Julianne Bell using Omeka as a Digital Studio Graduate Intern

Julianne Bell is an intern employing Omeka in her current project. She is working on a project with a rich database of Pre-Modern Execution Ballads. 

Julianne is a second year PhD student in Cultural Materials Conservation at the Grimwade Centre at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis is on the management of the deterioration of plastics in museums from an Arts and Science perspective. She is one of 11 interns at the Digital Studio. She is working on the project ‘Execution Ballads in Pre-Modern Europe’, supervised by Dr Una McIlvenna, Hansen Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne. Dr McIlvenna has collected an impressive range of original data on ballads in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe in a variety of formats.

Julianne Bell

‘The project was my first experience with Omeka’, said Julianne. ‘I was a little daunted at first to learn a brand new program, but I found that Omeka has such a user friendly interface… After the training session that Tyne led, I was able to start developing the database almost straight away’. Julianne is keen to use these skills in the project: ‘it relates directly to what I’m doing for the internship project… The project includes textual data, images, sounds, as well as items such as people, locations, and events and it’s all really easily collated and managed together’. Julianne sees a number of benefits to using Omeka, ‘while you develop the database, you’re also developing the public facing output at the same time. That seems like getting two jobs done at once.’