The Milner Metadata team attended and presented at the Digital Libraries Federation Forum conference held July 30-31 at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Emily Baldoni and Angela Yon presented at the first session and received compliments from attendees into the next day. Their presentation, “Capturing Hidden Narratives with Metadata and Digital Storytelling,” focused on the World War I Illinois State Normal Service Records collection they, along with Maddi Loiselle, have been working on from August 2023-March 2024.
The collection itself was digitized in June to December 2022 and transcribed on from February to April 2023 before it reached metadata hands. Baldoni and Yon overviewed different digital humanities tools used to visualize the data, including the text mining website Voyant, an interactive Histropedia Timeline, ArcGIS interactive maps, and ArcGIS StoryMaps.
Their StoryMap, “Over There,” focuses on different groups and narratives from the collection, including Influenza Epidemic, the Russian Civil War, and major battles Illinois State Normal University combatants participated in. The team is continuing to add content to highlight additional narratives and provide new ways of discovering and interacting with the World War I Service Records collection.
Presentation attendees asked about how they track statistics and different tools to use. “Over There” was published the week prior for conference attendees to view, so statistics have yet to be considered. Another attendee asked if the team used a tool that employs artificial intelligence to pull commonalities from images, but since the collection is text heavy, analyzing images was not necessary.
The team also attended sessions on how to handle incomplete metadata, a Wikidata workshop, ARK Alliance, transcription tools, and took a tour of Michigan State’s campus.
