Week 10
(M 12 Nov) Research day 1 — collective exhibit
Using AntConc and the geographic information files from Lorimer, work with your partners to sketch out an outline of your collective exhibit in Omeka S.
What kinds of visual content will we use for our collective exhibits (word clouds? density plots? open images? How will text and image be integrated within your exhibit?
(W 14 Nov) Voting and submitting our first data to WikiMedia
Blog 5: What did you learn from the “text mining” exercise using AntConc with the collective exhibit project ? How helpful were the digital reading tools to get you to pay attention to the details of the text? What was not convenient about it? (due 24 November)
Week 11
(M 19 Nov) Research day 2 – personal exhibits
Experiment with how else you can use page design to contribute to the quality of your exhibit. Then, we will discuss this in pairs. Third, try a new plugin (CSS editor, Derivative images, Docs Viewer, Exhibit Image Annotation, Hide Elements, SimpleContactForm, etc.). What does that plugin add to the quality of your exhibit?
(W 21 Nov) NO CLASSES (in lieu of Mawlid)
23 (M 26 Nov) Writing Center workshop for personal exhibits (with Nkem)
By class today, have a rough draft of your personal exhibit ready for the writing center workshop. A sample exhibit (an introduction, 3 or 4 pages, with items included and content blocks partially filled in can be found here).
Other things you might want to do before the workshop:
CHANGE OF THEME: If you are interested in changing the theme, follow instructions here. OR download the zipped theme. From dashboard in your web hosting go to file manager -> public_html -> [name of exhibit] -> themes and upload the zipped theme here and then click on extract. When you are done, you can edit your exhibit and select the theme from the pull down menu. Finally, delete the [nameoftheme].zip file.
FIXING THE ABSENT THUMBNAIL ISSUE: If you are only getting a link or an empty image once you have uploaded your items, then you need to fix what is called the ImageMagick directory path. To do that, in Omeka admin -> settings -> general you have a number of fields including ImageMagick directory path. You should enter /usr/bin as the path. Click test to make sure that it worked. You should get a message to that effect. Next, upload a new item and the thumbnail should be automatically generated. The bad news is that you need to reload all the other images to get them to generate, but you can leave the metadata as is. (You do not need to recreate all the items, only upload the image again.) Just open the page with items and click edit for the item. Go to files, then delete the existing image and upload it again. It should generate a thumbnail.
Additional questions about Omeka are answered here: https://omeka.org/classic/docs/.
24 (W 28 Nov) Lab on Collective Exhibits
Blog 6: Design, Technology and Curation: Use this blog to comment on issues of the interrelation of art, design, technology, open content and academic research that have arisen so far in the creation of the two digital exhibits in the course. What have been the major implications of linking physical “digitized” objects in a virtual environment? (due 5 Dec)
Weeks 12 and 13 Lab – Finalizing semester projects, write-ups, student presentations and critiques and public presentations
25 (M 3 Dec) Learning how to back up your final semester work (in NYU FDA), keeping your web hosting after your graduate
Instructions here.
Critiquing Omeka and Neatline
Schmidt, Reflections of an Omeka User
Svensson, “Intellectual Middleware,” from ch 3 of Big Digital Humanities
Discussion: What are some of your critiques of the Omeka and Neatline platforms? What about those of the readings? What would you like to be able to do that you can’t/you don’t know how to? Is there something about the architecture you would like to change? Something about the design or the interface? Do you think that it will work if it is “exported” culturally around the world? How does Omeka compare to WordPress?
26 (W 5 Dec), 27 (10 Dec) Presentations in Class of Final work
Your individual and collective digital exhibit should have an About and Reflections page in addition to any other content pages. The About page should explain for the average reader how you came up with this topic, the source of the materials, the principle of Creative Commons, open access and thorough metadata as well as anything else you want to say about the genesis and structure of the project. The Reflections page should include our critical reflections using the readings and the discussion in class 24.
Blog 7: (you must do this blog posting) The final blog should deliver lessons learned and your personal reflections on both the individual and collective curation process. You should return to the initial questions of the course of authorship, collecting, curation and audience. What kinds of materials are available in the world for your interests in academic curation? What are missing? What should we focus on creating? Here please explain what parts of the collective project you worked on specifically and what the challenges were. Also, you should make explicit reference to places in your project using links, screengrabs, etc. This is your opportunity to look back on the class, the learning outcomes, the course description and to reflect on what you have done (and want to learn more about). (due 16 December)
28 (12 Dec) – no class
Please complete your final blog, individual and collective exhibit by Sun 16 Dec, 11:59pm. NO EXTENSIONS.