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The most widely used platform for the creation of online events is Omeka, created at George Mason University.
As decided in class, we’re going to try and make a pop-up exhibition about The culture of absinthe, 1880-1922.
Task: Find and upload six items online for a preliminary exhibition on absinthe. Fill out appropriate metadata in the Omeka item.
Task Guidelines
- They should relate to the visual culture of absinthe in the period from 1880 to 1920. Advertisements, paintings, etc., newspaper articles; all are fair game. Try to branch across a few different online repositories to find information. Use Google Image Search only as a last resort; you know how to find things from deeper archives that aren’t already easily discoverable.
- At least one should come with already well structured data. In most cases, the best strategy here will be to search the DPLA, Europeana, or the Library of Congress for an item. Avoid items others have uploaded.
- At least one should come with unstructured metadata, although it may be a part of something more structured. For example, if you find an old book on the Internet archive with a photograph of a prison in it, the book would be structured data and suitable for bundling on its own; while the image would require different metadata (such as the photographer and the subject).
- You should upload two different item types according to the Omeka scheme.
- You can see the Item Types in the “Item Type Metadata” field in the “Add an Item” field in Omeka.
- For instance, you might upload two “Still Images” from DPLA, two “Moving images” from YouTube.
- You should click featured for the two best of your objects, and “public” for all that are not encumbered by copyright.
- Do not upload anything covered by copyright. The 1922 restriction should be helpful in forcing this.
Other options:
If you don’t just want to search for items, there are three other things you could do to knock off–let’s say three–of the items you need to find and upload. Choose 1 if you’d rather do this.
- If anyone would rather create an exhibit of existing things rather than upload an item, do so; an exhibit is a walk-through tour of several images on a single theme. It will be difficult to do this before Sunday, I imagine.
- If you want to adjust the stylings of the page to make it less ugly and use a different theme, you can do this. Don’t revert changes someone else has already made.
- If you want to just write a paragraph or two on an intro page about what this site is, that can work too.
Site Login Instructions
- Login to the site at
benschmidt.org/omeka/absinthe/admin.
- Your username is your NEU username (e.g.; if your neu e-mail is rubio.ma@northeastern.edu, your username is ‘rubio.ma’)
- Your password is your last name as lowercase (or whatever precedes a dot in your neu username; for Marco Rubio, it would be ‘rubio’.
- You have administrator access, so if it works for one of you you may be able to create more accounts for each other.