Workshops

You can choose from one of three workshops being offered on Saturday morning:

• Introduction to Omeka
• Introduction to Text Encoding
• Building Collections to Support Digital Scholarship

Introduction to Omeka
Amanda French, THATCamp
Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable database; and to create attractive web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. We’ll also look at some examples of pedagogical use of Omeka in humanities courses and talk about assigning students to create digital archives in individual or group projects.

Introduction to Text Encoding
Mark Caprio and Hailie Posey, Providence College
This workshop will introduce the basic ideas of text encoding with the TEI. We’ll talk about what text encoding is, what tools are available for encoding texts, and how to get started actually doing it. Then we’ll do some low-tech hands on, and talk further about how to use the code to illustrate ideas, index concepts, and even find out new things.

Building Collections to Support Digital Scholarship
Ian Graham (Head, Archives, Special Collections, and Conservation) and Jenifer Bartle (Manager, Digital Scholarship Initiatives), Wellesley College
One of the most concrete and powerful ways that Library and Archives staff can contribute to the goals of digital scholarship is to provide digital collections that are robust, flexible, and responsive to the needs of their communities. This workshop provides an overview of important aspects of digital collection building, including: creating a culture of collaborative digital collection development, digitization and file format decisions, display and access issues, collaborative approaches to metadata creation, preservation concerns, and strategies for incorporating digital collections in research and pedagogy using open source tools.

If you have ideas about an additional workshop you’d like to lead, or participate in, please let us know!

For examples of workshop at past THATCamps see:

• THATCamp New England’s workshop series
• THATCamp Virginia’s workshops series
• THATCamp Southeast’s workshop series