Digital Scholarship Projects

Corpus of historical transcripts transformed for digital use

A researcher (interdisciplinary) needed a large corpus of rare interviews digitized to support her research, live public presentation, and electronic dissemination.

We obtained and digitized the microfilm through a partner institution, then experimented with OCR techniques to improve the digital output and provided details for the process to the researcher. Finally, we evaluated and reported on platforms for new techniques the researcher could use to improve the data and disseminate her work in a digital context.

SWALLOW metadata management system

The SpokenWeb researchers needed a tool to help with their work preserving and describing sonic artifacts captured from literary events. The Library collaborated in this work by developing an open-source document-oriented database for ingesting audio metadata, SWALLOW. The system is capable of dealing with an evolving scheme, such as was needed in the SpokenWeb Metadata Scheme.

Seer

Seer provides a playful way to explore information. Using a fantasy-game style motif, the interface invites people to read bite-sized pieces of information and then makes it easy to access the sources of that information. Originally developed for Open Access Week 2022, Seer prompted people to ask questions on the theme of climate justice and then discover how open access research responses are valuable in everyday life.

Seer content can be collected and developed through a Zotero library of collections and notes. The interface was made for an immersive multi-user experience in Concordia's Visualization Studio, as well as smaller touchscreens, and from individual web-browsers. Seer can be put to use for any topic and for alternative instructional, research, or exhibit purposes. Visit this page about Seer to learn more or try it. See the GitHub repository for access to its code.