• Anna: An Animated Historical Short

Narrative Scripts: What are the contours and elements?

• Pro-Slavery
• Anti-Slavery
• Abolitionist

Geospatial History: In your working groups, review the following two examples of geospatial digital history.

• Slave Streets, Free Streets,” Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore, https://earlybaltimore.org/ssfs and Anne Sarah Rubin, “Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore,” Current Research in Digital History, (Vol. 4, 2021), https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v04-01-slave-streets-free-streets/
• Visualizing Emancipation: http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation/ Read, and also watch the animations.

• What is the argument?
• How does the sequencing work?
• What are the key elements of evidence?
• What role does space play? (absolute space, relative space, representational space, etc.)

Omeka allows scholars to enhance their digital exhibits using an iFrame. An iFrame is an HTML code that you can insert into your Omeka’s source code via the system’s admin dashboard. It’s useful when you want to embed interactive content that’s hosted somewhere else like a video on YouTube, an interactive map using StoryMapJS, or interactive timeline like TimelineJS.

How to add an iFrame

1. Make sure in the Omeka Admin Dashboard to go to Settings then Security and then scroll down the page to HTML Filtering. Make sure the box is unchecked.

2. For a static page or an exhibit page, locate the text box where you can add and style written or media content.

3. Click on the <> icon in the text editor and then copy and paste your iframe HTML code and save.

Navigation

The Navigation section in Appearance lets you manage your Omeka’s public navigation by ordering, editing, and adding navigation links, and by selecting a homepage.

Access Navigation settings by clicking Appearance in the top navigation menu in the admin dashboard and then going to the Navigation tab in that section.

Omeka includes links to Browse Items and Browse Collections by default. If you have installed Simple Pages, the About page will also appear by default, and any published Simple Pages will be automatically added to the navigation. Likewise, once you have installed Exhibit Builder, Browse Exhibits will automatically appear in the navigation.

You may arrange navigation items in any order by dragging and dropping.

Naming and Publishing Navigation Links

The checkbox located to the left of each section or page title indicates when a navigation link is visible on the public site. For example, if you don’t want Browse Collections to display, uncheck the box.

To rename the links to different pages and sections in the site’s navigation, click the arrow found to the right of the page or section’s title to reveal the Label and URL.

Edit the word or phrase that appears in the Label text box. For instance, you may change “Browse Items” to “Sources,” or to any term or phrase you choose.

To add menu navigation for a specific collection, exhibit, or item, see the section on links, below.

Add Navigation Links

In the section, “Add a Link to the Navigation,” you may add links to other content, whether on your site or elsewhere.

Choose a Label, or title for the link, and paste in the URL to the external or internal webpage.

Click “Add Link.”

Choose a Homepage

You may change the homepage of your installation by selecting a page from the dropdown menu located under the heading “Select a Homepage,” found on the right side of the screen. The dropdown lists all of the public navigation links you created.

Select the desired page from the list and click save changes to designate a new homepage.

Reset Navigation

To reset the navigation back to Omeka default, click the Reset Navigation button below the Save Changes button and Homepage dropdown. Please note that all customizations will be lost: navigation item order and custom labels will revert to Omeka defaults, and custom links will be lost.

All, I have decided to make some adjustments so we spend a little more time workshopping in class. How this is going to work is that I will review some elements of the Omeka Exhibit, as well as finish our Timeline Lecture. During this week, we will take time to work simultaneously on our Skills Assessments for Omeka and the Timeline, which means you all have no homework except to start outlining your project and gathering items to enter into your timeline. Be prepared to workshop and troubleshoot together!

Class Prep

To prep for class on Tuesday, please work on your outline. Here is an example of a completed outline from a prior student (please note: this is her final outline, but she worked on it as she was working on the digital project):

Resources

Dublin Core and Omeka

• Lecture: What is Dublin Core? Metadata, CMS, and Omeka
  • Lecture Slides/Tutorial
• Installing Omeka 
• Dublin Core – A Beginner’s Guide
• Basic Omeka features and definitions
• Lecture: Creating and Exhibit
  • Creating an Exhibit in Omeka
• Screenshots: Creating an Omeka Exhibit
• What is a Simple Page?
• Omeka: Uploading Plugins and Themes

Timeline JS

• Timelines_JS_Part 1

November 9 – Workshop: Project design iterations (post answers on Slack #wireframe)

• Quickly sketch or wireframe three versions of your final project. The purpose of this is to identify alternative strategies for achieving your research goal and to choose the best option.
  • Who is the audience and how does each version reach that audience?
  • What expertise is necessary and how will it be accessed or acquired? List individuals you would reach out to or resources you would access in order to achieve this.
  • Which of the three versions is most feasible, or how would you combine aspects of each into a project completion plan?
  • Share out with group

