Summer of eResearch 2011
UC & VUW Digital Humanities Linked Data and GIS Mapping
Primary Sponsor and Point of Contact
Dr. James Smithies, University of Canterbury (Phone 03 364 2987 ext 6896)
Dr. Sydney Shep, Victoria University of Wellington (Phone 04 463 5784)
Research Group and Sponsor
University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme
Region / City / Town
Christchurch
Project Proposal
This project will develop a plugin for the Omeka web application, which will allow ingestion of content using the Digital NZ API. A website will then be built using Omeka and the new plugin, before geo-locating the content, exporting to KML and visualising it in Hypercities or a similar GIS mapping tool. If the project has time, additional sites will be built using the same technique. All outputs will be provided online under open access principles.
Dual boot Apple / Windows machines are available in the University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme room. The students will be able to work together, in all likelihood with a third scholarship student in the humanities (working on a different project), from the University of Canterbury College of Arts.
Development contacts will be available at Digital NZ and Omeka.
Requirements for Students
- Web development (.css, .html., .php).
- Web services, linked data and APIs.
- XML.
- GIS, geolocation and data visualisation.
Relevance to your research interests
Reuse of linked data (specifically structured humanities-oriented content) is central to the digital humanities, and GIS / data visualisation is one exciting new manifestation of this. The resulting plugin will be used by the Digital Humanities team at Canterbury and the Print Culture eResearch Hub, Wai-te-ata Press, and School of Information Management at Victoria for teaching and learning purposes. The Omeka and GIS website(s) will embed important knowledge in these programmes and provide an excellent means of publicising New Zealand digital humanities to the international research community. It is expected that the Omeka plugin will also be used extensively in conjunction with the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive, due for launch over the same period as the scholarships.