At the recent Omeka Meet-Up, we opened up discussion to include all things Digital Humanities.
Over three fantastic presentations and several provocations around data, Humanities research and cultural collections, the group developed a range of responses, provocations and ideas for future projects.
To kick start things we first had a discussion about what we mean when we use the term ‘data’ in the Digital Humanities space. Are we referring to text? Images? Digitised materials? Or simply everything involved in research? Questions around ontologies and silenced voices also came to the fore as did thoughts about the future of infrastructure in Digital HASS.
Julianne Bell then gave a fantastic presentation on a project she is working on as part of the Digital Studio Graduate Internship program, entitled Execution Ballads of Pre-Modern Europe. Developing this project with Dr Una McIlvenna from the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Julianne has encountered an array of challenges and discoveries around presenting and narrating cultural materials with Omeka.
The project has developed a database on execution ballads (cheaply printed songs about crime and punishment dating from c. 1550-1900) that includes hundreds, if not thousands of items. These are partly in textual form (transcriptions of lyrics, notes on historical context, dates of publishing, etc), partly pictorial (images of the pamphlets and broadsides, images of historical figures who feature in the ballads, etc), and some audio recordings. Until recently, this has been stored in a MySQL database on Heurist software. The intern project is transferring and setting up the database correctly in the content management software Omeka, as well as adding to the database.
Here’s a breakdown of the project:
And the methods and approaches taken in customising Omeka to fit the parameters and requirements of the project:
Following Julianne, our excellent Omeka ResLead Alex Shermon spoke about his work on an Omeka site that is part of a broader project within the University of Melbourne looking at Sir Redmond Barry.
This project brings together cultural and legal history, biography, philosophy and a wide range of curation and collecting practices.
Here’s the official description from the Lives Lived with Law Journal edition:
“We see ‘Lives Lived with Law’ as drawing into relation the scholarly experiences of disciplinary technique, and the experimentation over time with style and forms that help to show what the conduct of lawful relations can be between peoples, between everyday and official experience of law, as well as between Indigenous and Anglo Australian laws.” (Genovese, Rush, McVeigh. Lives Lived with Law: An Introduction, p.2)
According to Alex, “Jurisography is the hip new rebranding of legal biography.”
Working under Carole Hinchcliff (who is collaborating with several academics from the Melbourne law school), Alex has set out to examine the fragmentary sources and forms of legal theory involved with Sir Redmond Barry.
Title: The trial of Ned Kelly
Subtitle: Newspaper illustration
Date: 1880
Keywords: people, biography, Bushranger, trial, illustration, media
Record creator: Department of Information
National Archives of Australia
Alex writes how, “Sir Redmond Barry (who, by the way, has an apple named after him) got a lot done and left a pretty big legacy. Aside from the apple thing, he helped found the State Library, The National Gallery, and the University of Melbourne (He would have loved the sheer boring monotony evoked in the brown brick monstrosity named after him).”
“In law he was the first standing counsel for Aboriginal people, and famously sentenced Ned Kelly to death just days before he himself died. Barry shattered over Melbourne when he died. The task then for the Jurisographer, is to pick up these pieces and present them in a meaningful way. That’s where Omeka came into our project. It is allowing us to relate contemporary instances of Barry (statues and bookcases) with his own digitised publications, such as the important addresses he made at circuit courts and his annotations in statute volumes.”
Alex presenting his talk:
Mitchell Harrop from SCIP then delivered some timely and useful information about Omeka and Web Archiving - a topic we’ll be coming back to very soon as there is increased need for and interest in researchers being able to maintain and present their work on Omeka into the future.
Stay tuned for the next Omeka event. We have something very exciting in the pipeline which will, once again, consider dynamic scholarly workflows that connect Omeka with other digital research tools.
For more information, get in touch with our Community leader, Tyne!