Thank you to everyone who participated in this workshop, which was held by Andrew French on March 3, 2021. You can watch the recording of this and our past workshops on the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) YouTube page. Our next and final workshop will be held on March 24, 2021: XML Transformations with JavaScript and XSLT.
In this workshop, participants were introduced to Omeka Classic, a popular web publishing platform. Omeka is widely used for digital projects that aim to collect primary resource items and share them publicly in digital exhibitions. This platform allows users the ability to easily navigate and manage the backend of their own Omeka website.
The workshop participants were brought up to speed with the basic components that make up an Omeka site. These are the items, or resources, that are added to the archive, the collections that group the items together, and the tags that link the items together through shared keywords. Another significant part of any Omeka site is the use of metadata to describe the resources in the archive, and Omeka uses the Dublin Core metadata standard. The popular plugin the Exhibit Builder was also explored, and this plugin allows users to curate their own exhibitions to be shared. To get a sense of how all of these components work together, the participants spent the final portion of the workshop working on a shared Omeka site, where they had the opportunity to add their own items, describe them with metadata, and then use these items to create their own exhibits.
If Omeka Classic interests you, and you would like to learn more about the platform and how to use it for your own projects, feel free to check out the resources below:
Omeka Classic
Omeka Classic requires installation to use. For some information on how to get and set up Omeka Classic:
- Main website for download: https://omeka.org/classic/
- Omeka Classic User Manual: https://omeka.org/classic/docs/
- Tutorial for installing Omeka Classic: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/installing-omeka
- Tutorial on how to create an exhibit: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/creating-an-omeka-exhibit
Omeka.net
If you are not comforatble with installing Omeka Classic yourself and setting up your own web hosting, you can use Omeka.net which is very similar. Here is a tutorial on how to use Omeka.net, which also shows how to add items and group them into collections like you would using Omeka Classic: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/up-and-running-with-omeka
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Omeka uses the metadata elements drafted by the DCMI on all of their sites. For descriptions and examples of these 15 core elements (split into three parts by category):
- Content: https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/usageguide/2000-07-16/sectb/#content
- Intellectual Property: https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/usageguide/2000-07-16/sectc/#property
- Instantiation: https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/usageguide/2000-07-16/sectd/#instantiation
Corporation for Digital Scholarship
Omeka is a Digital Scholar project. For more information on the Corporation for Digital Scholarship and to check out the other Digital Scholar projects: https://digitalscholar.org/
Andrew French is a second year graduate student in the Digital Humanities Master’s Program. He works with the Center for textual Studies and Digital Humanities as a Research Fellow. His research interests include digital pedagogy and issues regarding equity and accessibility.
