Images Lesson Plan I
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:
Find a historical image on a reputable museum’s website (see below).
Link to an image from the website
Create an “item” in Omeka that will house that image.
Enter in the relevant Dublin Core Data into Omeka
Describe what your object tells us about the history of gender, ideas, material culture (the stuff of the past), or organizing people (into religions, communities, governments, collectives…).
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.
Working with Dublin Core – Omeka
When presenting information about the past, scholars needed to agree on what are the key information items, or metadata, that should be attached to historical objects. In 1985 a group created the Dublin Core (named for Dublin, Ohio, not Ireland) . The Dublin Core is 15 key pieces of information we try to attach to all objects. Not all objects have all 15 metadata. Important: Please review the Dublin Core here before looking for an image.
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 from the Mauryan or Hellenistic periods.
Below is the page that will allow you to add a picture to one of our Collections: Gender, Ideas, Material Culture, or Organizing People. However, before doing that you need to do two things: learn about the Dublin Core Standards (see above) and how they are used in Omeka and find an image that from the Mauryan or Hellenistic periods in art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
To find an image of Hellenistic or Mauryan art, please review the Met and the British Museum. Both museum have robust search engines on their web pages. Both have two search spaces that return slightly different results. You may use any credible museum’s website (The Louvre and The Smithsonian are also good choices).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art