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Very brief notes from my session on using Omeka.

Omeka is best suited for collections-based sites, where individual pieces, ie items, are described with Dublin Core metadata.

General categories of most Omeka sites: archiving, exhibiting, collecting, teaching.
See examples sites in the Showcase wiki (many highly customized sites): omeka.org/codex/View_Sites_Powered_by_Omeka

Do I need the downloadable version that I host or the Omeka.net hosted version?

• Comparison chart Org vs Net
• Downloadable: Omeka.org/download. Good idea to visit Documentation’s preparing to install, helps you find what you need ahead of time, suggestions for hosting.
• Hosted: Sign up for a free account, to test out Omeka basic funcationality and admin UI, or start building a site.

As with any site, you will want to set goals for the site, outline content—and know exactly what will be available on the site, and know your audience.

Try these Site Planning Tips to help you think about Omeka as a system and what it can do for you. There are many links to the documentation from this page that explain items, item types, collections, exhibits, and simple web pages.

Omeka’s core application is an archiving system, with an item as a building block, and it is extended through plugins. Front-facing design is controlled by a theme.

Start with our fantastic documentation: omeka.org/codex; when you have questions, post to forums: omeka.org/forums.

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Lots of great themes are already emerging from the pre-conference posts; allow me to add a couple thoughts about mobile, which is one of the things that I’ll be interested in discussing and learning more about.

My digital humanities research explores how one can curate a city through mobile devices. Over the past several months, this culminated in the release of Cleveland Historical (clevelandhistorical.org) with a recent news story about the project here . Our work at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities has taken this challenge of curation into multiple educational, institutional, and digital environments over the years: from simple websites (such as that on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens) to street-level history kiosks to an extensive (700+) collection of oral histories. Our work is all crowdsourced through community-based processes, emphasizing scads of project partners sharing similar goals. Our number of partners exceeds 1000 individuals and organizations, for example.

We built Cleveland Historical using Omeka as a CMS. It includes iOS, Android, basic mobile stylesheets, and a web presence. It includes multiple layers of interpretive materials and stories that are geolocated, tours, and social media integration. We are currently making the tour features richer, integrating QR codes (easy), and building a version for regional museums (that has a different navigation strategy.)  Lots of other cool features could easily be developed, including content added directly from mobile devices and new interfaces.

We designed the project to be extensible and scalable beyond Cleveland.

In fact, Cleveland Historical is the first instance of a broader project we’re calling Mobile Historical, which is essentially a mobile publishing platform that sits atop a lightly customized Omeka installation. We will soon open a second instance of what we are terming Mobile Historical in collaboration with initiative partner Larry Cebula at Eastern Washington University. We are exploring collaborations with several other partners to help us work out the technological kinks associated with extending the platform to multiple cities/institutions. We are seeking to make the cost of each new instance ridiculously cheap (seeking only to recover costs associated with labor, maintenance, and sustainability of the mobile client.) Toward this end, we have begun moving toward connecting with Omeka.net in conjunction with our lovely friends a CHNM, hopefully making it available as part of the Omeka.net ecosystem early next year. Also, as we do this, we’ll also be developing an open-source version, which is further down the line (time-wise.) But, first things first–extending the project to a couple other sites.

Interestingly, the most critical part of our work is not the digital, but the humanities. How do we create interpretive stories for mobile, in conjunction with multiple communities as works of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement? Curating cities and collections happens collaboratively. Our larger work seeks to create a vehicle for scholars, GLAMs, and communities themselves to take charge of cultural interpretation by giving them both tools AND an intellectual community of best practices and approaches. Building this community and these best practices are well underway in different mobile settings. Even so, extending, building, and sustaining dialogues mobile interpretation is as critical to what we’re about as is the technology.

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Teacher-scholars unite! I’ve been testing some possible applications of Omeka archives and Zotero as collaborative tools organizing the development of literary research methodologies classes, and I’d like to take the wonderful opportunity of THATcamp to begin developing the structure and content of project I see as The Next Step. I’d like your help to discuss, plan, and/or block out a template for a full-class, full-term student project that works toward researching, annotating, and encoding a small number (perhaps just one per term?) of thematically-selected texts in our shamefully neglected special collections room. Ideally, this project would therefore include study of the texts themselves, research about their material and digital existences (using the ESTC, Google Books, and something like Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker)  a basic practical/theoretical framework for DH, collaboratively writing a useful and accessible overview and producing an XML version of the text. Each term or year, students and faculty would work together to select, create, and grow the entries according to a broader thematic logic that can expand over time, based on the strengths of the collections. I’d like to use this template as a basis for a grant application that would allow the project to grow and, ultimately, link faculty, students, and resources at area institutions.

I think this would be a viable model for an advanced undergraduate seminar, and it has the benefit of drawing together a variety of practical and theoretical facets of the digital humanities. Some questions to consider include how we can best design the arc of the class? What specific parts of the project would have as their goal which practical or conceptual outcomes? What are the technological hurdles to be 1.) aware of, 2.) avoided, or 3.) embraced? What should the Omeka site look like/allow, in order to help the project grow over time? How might faculty help students approach the text encoding portion of the project? What are the most useful introductory text-based sources providing a theoretical framework for such a practical project? And what might steps after The Next Step look like?