Archives, Encoding, and Students, Oh My!

I’m looking forward to some great discussions on this topic… Cathy, I’m really eager to hear about your project, what kind of class you’re integrating an archive into, and what kinds of purposes you see it fulfilling; I’ve mostly used my archive for thinking about how to teach students how do research and contribute to discussion in the full-text and web-searchable environments we now have, given the somewhat limited skills many of my students come in with. I think that card catalogs and print indices were particularly good at helping researchers think clearly about what they were looking for, while being open enough to follow trails and find unexpected connections (is there a way in an Omeka archive to relationships visible?); now, sometimes there’s just a search term and a result, nevermind the rest. Getting students to generate mini-networks for specialized research projects can be a great way of teaching research methodologies themselves, though I admit, I need to think about it more systematically.

Patrick, I you have a definite advantage here! I know the theme offerings and features already available can be tweaked, but it does require a better knowledge of PHP–most instructors interested in Omeka don’t really have that knowledge (like me!). Developing a couple of themes for classroom use would be fabulous, or even a plugin to enable some customization without going into the PHP. For instance, I found it very tough to customize the “add a resource” widget. As you suggest, and as my limited experience confirms, some of the things that students found difficult were more about how to select resources. Perhaps we could think about ways to focus attention in the Dublin Core data or in the contributors’ options on provenance and annotation? Or ways easily to alter the headings/titles/language used throughout the site to accord with pedagogical ends–instead of “collectors,” for instance, “researchers”; altering the help text associated with contributing; building connections; and so on. I haven’t returned to the project since I last taught the class I’d used it with (and now, some things in the class site I’d developed are defunct because I haven’t updated), so I would welcome a brainstorming session about what facets of the record are most useful for students and for what purposes. Of course, this means considering instructional design, too. Exciting!

There’s also a conversation waiting to be had about copyright, fair use, and so on–I’ve uploaded things, for instance, from ECCO, which I’m sure the folks at Gale would be less than happy about…. Sorry for the chaos of/lack of revision in this response–I just wanted to get some thoughts down. Two weeks!

Amanda, how awful is this? I completely missed that plugin–but I certainly will check it out now. My experience with TEI is also limited to projects that others had set up–the EEBO and ECCO encoding projects use exiting DTDs, as far as I can tell. I guess one could use an existing DTD, providing it gives you what you want? At any rate, I’m going to play around with the plugin, and hopefully that will give me some additional ways to articulate what a class archive/encoding project using Omeka would/could look like.