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From the Attic to the Web: Building the May Weber Ethnographic Digital Collection

Wednesday, April 11

12:30 - 1:30PM

CTSDH, Loyola Hall, 3rd Floor

The May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection is housed on the fourth floor of Mundelein Center. Students, faculty, and university visitors pass by this room all the time without realizing it contains a trove of aesthetically compelling objects from cultures around the world. The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities-supported project, "Decolonizing the Museum Catalogue" is an effort to increase accessibility of the collection through a digital database, while also addressing concerns about knowledge: whose knowledge does the catalogue contain? How does this knowledge shape representations of other cultures?

This talk will focus on the development of the catalogue by DH students enrolled in DIGH 500 during the Fall 2017 semester. We will discuss progress made on the project, specifically some of the challenges we encountered in translating theoretical and scholarly critiques of digitized museum catalogues into a functional, web-accessible database.

Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (kroberts2@luc.edu) and let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.