Migrate the Chinese Shadow Figures website

[cwulfman]

Migrate a small collection of amateur images and unofficial metadata to a static site.

See https://github.com/pulibrary/EAL_Shadow_Figures

Updated to Collection Builder Version

From https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JVXuQ-KnxO4PpQbOmfhoc4A3rk_lYSzmQeRksd1lywo/edit:

Shadow Figures Catalog https://library.princeton.edu/eastasian/shadowfigures//

A catalog with images of a collection of art objects (i.e. non-textual). It seems feasible to make this a DPUL collection. The main issue is how to structure the data. The current site’s DB has one entry per physical object in the collection. Many of the images contain combinations of multiple objects, and the EAL site allows one to view all images containing a given object, as well as the metadata for all objects in a given image. The question is whether DPUL can provide this kind of user experience. The main drawback to taking the “one entry per object” approach in DPUL is that images containing multiple items would need to appear in the collection more than once, and this kind of data duplication is not desirable. Splitting and cropping the images (so that each image would only contain one object) was discussed but decided against, since some images portray scenes showing how the shadow figures would be used in an actual performance, and we would not want to lose this context. Also, splitting the images would be impractical in some cases (for example, an image might feature a person holding a weapon and seated on a horse, which means that these 3 objects would be overlapping).

The alternative (and one which DPUL supports more easily), is to have one entry per image. This would make the DPUL collection more of an “online exhibit” of the overall collection, rather than a catalog providing detailed metadata about each item. However, this is not the desired experience for our target users, and so the question remains how to replicate the structure of the current site.

Since the above analysis was written, Kim & Cliff have had several conversations with Tom V., and the DPUL option was ruled out, because this is not a Figgy collection:

• the items have not been properly photographed or cataloged;
• the photographs are often not of single items but of multiple items or scenes.

These amateur photographs are akin to the photographs in the Western Americana collection: many photographs of Sitting Bull; Sitting Bull appears in photographs grouped with other named individuals.

[cwulfman]

Another take at this migration is in AirTable. There are two tables: one of the photos, one of the object data. The two tables are cross-linked, fulfilling the requirement that viewers of an image can easily get to the records of each object depicted, and viewers of an object can easily see all the images depicting it.