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UBC Press and the University of Washington Press Receive Mellon Grant to develop indigenous studies publishing platform using Scalar

 

Thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, UBC Press and the University of Washington Press will work with the Scalar team to develop a digital platform for publishing multimedia books in Indigenous studies. The publishing platform will offer a suite of tools for linking data and analyses to digital content from around the world and for interacting in culturally sensitive ways with heritage materials, ranging from clothing, beadwork, weapons, and tools to songs, stories, and dances. It will provide authoring teams with customizable methods to label content and inform readers about Indigenous cultural protocols for access and use of specific content.

Scalar will sit at the center of this project, constituting the core infrastructure upon which the publishing platform will be built as well as the reading interface in which the multimedia books will appear. Our team will also work to develop significant new functionality for Scalar as part of this grant, including the ability to import media with Traditional Knowledge (TK) labels and to properly display those labels for readers viewing the media. In addition, the Scalar team will develop a new middleware media importer dubbed “Tensor.” As a stand-alone platform, Tensor will sit between online archives and Scalar projects and allow users to browse archives, create playlists of media they find there and sync those playlists to one or more Scalar books.

We look forward to working with the wonderful people at UBC Press and the University of Washington Press on this project.

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