Building the Pieces – Exhibits and Simple Pages, continued (November 9/11)

Skill Assessment (start in class; due by 10am on November 16):

Now that you’ve added five items to Omeka you will use these to create an exhibit. To create exhibits, we will use Omeka’s Exhibit Builder plugin which “allows you to develop online exhibits, or special web pages, that combine items from your Omeka archive and may include narrative text.”[1]

As Omeka’s Exhibit Builder documentation explains: “Exhibits are composed of pages, generally an initial page that introduces your exhibit and subsequent pages composed of the items from your Omeka database that you wish to highlight and/or relate to each other. Exhibit Builder exhibits may be as short as one page or consist of multiple pages. You can make the pages of an exhibit hierarchical.”

The layout of exhibits “is highly customizable, with the pages composed of smaller units called blocks. There are three content block types which come with Exhibit Builder … file with text, gallery, and text block.”

There is no right or wrong way to format your exhibit. You may wish to take a look at some of the examples that were discussed in last week’s class for ideas on how to format your exhibit. It often helps to draw the exhibit on paper before you begin building and the Omeka Exhibit Builder Documentation contains an excellent tutorial on using the plugin.

Your exhibit:

• should tell a story about topic that you chose for last week’s exercise.
• should have at least 2 pages for content and a page for an introduction to your exhibit and they should be broken down as you see fit according to the topic.
  • One part of this element should be done using a Simple Page
•  should include at a minimum the five items that you’ve added to your collection.
  • As you write your exhibit link these items together with prose.
    • should be between 750-1000 words.

Remember, this assignment is not only about the technology behind Omeka, but also about the craft of writing for the web.

After Class (due by 10am on November 16):

• Blog Entry #1: Write a blog post about your experience creating an exhibit and be sure to include a hyperlink to your Omeka exhibit (in draft form)

Building the Pieces – Timelines, continued (November 9/11)

In-Class (November 9/11):

• Finish Workshop: What is Timeline.JS?
  • Notes
• Review Sample timelines:
  • Key Events in the Persian Gulf Crisis
  • Battle of Appomattox 
  • Women in Computing
  • Music Inspired by “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp”
  • Timeline of Roman Catholic Popes (site in Spanish but a good example of a timeline with more than 200 entries.)
  • British Reformation in Context

Skills Assessment: Timeline (start in class on November 9), Embed timeline no later than 10am on November 16):

• For this skill assignment you will use Timeline.js to make a timeline that chronicles important developments in your topic.
  • Should contain 20 events about your topic.
    • Events should be drawn from your research.
    • An introductory slide/entry that contains a definition of your topic.  What were the major themes, events, and issues that dominate your topic? The twenty events you add to your timeline should support this statement. Consider each event a piece of supporting evidence.
    • Each event’s entry must include an accurate date, a several sentence description, links to more information where relevant, and an image if possible.
    • Each entry’s description needs to address the 5 W’s:
      • who or what is this entry about?
      • what happened?
      • when did it happen?
      • where did it happen?
      • and lastly, but most importantly, why is this event important or significant in the history of your topic? In other words, why did you choose to include this particular event on your timeline? What makes it special or important?

After Class (due by 10am on November 16):

• Blog Entry, #2: Describe any challenges or issues that arose during the creation of your timeline. What is the added value of incorporating this type of visualization?
• Once you have finished your timeline, embed your timeline into a blog post (if you also want to embed it to your Omeka exhibit, click here for instructions).

Class Prep (for November 16): 

• Read:
  • Ted Underwood, “Where to Start with Text Mining,” The Stone and the Shell, August 14, 2012.
  • Ted Underwood, “Seven Ways Humanists are Using Computers to Understand Text,” The Stone and the Shell, June 4, 2015.
  • Dan Cohen, “Searching for the Victorians,” October 4, 2010.
  • Explore: Cameron Blevins, “Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary”
• Watch:
  • What we learned from 5 million books (A TED video)

Dear Reader:

(The hypothesis/claim/assertion/research question) I want to convince you that…/I want to recast my topic from X to demonstrate Y…/I want to provide a more nuanced interpretation of…/I want to show the significance of…/I want to examine X evidence to…/I want to reassess my topic based on…

(The summary of evidence/sources/logic) The main reasons why you should “believe” me are that…

(Checks the significance of your topic) You should care about my topic because…

From, Love, Forever indebted,
Me

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Please let me know if there are any medical issues that I need to know about.

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If you aren’t familiar with it, please also consult the “Understanding Plagiarism” tutorial created by GMU Libraries: https://library.gmu.edu/tutorials/plagiarism

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Dates and deadlines listed on this page include full semester:  Fall 2021 Academic Calendar | Office of the University Registrar | George Mason University (gmu.edu)