Bushman Mashups

Proposer: Hussein Suleman

Abbreviation: BushMash

Brief Description: The Bleek and Lloyd collection of Bushman stories, drawings and dictionaries are world-famous as the last documentary record of the culture of the Bushmen of this region.

Over a period of 5 years, this collection has been digitised and carefully organised into online Web-accessible collections. It is now possible to make use of the collection in teaching, research, performances, exhibitions, etc.

The aim of this project is to develop a set of Web 2.0 tools to reuse the content and assemble it in interesting ways, both automatically and manually. A typical automatic assembly of the content could be the illustration of the Bushman stories based purely on analysis of the corresponding word patterns/statistics. A typical manual assembly would be a tool that allows authoring of Web pages (or PDFs or other documents) with embedded content from the B&L collections, thus allowing reuse and the creation of new forms of expression that can be contributed back into the community.

This project can have a substantial impact in how we appreciate and assimilate the culture of the Bushmen in a modern context.

See http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/ and http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/dictionaries/.

Computer Science Content: Digital Libraries, Web technology, cultural heritage preservation, Web 2.0 techniques, information retrieval

Specific Learning Outcomes: System implementation; research methodology; experimental evaluation.

Skills Required by Team as a Whole:

Theory: Nothing particular.

Implementation: Knowledge of Web technology and XML will be useful. Some knowledge of information retrieval will be useful for aspects of the project, but these will be covered in the DL course.

Other: Excitement about contributing to the preservation of endangered cultures!

Facilities needed: Server and data storage space will be provided.

Supervision: Hussein Suleman, with input from the Centre for Curating the Archive (UCT Fine Arts). This project will be hosted within the Digital Libraries Laboratory – students will be encouraged to attend DL activities when relevant or to get input/assistance from senior research students.

Number of Students: 3 or 2