Resources
Omeka S multilingual software pack
AREPR’s approach to community data ethics combines critical digital humanities and community engagement by advocating for data and technology practices that are built on community input. This approach flips the conventional top-down, business-first approach to data management and software development by implementing a grassroots, community-first strategy. A key component of this work is the belief that community stories can both highlight the ways in which technologies are discriminatory and envision new relationships between humans and digital objects. Using this approach, we developed Multilingual, an Omeka S theme that is available on the Omeka website and is freely available for other groups to use. This theme and the corresponding software extensions we developed—Transcript, GroupEdit, PageBlocks, and SimplePDF—as well as those we supported—Internationalisation and Translations—simplify the process of developing and sustaining bilingual digital projects for scholars across the disciplines by providing free, easy-to-use tools for displaying archival and cultural heritage materials across languages.
- Omeka S theme: Multilingual. Allows for end-user language switching and more thorough translation capabilities when used with its related modules.
- Omeka S module: Internationalisation. Enables translation of Omeka S pages and sites.
- Omeka S module: Translations. Enables translation of Omeka S metadata/resource templates.
- Omeka S module: Transcript. Provides an interactive, translation-enabled transcript for captioned video and audio items.
- Omeka S module: GroupEdit. Flips the traditional permissions system to a bottom-up approach, where community groups have the ability to manage their own subsites.
- Omeka S module: PageBlocks. Adds additional modular, customizable page elements to Omeka S.
- Omeka S module: SimplePDF. Allows .pdf files to be embedded within Omeka S. It improves on existing solutions by providing better mobile browser compatibility and screen reader accessibility.
Community archiving sustainability toolkit
Sustainability in the development of Digital Humanities projects has been a topic of concern for us in the conceptualization and development of community digital archives in Puerto Rico. In this collaboration, the UPR Caribe Digital team, together with AREPR, has decided to create an open educational resource aimed at providing a guide that allows participating community groups to maintain, expand, and safeguard the digital archives created in this initiative in the medium and long term. To develop this resource, the researchers undertook the task of creating dialogue spaces with community leaders from each organization. This participatory and horizontal conversation allowed us to identify vital digital preservation themes and processes for the management, safeguarding, and dissemination of the documentary heritage of these organizations. This tool adds to other collaborative training efforts seeking community empowerment and self-management through digital preservation. With this resource, we reaffirm our commitment to digital humanities in the service of communities and nonprofit organizations.
The sustainability toolkit is freely available online as a PDF.
Other multilingual archiving resources
- “Post-custodial Praxis: Building Shared Context Through Decolonial Archiving.” Scholarly Editing. (2022). Authors: Christina Boyles, Andy Boyles Petersen, Elisa Landaverde, and Robin Dean.
- “dLOC as Practice: Decolonial Approaches to Listening and Remembering.” archipelagos. (2022). Authors: Ricia Chansky and Christina Boyles.
- “Resilience, Recovery, and Refusal: The (Un)tellable Narratives of post-María Puerto Rico.” enculturation. 32 (2020). Author: Christina Boyles.
- “The Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico (AREPR): Preserving the Cultural Legacy of Puerto Rico.” Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities. (Spring 2020): n.p.