[apologies for cross-posting]
The Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) is sponsoring a workshop, led by Dot Porter and Tim Stinson, at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI. The workshop is scheduled for Friday, May 10, 10am, Waldo Library Classroom A. This room is a computer lab. No registration is required, just come if you are interested in learning more about MESA.
Wat is MESA? Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MESA is a federated international community of scholars, projects, institutions, and organizations engaged in digital scholarship within the field of medieval studies. MESA seeks both to provide a community for those engaged in digital medieval studies and to meet emerging needs of this community, including making recommendations on technological and scholarly standards for electronic scholarship, the aggregation of data, and the ability to discover and repurpose this data. MESA is also a website, providing a federated search across digital medieval projects and collections. This workshop will focus on the use of the website (which is set to launch publicly in early Summer).
In this workshop, we’ll do three things:
First, we’ll demonstrate MESA’s functionality and use. This will answer the most basic question: What is MESA, and what can it be used for? This part of the workshop will be useful both for a generally interested audience of scholars, and for individuals and groups who may be interested in having their projects in MESA.
Next, we’ll practice using MESA for research purposes. This will be the most hands-on part of the workshop, and we encourage participants to come ready to search, comment, and perhaps even to start to build scholarship in the workshop.
Finally, we’ll present background on how federating projects into MESA actually works. This part of the workshop is aimed particularly at individuals and groups who may be interested in having their projects in MESA, although others may be interested to learn about the process. This will involve some technical discussion and in-workshop coding examples. Workshop attendees representing projects are invited to bring project metadata with them, and we will work on extracting the RDF metadata required by MESA during the workshop. If you are interested in having your project used as an in-workshop example, please email dot.porter@gmail.comto express interest.
To read more about MESA, please visit our blog: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/mesa/