Lindsay Decker's blog

For the past few weeks, I have worked on writing a reflection of my experiences thus far on the medart project. I did this partially as a way to wrap up my experiences this past semester and partially as a means to synthesize my work to make it more useful to the grant report.

I recently finished the finding aid for PITT_EDU–medart. PITT_EDU–medart is a folder containing the earliest version of medart. It was the primary directory for medart until they created VRCOLL out of a need for more storage space. However, instead of moving the contents of PITT_EDU–medart onto VRCOLL, they continued to maintain it. PITT_EDU–medart served as the nucleus of medart in that the contents of VRCOLL often linked back to material in PITT_EDU–medart.

Recently, I have taken some time to explore the changes made to medart’s menu page for England (menuengland). Some of the most drastic changes to medart occurred on this page. In the earliest snapshot we have of menuengland from 12.25.1996 the user had to navigate to the images they wanted through a map. The user had to click on the location of whichever monument they wanted images of. They did have a link to an alphabetic site list one could choose as an alternative to the map.

For the last  couple of weeks on the Sustaining MedArt project I have focused on compiling what I have learned from comparing MedArt with MedArt-2014 in addition to continuing to work with BitCurator.

This week marks the end of my second offical week working in the Visual Media Workshop on the Sustaining MedArt project. It's been an interesting transition from the physical forensics I performed as an archaeology major in undergrad to learning about digital forensics as an MLIS student. I've found a similar excitement to finding indiscrepencies in file trees, extracting themes from transcribed interviews, and small successes in using unfamiliar software comparable to finding potsherds on a dig site.