Images Lesson Plan I - History of East Asia

You will learn to add historical sources (images) to the Omeka content management system as items, and properly document your creation of the item in Omeka.

Background: Images of historical objects provide a rich source base for us to understand the world. As we move into more developed societies, such as ancient Greece and India, we have many more objects, now stored in museums, to inform history.

For this assignment you are going to:

  1. Find two historical images on a reputable museum’s website (see below).

  2. Link to the images from the website

  3. Create a collection in Omeka that will house the images.

  4. Enter in the relevant Dublin Core Data into Omeka

  5. Make a historical argument for what the objects tell us about the period in which they were produced.

When we use pictures of objects, there are some common rules that historians have agreed to use about what information is associate with a digital image. If a picture is our “source” then the information that we attach to the “source” is our metadata. You use metadata when you tag someone in a picture- the picture is the “source” and the information you add to help explain the source is the metadata.

Login to our Omeka site and click “Item” and “And an Item”

Once you have this screen, you can open another tab or window to find an image of a historical object.

http://www.clevelandart.org

https://new.artsmia.org

You are going to create a collection and call it your name. Your objects should be from SE Asia.

Sample Image: How to create and save an image for an Omeka item.

Once you’ve found an item from the pre–1500 CE era, you need to save that image to import it into Omeka. You can do this by right clicking an image and “Save Image As.” Save the image as a jpg, and call it what it is called on the museum website, in this case “Glass mosaic jar.” MOST IMPORTANTLY: You need to copy a stable or permalink for the page so that anyone who sees your image in Omeka can click on the link and see the source. A stable link to an image ends in .jpg.

You’ll need both the image and the information to accurately add an Omeka item.

Adding new item to Omeka collection

Now you are ready to create a new item in Omeka. I like to put the Omeka page right next to the museum page. NOTE: when copying the description, I’ve put it in quotation marks to indicated that the measurements are not my own, but the museums. Creating credible online exhibits demands attention to transparency (what is my work, what is others’ work) and citations (who created what.) We are not creating historical mashups.

Linking your item.

in the source box, write the name of the museum, highlight the museum, click the “Use HTML” box, and click on the link button to create a link.

Add the link from the page of your object.

This link should be the permalink to your object, not the URL of the museum homepage. Tell Omeka to Open Link in a New Window.

Contributor, Rights, Collection and the rest.

You are the Contributor of this item to our collection. It’s important to included your name as Contributor, otherwise I can’t give you a grade.

The rights to all these items are held by the museums. We use the images only for educational purposes. Please note that in the rights section.

Fill in the rest of the fields as you have the information- set as “Public” and then hit "Add item.

Grading Criteria

Student:

Added an item to an Omeka collection

Correctly added Dublin Core Metadata to the item.

Correctly linked to two image from a museum website.

Wrote one paragraph for each object that included a thesis about what the object tells us about the period studied, and includes a citation to the readings for the week.

Paragraph is 200 words (approximately)