and everything else) is extremely important. Although I don’t have a lot of experience with GIS, we are working with a collection management system that provides (DC-compliant) geolocation, and we’re experimenting with controlled vocabularies for place names in transcripts, etc…