News from CUDRG this Winter
By Brittany Clayton, Research Administrator and technical Advisor
19 February 2019
Here’s what the CUDRG has been up to since the last meeting on November 1st.
Dorothy Jane Smith says that the Mobility Histories exhibit has now been completed. There were technical difficulties, but the Omeka team came to the rescue and fixed them. New material has been added and the item descriptions have been made descriptive so they can be used for alt text through visual assistance software. Feel free to check them out at this link: https://mobilityhistories.omeka.net/exhibits
As for Adrian Chan, he and Beth Robertson will be talking about CUDRG outputs in a combined class they will have during March. Hollis Peirce is helping them in this joint venture. He has also been a member of the Carleton University Co-ordinated Accessibility Strategy. For more information on this, check out this web site: https://carleton.ca/read/accessibility-strategy/Also, Adrian has worked at a Multidisciplinary Research Cluster Fund application and other accessibility research funding opportunities.
Adrian has supervised the making of pedagogical material associated with the virtual exhibits. These are being tested at this time and will be added to the exhibits shortly.
Shannon Prendergast has been splicing together video recordings for Ryan Patterson, who recently recorded himself reading the texts for the virtual exhibits. She has been preparing a blog about her work with the Landon Pearson Centre for the study of childhood and children’s rights. Shannon is preparing a finding aid for the LPC on the rights of children with disability. She also helped organize the “Shaking the Movers” session on children and disability in the Fall.
As for Ryan Patterson, he has completed twenty-two recordings of himself reading the texts for virtual exhibit panels. These are now live on the CUDRG web site under the section entitled “our exhibits.” The e-seminar series called “Disability Futurity” is in progress. The call for papers brought in a wide variety of papers from Canada and England. A team comprised of three people from Carleton and three from Liverpool Hope University selected the papers that would be presented at the seminars. Currently, Ryan is putting together the schedule for the 2019-20 school year.
The SSHRC Connection Grant proposal for these seminars is in partial draft. There will be a virtual seminar broadcasted from Liverpool Hope on the morning of March 17. We have booked SH 617 for the occasion. Please save the date and we will return with more information. Ryan hopes that we will be able to connect to the e-seminar and watch the presenters talk and participate in their discussion afterwards.
Ryan is working on two other Omeka exhibits.
Brittany Clayton has been looking over the exhibit panels in both the “Envisioning Technologies” and the “mobility history” exhibits. She has been making recommendations on the accessibility of each of the exhibits. At present, she continues to maintain the web site, train in administrative skills, and working to extend her contract to the summer of 2019. She will be reviewing the exhibits from the PC side after she is finished with the Mac version. Brittany’s contract will be extended to the Summer of 2019, thanks to a grant from CUAEL.
Dominique Marshall is preparing a presentation on the Red Cross and Disability for Colloquium on the history of Red Cross societies in Geneva in July in collaboration with Beth.