In an effort to make a space for digital historians to communicate and collaborate, I created a “Commons in a Box” site: digitalhistorians.org/.

THATCamp offers a gathering of individuals from many disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and that mix of experiences is one of the things that make it such a great opportunity for collaboration. But, so much work in the digital humanities is driven forward by literary and media studies, I’d like to propose that the historians in the crowd take an hour to talk about ways to form a loose affiliation of those individuals who share our disciplinary commitments and questions.

I think it might make sense to strengthen/create some channels that will let us share questions and methods with others historians (academic, public, independent, and enthusiast). I’m not sure that the outcome of this session might be: a working group? a group blog? an aggregator of conference sessions and meeting events? What do you think we need to grow the sense of community and innovation among digital historians?

Instructor: Sharon Leon
Requirements:

1. A laptop
2. Sample materials (several images, pdfs, and audiovisual files would be great)
3. A free Omeka.net Basic account – sign up at www.omeka.net/signup

In this hands-on workshop for beginners, we will concentrate on the ways that humanities scholars and cultural heritage professionals can use Omeka (omeka.org) to build of collections-based websites. Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform that offers a flexible way for users without a lot of technical expertise to publish digital collections and to embed those collection materials in a range of contextual data. During our time together, we will cover:

• the basic structure of an Omeka repository
• configuring and choosing a theme for an Omeka site
• adding items to an Omeka repository (Dublin Core Metadata, file upload, etc.)
• creating and using Collections to group materials
• extending the basic Omeka functionality with plugins
• creating many items quickly
• using controlled vocabularies with metadata fields
• creating relationships among items and collections
• using Exhibit Building to create exhibits
• collecting materials and stories from visitors
• integrating Omeka with Zotero, Wikipedia, and other social networking sites