Enhancing Accessibility of Site Content in Scalar for the Digital Publication of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Materials

FAIN: HAA-287675-22

Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-9800)
Aaron Glass (Project Director: January 2022 to present)
Judith E. Berman (Co Project Director: January 2022 to present)

The development of additional features and extensions for the Scalar multimedia platform to better allow scholars and publishers to produce works by and about indigenous cultural and linguistic content.

This grant will fund enhancements to Scalar, an open-source publishing platform, that will improve accessibility of content and enable core features and functions to better serve the needs of future authors and audiences. We will test the enhancements with content from our Critical Edition of Franz Boas and George Hunt’s groundbreaking 1897 ethnography, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, currently under development with RavenSpace, an application of Scalar for digital publishing of cultural heritage in accordance with mainstream academic and Indigenous frameworks. In particular, the grant will support collaborative research, testing, and assessment of extensions to Scalar features (navigation templates, advanced search functionality, expanded alt text and AV captioning capacity, and customized Traditional Knowledge Labels) that will increase access to Indigenous cultural and linguistic content, and be extensible throughout the digital humanities.