12 Zuni Voices
University Museum Director Arakawa asked Craig to build an interface for a series of videos and transcripts of Zuni individuals discussing objects in the Museum’s collections that were excavated from Chavez Cave. Craig was supplied with a list of objects, a series of videos, and some transcriptions of those videos.
Craig used Quarto’s website feature to organize the materials into broad thematic sections and manually listed individual objects under each of these headings (Figure 12.1). Each page contains an image of the object and some description of it. Most objects also contain a video of Zuni elders discussing the object. When videos are present, transcripts are linked. In many cases, a photograph of the object’s raw material is presented.
12.1 How It Works Under the Hood
Craig used Quarto’s listing feature to generate page listing by broad theme. Dedicated theme pages (i.e. footware.qmd) were established and listing contents were established in YAML frontmatter. For example:
---
title: "Footware"
listing:
contents:
- "1976.14.94_95.qmd"
- "1976.14.105.qmd"
type: grid
fields: [image, title, subtitle]
---Individual object pages presented some interesting layout challenges. Craig used Pandoc’s fenced div’s within Quarto to control layout. Images were displayed using the Quarto lightbox extension which relies on the GLightbox JavaScript library.
12.2 What Could be Improved
Projects of this nature would be more efficient with the use of transcription software. Storyboarding would be helpful as would improved audio recording equipment. Downsampled video and aggressive compression would help with hosting. As it was, the video files were large and difficult to get to servers.