Day 2 of the Digital Curation of the Puffenberger Religious Artifacts

It’s only day 2 of the research and I am feeling a lot more confident in the work we have gotten done so far. Yesterday, we narrowed down the 200+ artifacts to 30 items that we would like to include on our website. Now that the artifacts have been chosen, I can begin my research on the religious texts that start to correlate with the artifacts and decide what information I would like to include on the website. Speaking of the website, my research partner and I drew up a draft of what we wanted our website to include and gave a basic design of where the corresponding information will be placed. I feel like once we start building the website, this will expel a lot of the confusion of what we need to do, and start pushing us forward to make the website as good as we can. We also began to play with technology today, specifically the camera that would help us capture the images of the artifacts. Since we did not access any of the artifacts today, we instead took some pleasing pictures of a a Purrell bottle, but the pictures turned out well and I am excited to starting working with the actual artifacts. I also began to categorize some of the artifacts in their respective traditions. I was unsure of what to do with some of the “smaller” traditions such as Hawaiian indigenous, etc. Whether they should be categorized as “other” or the categories should be more specified toward region is definitely one issue I need to resolve. In addition to other tasks we completed today, I began to email some faculty that delve into the realm of religious studies to see if they would be interested in potentially doing an interview with us about how they would use the artifacts in their classroom. Hopefully we get some replies soon and build up some credible content for the website. As we move forward into tomorrow and later into the week, I want to start the nitty gritty research of the textual background behind some of the artifacts we picked out and start to utilize some of our resources such as Excel and WordPress to record the data and progress of my research. Until tomorrow!

-Amal