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'Released by Ethnoarchitecture.org' showcases personal - professional notes related to
Ethnoarch webmaster's current work. In other words, this is Ethnoarch's blog.
The section also details new content added to the site, technical improvements and, in general, how Ethnoarch.com is going.
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Database: Getting there… (Get ready to register!)
December 2, 2006
Ethnoarch has been apparently inactive over the past three months, with no new notes or articles published. Paradoxically however, I have been working on the project harder than ever. I decided to hold what I was doing and publish everything together. Everything means not only the groups' database, which is now ready (translation, templates and data are already online, although not public yet), but also the countries database, which I created afterwards, and the types database, which is set up since January. Everything is ready now, and making it public is only a matter of a few days. Before that, I am going to do a little clean-up and reorganization in the home page so people can easily access all that material. This is necessary because it is a lot of material, in total more than 7,500 new entries, all to be published at once.
Yesterday was a very important day for this project, as it was the first time it was presented publicly (in the "real world" as opposed to the virtual world, where the site was introduced two years ago). This happened at the BEDA IASTE pre-conference (BEDA stands for Berkeley Environmental Design Association and IASTE for International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments). Five of the presenters that are going from Berkeley to the IASTE conference in Bangkok delivered their in-progress papers for feedback and discussion with faculty and students. I offered a sneak preview of the material not yet public and reflected on the implications of a project like this. The feedback was fantastic and very encouraging. It made me certain that after all I haven't been just wasting time playing with my computer instead of doing useful stuff.
One of the main issues discussed during the feedback section was related to participation and (or versus) authorship in the Internet era. This is a crucial issue, given that Ethnoarch's database is designed to be participative. Since it is going to be participative, I am encouraging everybody to register in advance, in order to take full advantage of the site once the database material is published. Registering is easy, free and it only asks from you to have a real email address, in order to make sure that I am dealing with real people. The way of verifying it is that you will receive an email from the site after registering, prompting you to complete the registration. Most likely the message will not show up in your inbox folder but in your spam folder, because mail servers usually block automated messages coming from websites. The message contains a link, which you need to click on in order to complete the registration. That's all you need to do.
In order to keep in touch with the site after registration, please make sure to "white list" the address in the email so your email program or service doesn't send future emails coming from Ethnoarch to the spam folder again. You will know that the white-listing worked because you'll receive a second email confirming that your registration was successful.
After that second email, you will not receive any more emails from the site unless you opt to receive them or you need them (you forgot your password, for example). I might break that rule eventually, but I don't plan to do it often. My estimate is to do it at most once per year, if I think it is important to send members a report or newsletter on the general progress of the project during that year.
It is important to register, because only registered visitors will be able to use the participative areas of Ethnoarch's database as well as the forum, the possibility to contact other members who accept so, and in general the possibility to be part of a virtual community dedicated to explore issues of culture and architecture in real world communities.
About this article
I previously published a note about the crucial update to Ethnoarch in relation to the traditional buildings database, which is the main, and long delayed, purpose of this website. I was so busy working on the database that even publishing the note took two months, but I am happy to report, three more months after, that I finished the work. The translation work ended, and also the very critical online importing of the bilingual database, which turned out to be a considerably heavy document to put online, 20 megabytes, something that made the uploading work a little complicated. But there is more than that; more databases are ready, and the work in general is only a few days away from being public. This is, then, a good moment to register as a member.
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