MITH is very excited to welcome Emily Frazier to the MITH team, in the role of Graduate Research Assistant on the newly-funded NEH grant project Broadcasting Audiovisual Data! Emily is a graduate student in the History and Library Science (HiLS) dual-degree program at UMD's iSchool. Her graduate work focuses on maps and cartography in the Americas, which builds on her undergraduate work in linguistics and Spanish at University of Texas at Austin, where her thesis project centered on creating custom map visualizations to track linguistic data. She enjoys solving information and data 'puzzles' to improve discoverability for collections, a trait that will be extremely useful to the MITH team on this particular project.
Broadcasting Audiovisual Data is a new initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to enhance discoverability of institutionally-distributed archival radio collections using a linked open data framework. A partnership between MITH and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the project is an expansion of the previous NEH-funded project Unlocking the Airwaves. It will virtually link together four complementary radio collections at UMD Libraries, UW-Madison Libraries, and the University of Minnesota Libraries.
In her role, Emily will create select data visualizations during the final phases of Unlocking the Airwaves, before transitioning to the Broadcasting A/V Data project. There will she assist the team with testing and documenting workflows for managing collected archival authority data (data about people and organizations represented in the collections), including reconciliation to outside sources and enhancement. She'll also perform data transformations, and create 'linked open exhibits' from the newly-connected collections.
You can read more about Emily on her staff page. Please join us in welcoming her to the team!