At the Center for History and New Media I’ve had the opportunity to be on the web development team for Omeka, a “simple and flexible system for organizations, cultural institutions, and individuals to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the web.” Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform that makes it easy to “show your stuff”, be that text, images, video, or any sort of file imaginable. Our tool allows administrators to intuitively create and organize exhibits with these items.
CHNM was recently awarded a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund Omeka’s development, and we’re currently in private beta. If you’re interested in getting on the invitation list to download and test Omeka, email us and we’ll notify you when there are additional spaces. You’ll also get current information about Omeka’s development at the Omeka blog.
One of the exciting things about Omeka is that it;s extensible for ‘oth themes and plugins. Similar to WordPress, Omeka allows administrators to FTP files into the respective directories, then easily activate extended features. There are tons of possibilities with this. Many projects at CHNM were started using earlier versions of Omeka and deal with collecting oral histories, like the September 11th Archive. Omeka has a contribution plugin so that you can perform similar collecting.
With the passing of Roy Rosenzweig, founder and director of CHNM, we’ve set up a site called Thanks, Roy to gather stories and images about him. The site honors his contribution to us all, and is run by Omeka. Whether you knew Roy or not, I’d encourage you to take some time to visit the site. The contributions so far are nothing short of heartfelt and inspiring. Thanks, Roy.
The New York Times website is featuring an “interactive graphic” – visualizing the wealthiest Americans in history when wealth is measured as a percentage of the economy. Not only are these men ordered by wealth, but their lifespan is visualized vertically. The resulting graphic is both easy to use and understand.
I’m reminded of the Digital Campus podcast where Jeremy Boggs was a guest, discussing web design in academia. At one point in the episode Designed to Make You Think, Jeremy said:
As academics we’re already thinking about user interfaces. The way we present text in a book – the way we organize text in a book, if we want to move a sentence into the middle of a paragraph or if we want to move paragraphs around. The way we title paragraphs – this is all information architecture. This is all user interfaces. A book is a user interface.
The interactive graphic is effective is due of its user interface – predominately displaying the photos and bios of the businessmen, while also including supplementary information such as their life span, or a link to their obituary. It uses a simple and sexy user interface that links to further contextualizing information, and avoids overloading users with too much information. One of the shortcomings of the American Studies Tagline I created is that the visualization remains too cluttered — the approach of the NY Times is much more effective in that regard.
Evolution is a data-mining tool that searches archived information including cached websites, DNS records, phone records and IP email addresses. This information has been on the net for a long time, however the goal of Evolution is to map this information together and visualize a person’s online activity. The web version is in beta and client not yet downloadable, but this project has some startling possibilities that have me concerned about privacy.
Searching someone’s name, you can see that they own a domain name. A whois search will give that person’s home address, which can then be used to search for their home phone number. Searching their email address, you may find out they use a certain alias on several websites, where you may uncover other accounts and websites they use to find out where they work, or who they’re dating. If they have a myspace or linkedin page, those have been cached as well – don’t forget their blog too! You don’t need Evolution to do these things, but it promises to make this all possible with one click.
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