In January 2014, the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archives at the University of Alberta received 15 TB allocation on the West Grid computing and data storage systems for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Repository project. The project became one of the 271 leading-edge Canadian research projects that were selected by West Grid and Compute Canada. Our project application has been rated as outstanding.
The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Repository project is focused on a large audiovisual data collection compiled from ethnographic fieldwork over several decades. Its goal is to create a sustainable online resource of information related to the cultural heritage of Ukrainian Canadians for scholars, community researchers, students and general public. The data is of great potential interest to historians, sociologists, cultural studies scholars and folklorists, but has been underutilized to date.
This project involves digitization of video, audio and graphic images, development of metadata at a high granularity, storage, and development of a web interface to facilitate researcher filtering and access on the web. Compute Canada / West Grid infrastructure is used to assemble the digitized material, provide secure storage, facilitate reformatting as necessary, and support researcher access. Pilot projects have been started, mining the data for selected themes. The results of this research have the potential to impact Canadians by providing them with a rich accessible resource on many aspects of Canadian social history, with an emphasis on western Canadian local culture throughout the 20th century.
See more about West Grid 2014 allocations here.