NITLE sponsors an ongoing series of videoconference seminars of interest to faculty working in the digital humanities, academic technologists, and librarians at liberal arts colleges. The next one has to do with in an important tool called Omeka, which is particularly useful for managing collections of images. The following is reposted from NITLE’s website. A group will gather to watch in the Academic Technology conference room in the basement of Bosler Hall. I hope you can join us!

–Chris Francese

Sharon Leon (Center for History and New Media, George Mason University), “Focus on the Item: Teaching and Learning with Omeka”

Hosted online via NITLE’s videoconferencing platform

Description

In this conversation, Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will introduce Omeka, a free and open source web publishing platform for scholars and cultural heritage professionals, and Omeka.net, a hosted version of the software. Leon will offer an overview of the main elements of an Omeka site and some of the ways that the open source software’s functionality can be extended through the addition of plugins. Next, she will showcase some of the ways that faculty are using Omeka in liberal arts classrooms by working with students to build digital collections and constructing narrative exhibits, both as individual projects and as group work. Participants in the discussion will come away with an understanding of a range of constructive assignments for students that focus their attention on a careful examination of cultural heritage materials, and that result in non-traditional narrative assessments.

Recommended Reading

• McClurken, Jeffrey. “Teaching and Learning with Omeka: Discomfort, Play, and Creating Public, Online, Digital Collections.” In Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, edited by R. Trebor Scholz. The Politics of Digital Culture. The Institute for Distributed Creativity, 2011.

• “Introduction to Omeka 2.0,” http://vimeo.com/55973380.

Speaker

Sharon Leon is the Director of Public Projects at the Center for History and New Media and Research Associate Professor at George Mason University. Leon received her bachelors of arts degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997, and her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her book, An Image of God: the Catholics Struggle with Eugenics is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press (May 2013). Her work has appeared in Church History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. She is currently doing research on Catholicism in the United States after Vatican II. At CHNM, Leon oversees collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country. She directs the Center’s digital exhibit and archiving projects, as well as research and tool development for public history, including Omeka and Scripto. Finally, Leon writes and presents on using technology to improve the teaching and learning of historical thinking skills.

Registration

Please register online by Wednesday, February 20, 2013. Participation in NITLE Shared Academics events is open to all active member institutions of the NITLE Network as a benefit of membership and as space allows. No additional registration fee applies.

Questions

For more information about this event, please contact Rebecca Davis at rdavis@nitle.org.