For a recent class assignment to make a Collection Builder exhibit, I created an exhibition of the first 10 boss fights from the mainline Legend of Zelda video games, specifically the final blow in each boss fight (https://beeyop.github.io/zelda-death-blow/). What weapon has to be used? Who’s involved in the fight? What part of the timeline, via the Hyrule Historia, does it come from? This was an expansion of a previous project where I looked at repeat objects in the Legend of Zelda series (https://sydbauer.wixsite.com/scaling-stories/zelda ).

I immediately ran into some issues. I couldn’t get the YouTube links to show properly if I wanted to start them at a specific time. I also struggled for a while trying to figure out why a thumbnail wasn’t showing, only to discover that it was an errant capitalization. Frustrations aside, Collection Builder did a really nice job of creating a professional-looking digital exhibition space. For that, I think it fulfills a valuable niche.

I only had one major criticism of the Collection Builder exhibits we examined in class: all the websites felt the same. By the second collection I looked at, that sameness made me gloss over and lose interest in the content. The visual layout was pretty much identical, even with different themes and some custom CSS. I think this is indicative of a larger issue. I believe many cultural institutions view tasks like metadata curation as mechanical, logical chores. In reality, it is a fusion of artistic skills and data skills. If the visuals and experience don’t feel curated to the data, then it is a cute toy, not scholarship or a tool. Some of the exhibits we examined did have a cohesive feel and told a clear story, but I don’t know that they did more than a well-annotated photo gallery.

I think Collection Builder is a gift for smaller museums, organizations, and student projects as a tool for displaying work when you’ve got one, maybe two people working and there isn’t room to expand. In some environments, finding someone with the education and experience in both curatorial work and digital tools would be very hard. Hiring online is an option, but then you run into control issues and management duties. In a single-person or very small team space, hiring out isn’t saving any time or workload the way I think Collection Builder does. I think the well-written and well-organized guide does most of the work of making it a better alternative for that use case. Anytime I wanted to know how to do something with my collection, the guide had an easy-to-understand, easy-to-find, simple process. I have some background in using GitHub and VS Code, but I heard from other people in the class that they also appreciated how well thought out the guide is.

What concerns me is that every time I see a tool like Collection Builder that makes what seems to be a mechanical task, like cataloging, display, or access, easier, I see organizations pushing people to do more with less instead of hiring someone to do these things or paying people appropriately for an increased scope of their job. Budget issues often become the scapegoat, but that is no excuse. Most individuals’ budgets are equally, if not more, stressed than those of any organization they work for. That’s not Collection Builder’s fault by any means, but it is something to note, especially as we decide when to use what tools and what projects to pursue.

In Paige Morgan’s blog post “How to Get Your Digital Humanities Project Off the Ground,”¹ Morgan heavily cautions against making a digital humanities project part of your dissertation. The current status of digital humanities projects in academia is reflected in Morgan’s own experience creating projects while working on a separate dissertation. Morgan notes there were times when the dissertation had to take precedence and the projects suffered. That shouldn’t have to be the case, but from what I have experienced and witnessed, not much has changed between when Morgan wrote the blog post in 2014 and today.

While the cautioning is absolutely valid, and a realistic way of looking at the field and the way academia treats digital humanities projects, I think this advice exacerbates the problem. It’s going to take some people who are willing to push back and say, “No, this is a valid form of scholarship,” to really upend the idea that the only valid way to present mastery over information or share scholarship is the often recursive ouroboros of academic paper and book publishing.

With the rapid pace at which people are expected to graduate, to write, to do, we’ve lost a lot of the time to reflect and a lot of the purpose of academic scholarship. Academia must slow the speed and return to a contemplative pace or start accommodating other modes of scholarship as equally valuable and equally valid (preferably both).