Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Element Overview in Tonight's Class


The individual element overview was so helpful in tonight's class! While my element is relatively simple compared to some of the others it was nice to get feedback and be able to give input where other's are struggling.

I was personally struggling on how the opponent element should be defined and the vocabulary I should use.  Damen's use of the Simple Vocab plugin (along with Dr. MacCall's explanation) helped me out tremendously. I think I was overthinking it when it came to controlled vocabulary and was about to just simply make a PDF document attached to the wiki listing every single NCAA football team and their associated schools...whew.

I have been fighting the idea that that we are creating these guidelines for ONLY the images we are indexing. I keep wanting to think "big picture" - as in "well not every image in the Paul R. Bryant Museum digital repository will have players and opponents". For this, I blame LS560 - Digital Libraries where we were indexing all sorts or images from the Paul R. Bryant Museum, not a structured set like we are now.

Thankfully, we ARE just dealing with the images for this project and I can think small (for now). Adam was a gem and sent me a master list of all the images that everyone will be working with. I will now be able to load my controlled vocabulary for opponents into the Simple Vocal plug-in (a la Damen's style) so that you all will be able to choose! 

Clarity is such a wonderful thing!

2 comments:

  1. I have some trouble narrowing it down to specifically our context, too. My guideline originally had something about looking up the authorized version of the file format in the list...until I was told that it's just .jpg...but I didn't have the heart to remove the link (yet - we'll see if it ends up having to be removed) because what if someone somewhere ever added a .png?! ...except they won't, because this is just a class project, and even if next year's pictures are .png (or .gif or whatever), they'll have their own guidelines to cover that. I think it's just hard to think "interoperability" and "limited use" at the same time.

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  2. I agree, it's hard to think in terms of doing stuff "just for this project" when part of the scope we were given originally was to think about if the images were shared more widely. However, with just a couple of weeks left in the class, I'm thinking it's more about practicing with the software and description process and "done is better than perfect." Still hard to let go of that feeling that we aren't doing a proper job, though.

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