Tag Archives: digital humanities

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OMEKA: Web Publishing for Archives, Scholars, Libraries, Museums, and More

  September 11, 2014

OMEKA is an open source web-site builder that was designed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University with folks in mind who need to produce a digital collection of items that is fairly complex or intricate and needs to function as a digital archive or museum or library exhibit or perhaps even a scholar’s web site.  I’m particularly interested in the possibilities of OMEKA to build a site to share scholarship with other researchers as well as to use in teaching.  The most current version of OMEKA, as of July 14, 2104, is 2.2.2.  Though I have not yet used this software, I have begun investigating what others have done with it and what they have to say about it. The following are a few things I’ve discovered. Several example web sites built with OMEKA: Martha Washington Biography site: Project developed by George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The Making of the History of 1989 site: Project developed by German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Florida Memory site: Project administered by the Florida Department of State, Division of Library and Information Services. Center for the History of Medicine site: Harvard University  Here’s a link to a video from the OMEKA web site giving a tour of the software. Below is an article evaluating an early version of OMEKA: Using Omeka to Build Digital Collections: The METRO Case Study by Jason Kucsma, Metropolitan New … Continue reading

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Making E-reading more Productive in the Classroom

  September 3, 2014

One of the major projects that I will be working on this fall is a project coming out of the history department’s efforts to re-imagine the US history survey (2110). This is perhaps the key course offering of the entire history department. Certainly, it is the primary, and in many cases only, exposure that GSU students will have to history as an academic discipline. Two faculty members in the department, Rob Baker & Jeff Youngs, have been working for over a year on their version of the course, which will be a hybrid class featuring a custom-built and custom-written multimedia textbook. The course is being offered this fall for the first time as a hybrid course, meaning that students meeting physically only 1 time per week, using the other course period to engage with video segments, online activities (such as quizzes), and the traditional staple of 2110, reading assignments from a textbook coupled with a hefty dose of primary documents. As a SIF fellow, I’ll be helping primarily with editing ‘raw’ video segments, most of which take the form of conversations or debates between historians about important historical topics, adding visuals to the footage to make a more engaging viewing experience. Today, though, I want to talk a little bit out the readings for Rob & Jeff’s version of 2110. Both the primary sources and the textbook itself exist as PDF files, which students access and read through D2l (Desire-to-Learn, GSU’s commercial class portal pages). Having all the readings available … Continue reading

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Using Technology to Democratize Archaeological Knowledge

  September 3, 2014

This is my first post as a member of the CURVE project–and I’d love to introduce a little about myself and my goals while working at such an awesome space. For anyone who doesn’t know me–my name is Robert Bryant. I’m currently an M.A. student in the Anthropology department, studying archaeology with a focus on software/hardware methodology within a praxis framework. That sounds really official sounding, so to make it sound more exciting–I’m heavily interested in freely sharing archaeological and historical information over through the democratic access of the internet.  I think everyone should have equal access to our shared cultural heritages and getting all data online, accessible, and more importantly engaging, fosters an extremely community forward interpretation of the past. How can this be accomplished? The term ‘public’ has positive connotations but can easily fall short on civic engagement–or “Working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.” So, how can open public access to these collections be extended directly to its communities and stakeholders without endangering artifacts and carefully organized datasets? The answer lies in current technological innovation. With the advent of high-speed internet data transfer rates,  data digitalization technologies(such as the recently acquired NextEngine scanner at CURVE), and the wide-spread availability of computing devices capable of processing these large datasets—like smart phones, tablets and … Continue reading