Day 59: HAX and the Curation Pyramid

I got through my story quota today a bit early (everything falling into place perfectly!)... so I thought I take some time now to write about the "pyramid of curation" that represents my workflow this summer:

Here's what it means:

SPREADSHEET: BOOKS. I have been keeping track of full-text online books for years now (mostly public domain, plus CC-licensed), and I do that using a giant spreadsheet. When I find a likely book to use, I add a new row to the spreadsheet. When I have some spare time, I go through the spreadsheet and curate: if a book looks like it really is useful, it gets an entry at the Freebookapalooza and update the spreadsheet accordingly. If it's probably not useful, I don't delete it; I just move it off to another sheet in the spreadsheet because I might change my mind later about what's useful and what's not. Here's how that looks so far:
Freebookapalooza books: 1460
books awaiting curation: 679
books discarded (for now): 834

DIIGO: BOOKS. As I work on a project, I then bookmark the book at Diigo as the first step in indexing the book's contents. The Diigo link takes people directly to the page in the book where the story can be found, so it is very useful: any story is just one click away. Currently, I have 157 books in Diigo books. Of those, 96 are African story collections, 39 are African American, 10 are Caribbean, and 8 are Native American along with a few miscellaneous books. The Native American books are what I am currently working on (I've got over 200 Native American books bookmarked at the Freebookapalooza, most of which are good candidates for Diigo indexing).

DIIGO: STORIES. So, after bookmarking a book in Diigo, I start bookmarking the individual stories in that book. For example, yesterday I bookmarked Dorsey's Traditions of the Caddo, and then I bookmarked the 66 stories in that book, tagging them as being in the Dorsey book, along with a Native American tag.

That allows me to keep track of how many stories I have bookmarked for each of those interrelated projects; so far: African: 2897, African American: 1549, Caribbean: 1053, and Native American: 837. I've found most of the public domain African, African American, and Caribbean stories, but there are still thousands of Native American stories for me to bookmark. I have 6500 stories bookmarked so far this summer; my goal is to bookmark 10,000 by the time the summer is over. That's a pretty steep goal, but I've been keeping up with my quota for the past two months... it's totally fun, so the only problem is finding the time to do it. Luckily, bookmarking stories is something I can do while listening to audiobooks or watching TV. It's kind of like knitting. :-)

DIIGO: SUMMARIES / TAGS. Then things start to get really exciting: slowly but surely I work through the most important books, story by story, writing summaries of the stories that I think will be of future use. Sometimes that is all the stories in a book; sometimes that is just a few stories. I add the story summary to the Diigo description, and I also add some Diigo tags to indicate whether it is an animal story or a human story (I am most interested in animal stories, but also in human stories, especially supernatural stories), along with tags for the main characters. This stage of curation really enhances the searchability: I'm not just searching on the story title (which may or may not be useful); I can now search on the summary text plus the tags. So, for example, I just finished doing summaries for Jones's Gullah stories, and I can instantly find all the rabbit stories in there: 25 of them, all told in Gullah!

So far I have about 700 story summaries in Diigo, and my goal is to get 1000 by the end of the summer. This is harder work and takes more time; it's basically a way of reading books and taking notes page by page. But it's absolutely a pleasure. Once again, the question is just budgeting my time to get through my quota of a dozen or so stories each day.

HAX / BLOG: STORY TEXTS. Now we are at the top of the pyramid. The stories I am 99% certain I will use for future publications get transcribed, either at my Brer Rabbit blog or at my new HAX Story Folder site. When I transcribe the story, I then change the link in the Diigo record so that Diigo no longer takes me to the online book but instead to my fully digitized and edited transcription of the story. Being able to update the link in Diigo is the key to using it for project management:

I also add a tag; for example, here are all the HAX stories: 60 so far! This is actually my favorite of all the tasks right now, so it's usually the one I do first thing when I start work. :-)

I'm adding 5 stories each day to my HAX site, and as you can guess I am a big believer in the power of slowly-but-surely. By the end of the summer, I will have 200 stories in my HAX Story Folder... and by the time next summer begins, I hope to have over 1000 stories in HAX. Plus a spreadsheet to go with them... and that spreadsheet will be the base of a new pyramid, as I start creating OER books and booklets reusing these public domain and CC-licensed stories.

This summer has been so much fun, and next summer will be even better! This summer: let there be stories! And next summer... let there be books, free and accessible to all!