The University of British Columbia - Okanagan

The Centre for Social, Spatial, and Economic Justice at The University of British Columbia Okanagan, in partnership with Métis Nation British Columbia, has undertaken research to document the history and practices of Métis people in British columbia and across North America.  During almost three years as an Undergraduate Research Assistant I had significant role in making this documentation process possible, and making the valuable information accessible to the Métis community as well as academic researchers.

Historical Document Database

The document database organizes thousands of documents, connecting a third party document managent system with custom software solutions in order to make historical information accessible to researchers and, more importantly, the Métis community.

Each document within the database is manually indexed against thousands of terms; the original HTML form interface quickly became burdensome to operate as the database grew.  What orginally began as a project to make the indexing process simpler became a necessity as the overwhelming size of the original interface began to cause data corruption.  I was able to implement a dynamic JavaScript / jQuery based interface for the system to reduce the visual complexity for users, and apply updates in an atomic manner which resolved the corruption issues.

Mapping

An important aspect of the documentation project is to represent the geographic nature of much of the information.  To facilitate this I was involved in utilizing the Google Maps API to create several map-based interfaces, and spent significant effort improving their usability and accessibility.  The large size of the dataset was a continual challenge, and required significant optimizations to the JavaScript used and the implementation of many dynamic features to reduce the amount of information being operated on at one time.

Harvesting Practices

The Metis community places great importance on environmental stewardship, and wanted to better record historical and contemporary harvesting practices.  I assisted in the development of data collection systems and reporting interfaces to unify the separate information collections.

System Architecture

In order to improve the development environment for the growing number and variety of projects, I implemented substantial system improvements such as a common page template system, a configuration framework, and a code library of other reusable tools.