The Scholar’s Box « Open Knowledge and the Public Interest

The Scholar’s Box

The Scholar’s Box is a four-year UC Berkeley project to develop a national model to enable campus scholars, academic departments, and libraries and museums to create and share open and reusable digital collections to improve campus scholarship and K-12 education. The Scholar’s Box is supported in part by the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE Grant # P116B040739).

The Scholar’s Box is comprised of three separate projects: Remixing Catalhoyuk, The Digital Resource Pool, and The Curiosity Box. Remixing Çatalhöyük provides a model for engaging students in inquiry-based learning and educational outreach. The Digital Resource Pool pilots tools and services to help faculty integrate digital resources into their teaching. The Curiosity Box solicits resources and feedback on services from a broad range of faculty across the UC Berkeley campus.

I. Remixing Çatalhöyük

http://okapi.berkeley.edu/remixing
Remixing Çatalhöyük, a multimedia exhibition and research archive featuring the investigations and discoveries of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük and their colleagues, was launched October 5, 2007. Located in central Turkey, Çatalhöyük (”cha-tal-hu-yuk”) is the site of a Neolithic farming community that flourished from 9,400 until 7,700 years ago. We invite the public to explore themed collections, create original projects, and contribute their own “remixes” of Çatalhöyük.

Remixing Çatalhöyük was constructed during the Spring 2007 semester by a team of UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty, working in close collaboration with the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH). Remixing Çatalhöyük highlights and supports a multi-vocal approach to history, where the global, online community is invited to participate in the dialogue alongside the physical, local community. The OKAPI and BACH teams hope that this project will inspire other researchers to openly share their research data and engage broad public audiences.

Web Site Design
Remixing Çatalhöyük features a tripartite design, including a research archive, themed collections and an interactive web exhibition.

The Research Archive includes more than 65,000 photos, videos, articles and other multimedia research materials–all freely available under Creative Commons NonCommercial Attribution licensing.

The Remixing team curated and adapted research materials into four Themed Collections designed to engage public in the process of archaeology and support a wide range of “k to grey” teaching and learning scenarios:
• Life Histories of People, Places and Things
• Senses of Place
• Archaeology at Different Scales
• The Public Face of Archaeology
The themed collections feature intro articles, intro videos, K-12 activities, and 200 carefully selected and annotated multimedia resources from the research archive.

The Web Exhibition was designed to spark interest and provide context for numerous research materials. The interactive Site Plan (at right) allows users to zoom in and roll-over excavation site features. The Timeline (at right), Map and People gallery orient visitors and highlight the project’s multi-vocal, multi-scalar approach to archaeology.

K-12 Activity
In this unique activity co-developed by a team of archaeologists, teachers, and curriculum developers, students use archaeological evidence and their own imaginations to reconstruct life in a Neolithic household, more than 9,000 years ago. The activity is designed for middle school students and can easily be adapted for other ages. This activity complies with Section 6.1 of the California History-Social Science Content Standards for sixth grade students, which requires that “Students describe what is known through archaeological studies of the early physical and cultural development of humankind from the Paleolithic era to the agricultural revolution.”

On Remixing
Remixing Çatalhöyük is designed to advance the discovery of new ideas by facilitating the reuse of resources and ideas developed by the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük. The site features student projects, faculty presentations, multimedia websites, and other “remixes” of Çatalhöyük research data. We hope these examples inspire others to remix and reuse research data from this and other projects.

Archaeoblender
http://www.archaeoblender.com
Visitors are encouraged to download, remix materials, and share their remixes using Archaeoblender. Archaeoblender was developed by the OKAPI team using ccHost, an open-source application developed by the Creative Commons for sharing and remixing multimedia content.

OKAPI Island and Remixing Catalhoyuk Day in Second Life
Virtual Residents of Second Life –a multi-user online environment—can visit Okapi Island to explore 3D representations of Catalhoyuk as it exists today and as it may have looked in the past. In November 2007, a dozen students, faculty and staff completed a construction of Okapi Island and preparing for a public program.

Okapi Island, location of Çatalhöyük in Second Life. Come Visit! http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/128/128/0

Okapi Island Project Wiki (Join Us!)
http://okapiisland.pbwiki.com/

Remixing Çatalhöyük Day Movie
http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/video/sl_short.mov

Accessibility
We provided a text version of the site to improve accessibility for users with low speed connections, screen readers, iPhones or other special needs.

Turkish Multilingual
The entire site (with the exception of the research database) was translated into Turkish by UC Berkeley Anthropology graduate student Burcu Tung and proofed by Stanford Anthropology graduate student Elif Babul. Tesekkür.

Dissemination
To maximize visibility and reuse, we have (or will soon) republished materials from Remixing Catalhoyuk in multiple locations, including Flickr, YouTube, Apple Learning Interchange, Connexions, Internet Archive, Wikiversity, WikiEducator, and CyArk. A future report will document the quantity and nature of traffic we receive from each site.

On Building Themed Collections
The design of our themed collections was greatly influenced by the process, products and findings of the Calisphere Themed Collections project as documented in “Handful of Things” article by Mankita et al in May 2006 issue of D-Lib Magazine.

Tips, Tools, and Templates
We paid special attention to documenting our process so that others could reuse our tools and techniques. This information is available in the Tips, Tools, and Templates section of the site.

II. The Digital Resource Pool

http://okapi.berkeley.edu/res/sites/pool

During the Fall 2006 semester, the team worked with UC Berkeley’s Department of Archaeology to develop exemplars and guidelines for creating reusable digital collections. The team started with this department because of faculty support and leadership in using digital collections for research, teaching and learning.

The Catalia Digitization Lab was created in order to serve as a place for faculty to come digitize and digitally share their teaching materials.

The team studied a variety of teaching collections (Anthropology 2ac, 129a, 136e, 229a, and 230), an internship program, and an archive of excavation materials from Catalhoyuk. During this first initial phase, issues regarding metadata, access and licensing were explored. An OKAPI Metadata Guide was created in order to assist those contributing to the DRP. The guide is also meant to be distributed so that other scholars and institutions are able to use and modify it for their own digital resource pool.

Digital Asset View The 13 metadata fields used in the DRP follow the Dublin Core standards. There was much focus on the the licensing field. The team provided many options for the licensing of material, but encouraged the use of a Creative Common NonCommerical-Attribution license which allowed owners to retain their rights, but allowed others to use their material in specifically prescribed ways.

During the first phase of study, it was realized that a lot of the DRP’s content was copyrighted. The following semester was spent conducting researching on copyright and fair-use issue. Contact was made with a number of universities and other on-campus digital libraries; legal counsel from UCOP and the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic was sought in order to help resolve licensing, publishing, and sharing issues.

Currently, the team is focusing on one collection- Anthropology 2AC: Introduction to Archaeology, which is taught every semester. The purpose will be to create an Anthro 2AC collection that can be used by different professors and students each semester. The project works closely with faculty in creating this collection, and explores how a wide range of faculty, K-12 teachers, and the public can best access and adapt these materials for their own use. The team plas to create an ‘e-textbook’ which will contain non-copyrighted and public domain resources, including powerpoint lectures and webcasts belonging to previous professors who have taught the class. The ‘e-text’ will be made available for students in the class, as well as the public, whether K-12 teachers, other institutions and scholars to use freely.

III. The Curiosity Box

Curiosity Box The team is currently collecting “prized possessions” from faculty. The website is currently under construction.