More Information
Collection Context
The Tallersol Cultural Center(opens in a new tab) was founded in 1977 in Santiago, Chile by a collective of artists and political activists who resisted military repression by creating a space for creativity and artistic experimentation under the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-1990. In that period, they produced around nine thousand posters, brochures and other documents for human rights, political, social and cultural organizations.
An initial set of 150 posters, all created by artist Antonio Kadima, were digitized through a partnership with the Tallersol Cultural Center and University of Liverpool with funding from MEAP.
Classroom Activity
Objective: Our job is to deconstruct and reconstruct posters as data and metadata, using selections from the Centro Cultural Tallersol(opens in a new tab) (Chile) collection. We aim to consider (1) who created the data that describes the posters and how the work of archival description can shape our understanding of the past; and (2) how posters represent and present data about the past.
Activity:
Open and browse the MEAP Tallersol Collection in the UCLA Library Digital Collections Site:
- Collection home page(opens in a new tab)
- Browse items(opens in a new tab) (preset to Gallery View)
Invite students to find an item they like and spend time looking not only at the poster, but also at the metadata on the item page.
Tip: If you are working with Canvas, you can invite students to access the images and data through your class interface using the IIIF icon on the item page and the IIIF Image Cropping Tool (copy the IIIF Manifest URL, then paste it in the Enter field in the cropping tool in Canvas).
Questions to guide your conversation:
- What is the power and purpose of digital archiving? What are these tools' limits and capabilities?
- How does the medium of the poster—the relationship between image and word—represent or reflect on political violence? How can the form re-narrate history?
Additional activity: Interrogating Metadata
Objective: Invite students to think about the posters across the whole collection and learn about text analysis by using Voyant-tools(opens in a new tab) to analyze the collection's descriptive metadata. This is also an opportunity to introduce students to metadata and how it is created.
Ask: How do librarians and archivists use structured data fields and controlled vocabularies to describe collections? How does metadata enable findability and provide context for digital collections.
Note:
- MEAP collections are accessible and interoperable using IIIF (learn more(opens in a new tab)). However, you can reach out to the MEAP Team to access data in other forms. For example, in this activity, the team provided the instructor with a spreadsheet that included object names, descriptions, and other identified fields.
- For information about Voyant-Tools, explore the tool guide(opens in a new tab) and consider this brief Voyant-Tools Tutorial(opens in a new tab).
Activity:
- Introduce students to the idea of metadata and show them where to find the metadata on an individual object page in the Tallersol Collection.
- Invite your students to copy all descriptive metadata, in English and in Spanish, from the Tallersol Collection Metadata sheet into the blank text box in Voyant-Tools. Explore the word cloud (cirrus) and invite students to interpret the most frequent terms used to describe the posters across the collection. Would they have guessed what kind of collection this was based just on the text? Does the description alone represent the importance of this material?
- Introduce students to the idea of stop words(opens in a new tab) so that they can control the kinds of words that are included in a word cloud. Then, invite them to add Stop Words and regenerate the world cloud. Can they keep adjusting the stop words so that the word cloud better represents the collection?
- Share word clouds that generate questions or new ways to access or understand the collection.
Interested in using MEAP collections in your classroom?
If you'd like to use MEAP collections for your current or future courses but aren't sure what to do next, please write to us. We're always happy to discuss possibilities and to share information with prospective users. The MEAP team is available at meap@library.ucla.edu.