UChicagoNode Milestones

2026-02-20, with comments added on 2026-06-01. These are notes for Node going forward.

Leverage TGN and Glottolog to allow searching by alternative terms for locations and languages (needed for OLA, MLC)
Include some EAD-described special collections (may be driven by EAD 4, if not Durrett)
Enable a multilingual interface (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish) (at least Spanish if MLC goes live)
Explore the use of OCR in searching both within and across items (in progress with Convocation Programs)
Explore semantic search with the aid of a Progress MarkLogic consultant

2026-01-05. The following needs revision. It is left here for informational purposes.

The boundary between Year 2 and Year 3 is not entirely fixed. Some things may move from one to the other in either direction depending on how quickly or slowly some work progresses.

Year 2 (July 2024 - June 2025)

Implement Guerrilla Television mockups and improve functionality (Web Dev)
Implement Mapping Chicagoland mockups and ensure required functionality (Web Dev)
Online Language Archive: migrate the OLA front end to React; implement API actions to ensure required functionality (Sep - ) (Web Dev)
Mesoamerican Languages Collection: migrate the MLC front end to React; implement API actions to ensure required functionality (Sep - ) (Web Dev)
Reconcile the slight discrepancies in how the home pages for these four sites were mocked up or implemented (UI/UX)

Research and design a new placeholder UChicagoNode home page that can be filled out with the development of the project (Aug - ) UI/UX
Research and design core interface (Aug - ) (UI/UX)

Implement core interface ( - Jun) (Web Dev)

Implement EDM MarkLogic triplestore (2nd OCHRE publication database) (Jan - ) (Migration Specialist)
Write an XQuery API against the EDM MarkLogic triplestore to support querying inflections when using the ARK identifier protocol (CB)
Define metadata format of per-collection on-demand metadata download (B2C) (Migration Specialist)

Year 3 (July 2025 - June 2026)

Write API to support per-collection on-demand metadata download (B2C) (Web Developer)
Expose on-demand per-collection on demand metadata download (B2C) in core interface (UI/UX; Web Dev)
Implement Jupyter notebooks (this needs specification)
Migrate some finding aids (CB; Programmer Analyst. See EAD to EDM crosswalk.)
Implement bulk download of metadata (B2B) against the EDM MarkLogic triplestore (CB)
Implement bulk download of data ("DHL-net" and Box should both be options; work out the details of each) (CB; UI/UX; Web Dev)

The following are somewhat aspirational.

Research and implement graph visualization tool against Node metadata (UI/UX; Migration Specialist; Web Dev) (For an example, see Hermetics as a Medium)
Research how to integrate analysis tools, even if by reference to the Forum for Digital Culture and the Center for Digital Scholarship for UChicago users, and to outside resources for non-UChicago users (email addresses in comments could determine which is which, although UChicago users could use outside addresses) (UI/UX; CB)
Investigate transformative use of collections: talk to Data Foundry; look at Edwin Hubble’s Doctoral Thesis: Using OCHRE to Associate Interdisciplinary Materials (CB)
Investigate submitting Chopin, Goodspeed, Rose and Chess, Speculum triples to Europeana (CB)

Year 4 (July 2026 - June 2027)

Keep loading (meta)data
Revisit the grant narrative making sure to dot the i's and cross the t's
Complete anything not completed in the above