CONNECTIVITY

CONNECTIVITY

The idea of Beautiful Spaces is to expose the myriad ways in which pieces of the historical record are connected across diverse contexts, at a variety of scales, and with a range of implications. To that end, the project uses three primary tools built into Omeka to organize material and articulate forms of connectivity at Item level:

1. Item Types

Each Item within the site receives a "type" designation. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has a standard Item Type vocabulary. Beautiful Spaces uses that vocabulary but extends outward from it as well with custom Types. The typology is as follows:

• Abandoned Place
• Administrative Unit
• Annotation
• Antiquity
• Archival Record Group
• Contemporary Account
• Dacha Property
• Elite Residence
• Garden Location
• Geographical Feature
• Historical Map
• Member of the Crimean Tatar Elite
• Narration Fragment
• Original Map
• Person
• Repository
• Spatial Data
• Still Image
• Vineyard

What is accomplished by using Item Types?

• Item Types establish hardwired links between Items of the same type, regardless of whether they derive from the same source or are used for the same purposes within the site. 
• Items of the same type share the same array of metadata elements. This means that whenever you find yourself looking at a "Still Image" you will find it accompanied by a standard set of metadata  

2. Item Relations

These describe one-to-one relationships. For this reason, an Item from a given Collection or of a given Item Type might relate to the rest of the project content in radically different ways than another Item of the same Type or Collection. Item Relations are the edges of the Beautiful Spaces network. They are displayed along with the rest of the Item-level metadata and are defined as follows:

• [This Item] annotates [This Item]
• [This Item] belongs to the same clan as [This Item]
• [This Item] is derived from [This Item]
• [This Item] owner of [This Item]
• [This Item] served with [This Item]
• [This Item] shares a common owner with [This Item]
• [This Item] visualizes [This Item]
• [This Item] is an attestation of the same place as [This Item]

3. Tags

A set of non-hierarchical keywords can serve as an excellent topic map of project content. As you would expect, here the set is composed of thematic, chronological, geographical, and methodological tags that describe one or more Items. For the most part, you can think of the tags as a curated set of Item attributes. They facilitate the identification of connections among groups of Items rather than one particular Item to another. Tags that highlight unique and/or isolated features are few and far between.