Sketch of the Washington Square Arch (from the New-York Historical Society)

I use Omeka as a major component of Creating Digital History, a graduate course for NYU’s Archives and Public History Program.  Students in the course locate, digitize and contribute digital items to the Greenwich Village History Digital Archive, learning how to create metadata, mapping their items, and creating an exhibit on some aspect of Greenwich Village History.  Some of the issues that have come up in using Omeka are:

• Tech skills versus History skills – The range of technical skills that students bring to the class varies greatly.  Omeka works well out of the box, but to create customized exhibits, students should know HTML, CSS or PHP.  Should we be attempting to teach that in addition to the digital history skills and practices? How much emphasis should we put on learning technical skills in a history course?
• Enhancing Exhibits – As students are participating in a group-created digital archive, they do not have a lot of flexibility in how they enter metadata or how the digital archive will appear.  Where they do have creative license is in their exhibits, which they create on their own, or in a self-selected team. Without having programming skills, changing the look of exhibits is not that easy. I am working with a programmer to develop a theme that can be more easily customized, enabling user-defined fonts, colors, backgrounds and navigation. I am interested in talking about the options students should have in exhibits lay out, and whether anyone has new ideas on how to structure exhibits within the section and page format that Omeka imposes.
• Structured versus Unstructured Tagging – The first two years that I taught the course, students tagged their items as they thought best, and the results were a mish mash of tags with little rhyme.  While working on a new theme, I decided that controlling tag vocabulary was more useful as a tool for searching the items and exhibits. This will be the first year we use these newer tags and I’d be interested in talking to those who have built larger collections (ours has about 900 items after 2 years) about how they use tags.

I’m interested in creating digital editions collaboratively in the classroom, having students work on mapping places, linking the text to referenced works, providing images, explanations of rhetorical devices used… Visualizations based on text mining would be amazing, too.
I’d love to hear ideas and insight from others interested in this kind of thing.

From Roger Panetta:

• What are the best platforms for developing semester-long collaborative class projects?
• What are the best ways to engage the public in the development and use of archives?
• For an interdisciplinary history of the Hudson River, what are some models of a multimedia e-textbook?

1. Student Digital Projects
Find a consistent and effective platform for the development of semester long collaborative class projects.

Upgrade the organization and programming to develop projects that are more fully digital.
Review past projects to establish a base line for moving forward in a more dynamic format.
See the following

South Street Seaport

Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909

SS Normandie: Paris and New York

Lincoln Center and Lincoln Square

Not the Hudson River

2. Discuss the state of eArchives and ways to engage the public in their use and development.

See DigitalHudson

3.  Models and support for the creation of an eText for an interdisciplinary history of the Hudson River.

I’m interested in discussing a topic that dovetails nicely into sessions that others have proposed: exploring DH-enabled alternatives to the long-form researched argument in undergraduate courses.  In a Spring course (cross-listed as English and Environmental Studies) I’ll be working with my upper-division students on a wiki and a handmade book.  Advice from those who have developed short- or medium-form research assignments using DH tools and platforms would be immensely helpful.

I agree that a general discussion on DH in the classroom, broadly under the concept of “DH pedagogy” would be useful. I would propose the following issues for discussion:

1. Lesson plans and learning outcomes: incorporating DH in the classroom
2. Student projects: ideas for structuring a realistic outcome
3. Applications and tools: for both students and instructors
4. Assessment: grading more than just content
5. Resources: publications and community engagement, beyond just the tools
6. The teaching environment: the classroom, the library, the lab

These are just a few basic things to start. I welcome any additions, suggestions, criticisms and comments.

I am very interested in a session that would be devoted to curricular applications of DH.  I would very much like to hear short presentations from all who have used DH in the classroom, or from those who have ideas they have not yet implemented on using DH in the classroom.   I have a theory that DH could potentially rejuvenate the liberal arts curriculum, bringing the humanities and the sciences closer together, and I would like very much to hear from others.