In my Renaissance and Spanish Colonial art history classes, I have found that an effective way of introducing students to some core DAH methods and tools is asking them to produce an Omeka exhibition. The creation of this type of project relates to broader issues in art history and digital humanities, including classifications or labels, digital versus print sources, reading and interpreting images, access, collaboration, and visuality.[6] It also introduces students to “digitization, organization, presentation, exhibition, [and] metadata creation,” as Jeffrey McClurken (2010) notes in his article on teaching with Omeka. Omeka is a content management system (CMS) available on the web that allows users to curate digital archives and exhibitions, providing students with opportunities to think like a curator or archivist. I prefer Omeka to other CMSs, such as Drupal, because it allows my class to create both an archive of items and a narrative exhibition even if students have no programming skills. In addition, I agree with teachinghistory.org regarding Omeka’s potential to help students gain certain skills transferable to many careers (Roy Rosenzweig Center 2010–2018). In some of the classes in which I have introduced Omeka (or something similar to it), students often felt unease with a DAH project rather than the traditional research paper of approximately 8–10 pages. This unease largely stemmed from their unfamiliarity with using Omeka and presenting art-historical arguments in a non-linear fashion, but it also sometimes resulted from my own missteps: not introducing Omeka early enough in the semester, forming ineffective teams, or not scaffolding activities to help them understand how and why Omeka is an important manner in which to present knowledge.[7]

Omeka Exhibition

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I've done this two ways in the past -- works with either Omeka or Omeka.net. I have registered all students as users with administrator privileges. Together we have built a shared Omeka archive. I ask students to put the items they contribute into a collection under their name so that I can quickly identify their contributions. Administrative users can edit and delete all items, so students need to be careful not to harm one another's work. But, this user status means that each student can use any item from the archive in her/his exhibit. Then, there are two options on the exhibits: 1) Have the class build a single large exhibit where each student is responsible for a single section. The exhibit will have a single theme, but each student can choose from the available page layouts and create many pages. This option limits the ability to single out a student's work on the homepage because you can't feature sections of an exhibit. 2) Have each student build individual exhibits. This allows each person to select a different theme, and allows for the possibility of featuring individual exhibits.

Using Omeka for Teachers

Glossary of Omeka Terms