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.