Omeka Content Management System 3/3

Omeka is the Content Management System (CMS) of choice for small galleries, libraries archives and museums (GLAMs). It supports the four linked data vocabularies: Dublin Core (DC), Friend of a Friend (FOAF), the Bibliographic Ontology (BIBO) and Functional Requirement of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) which it can publish using the plugin, OAI-PMH Repository, and which it can harvest from other repositories using the plugin, OAI-PMH Harvester. For those new to CMS’s they provide a basic web site structure template to which themes can be added to give style and a whole array of plugins can be added to give different functionality. The three most popular CMS are typically WordPress CMS for small sites, Joomla CMS  for medium sized companies/institutions and Drupal CMS for large institutional websites. Omeka though is designed to satisfy the institutional and academic requirements of GLAMs. Need we say more? Well yes, we have to add a caveat of the potentially dire consequence of adopting Omeka as a CMS  without first putting a clear design strategy in place. The rest of this blog then will deal with some of the issues that need to be known and addressed carefully if Omeka is to be used to its potential.

Are virtual museums worth it? 2/3

This internship is titled the UCD virtual museum proposal. My initial researches consisted of doing a critique on existing implementations of virtual museums and their associated
technologies. The main fruit of this endeavour was that I decided that a virtual museum was not the best implementation for a museum on-line. Let us investigate why not.

Archaeology and the Museum in a Technology-Driven Society 1/3

Ah, the museum. Our noble ancestors having gone ungently into the night have bequeathed us these few remnants of their erstwhile greatness. Reverentially have we erected great halls to enshrine these  tokens on a forest of plinths. The glass cases enclose and separate yet our ghostly reflections hover within.

Is the Semantic Web elegant?

Over the last half decade or so the founder, and continued evangelist, of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been urging organisations to put their data on-lineⁱ He is a champion of the Semantic Webⁱⁱ or of the Giant Global Graph as he also refers to it.ⁱⁱⁱ Such data must be organised rather more strictly than the visible content of web pages. It must correspond to a set of standards that have been built up over the last decade or so. Most of us are superficially familiar with metadata, if we dip into the source code of any web page there are typically a dozen or so meta-tags which contain information for search engines such as a description, keywords, author, rating, organisation etc. It is not particularly ‘elegant’ but it is functional and many people wile away many hours trying to optimise this information to achieve a decent indexing by search engine robots. This is our first clue as to how the semantic web works, it acts as a repository of information about the document or its content. However with the Semantic Web the sources for data can be very heterogeneous but once the data has been posted according to RDF Standards^iv consumers of the Semantic Web such as newspapers or NGO’s can navigate their way through it and use the semantic data to produce visualisations that once would have taken days or weeks in hours.

Benefits of Virtual Worlds

I would like to endorse and develop Olga Valsileva’s blog on the benefits of virtual worlds. Most of us are familiar with the negative aspects of anonymity where people unleashed from peer pressure can give free rein to  vindictive impulses.ⁱ  Yet not for a second should this distract us from the many positive aspects of the use of virtual worlds.

Digital Humanities & the Digital Humanist

The following discussion represents something of a way-station on my discovery to what exactly constitutes the Digital Humanities (DH). At  present many preconceived ideas are not quite displaced, many new not quite digested but already I have a sense that instead of attaining some all encompassing panoramic summit, metaphoric of a coherent
synthesis of ideas, I may simply arrive at a vantage point, to paraphrase Willard McCarty, offering a multitude of different vistas.ⁱ

Defining Digital Humanities

There are two discernible forms of activity in Digital Humanities. In the first there is the project and the project necessitates a project leader. This person marshals the services of a variety of specialists and/or software tools to turn a particular category of raw materials into  intelligible corpora through a process that is often referred to as transcription. The resulting corpora typically reside in a database. This is a very marketable skill-set because the baleine maws of business and national security use similar people and tools every day to sieve our digital traces, krill-like, for commercially useful data and subversive communication respectively.

Digital Humanities & Culture: Inspiration and Motivation.

As this early moment, before the hard impact of the academic literature on Digital Humanities and Culture (DHC) takes effect, I’m going to afford myself the luxury of a naive response to the question: what DHC means to me. The following verse from T.S.Eliot’s Dry Salvages serves as my touchstone.

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations — not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable.
TS.Eliot – The Dry Salvages (1941)