In the spring I will be teaching the second-semester, second-part to “Introduction to Digital Cultures and Creativity.” In the class, we’ll focus on creating a digital archive of letters from the Civil War (currently housed in special collections at the University of Maryland) from soup to nuts–from creating transcriptions and metadata to developing databases and designing interactive interfaces. The semester will culminate in an Omeka-powered site featuring the Civil War letters and will eventually become part of the University of Maryland Library’s permanent Fedora repository.
The program behind this class, Digital Cultures and Creativity, comprises humanities and computer science students. The class is intended to familiarize students with these technologies and to help them develop some basic skill sets they can use towards possible final projects around the archive which will include Omeka exhibits and plug-ins as well as associated multi-media projects and possibly a conceptual plan for an Omeka mobile app.
I’d like to see a session where we discuss how folks have used Omeka in the classroom. What skill sets are needed for one to feel comfortable tinkering around in Omeka and how one manages students under the hood, so to speak.
I’d be very interested in this. I’ve had students work on several projects using Omeka, including projects.umwhistory.org/jmp/ and projects.umwhistory.org/images/ from my Digital history class (dh2010.umwblogs.org/).
Hi Tanya, thanks for proposing this. I’m very interested to learn more about pedagogic uses of DH tools in general.
This sounds super interesting! Similar to cedwards, I’m interested to hear about the practical, technical, and intellectual concerns in having students engaged in DH projects. Looking forward!
This would dovetail well with my interest in teaching staff at small museums and historical societies how to use Omeka to get their collections out there on the web.
I would like to learn how to use Omeka to create digital exhibits using materials from special collections. Plus, I am also interested in learning about how it can be used in the classroom. I am looking forward to this session.
Sign me up!
I will definitely be following this from afar (Hudson Valley, NY)! Please take lots of notes, and share them, please? In January I’ll be migrating Vassar College’s historic clothing collection database to Omeka. Then, throughout the spring, students will refine that resource while they prepare for a physical exhibition. Our current database has no online access, and I’m hopeful that with Omeka students will feel more comfortable interacting with the data on more of their own terms. I would love any advice from others using Omeka with students, particularly concerning workflows, following through from initial data entry to more presentational public views, with a structure for all of us on the team to check each other’s work.