Web Publishing

Jeremy Guillette	Jeff Emanuel
Instructional Technologist (AT-FAS)	Associate Director (AT-FAS)

Overview

How do we publish things to the web?
Omeka
- Overall approach
- Features
Scalar
- Overall approach
- Features

How does stuff get online?

Content Management System

e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, SquareSpace, etc.

A content management system is a piece of infrastructure, like a building to house your content, in that it's a structure around your content. The structure was created for some purpose, and as such, it has different pieces of infrastructure to make certain things easier. Also like a building, content management systems exist in the context of different communities, which informs how things develop for the system itself. The original purpose of a CMS, just like the original purpose of a building, doesn't always define its current use. WordPress started as a blogging platform, and still does that quite well, but it has evolved into a platform used for all kinds of websites, from company pages to e-commerce sites. When you're looking for a way to put information on the web, you want to look at the structures that a system has to help you do stuff, and at the community of people surrounding it, to see if it's a neighborhood of people with similar or converging goals for their content.

Omeka

Let's start by talking about Omeka. It was developed at George Mason, and its name is a Swahili word meaning "to display or lay out wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack". It comes from a library, archive, and museum context, so it has a heavy focus on collections of various kinds of things, although it tries its best to be agnostic about what kinds of things it collects. This collections focus predisposes it towards metadata and organizational tools, with collections content being deeply integrated into its narrative features. Basically, Omeka assumes that you have a bunch of stuff, that you care a lot about how that stuff is described, and that you want to tell stories about that stuff. It can work for projects for which these assumptions are not true, but those are its biases.

Omeka Examples

demo.omeka.fas.harvard.edu

A screenshot of the admin interface of an Omeka website

Items in Omeka

Dublin Core

Title	Subject	Description	Creator	Source
Publisher	Date	Contributor	Rights	Relation
Format	Language	Type	Identifier	Coverage

In order to have a setup that can accommodate any kind of "thing" while still having some degree of specificity and interoperability in the metadata used, Omeka uses a metadata standard called Dublin Core. You see here all of the metadata elements that are included in the standard. There are 15 of them, and none of them are required to create an item. Title and description are used frequently by Omeka, though, so it's a good idea to include them. Otherwise, you have a collection of 15 buckets that are general enough for you to put in whatever information you'd like. This generality makes it easier to use Omeka for any kind of material, because you aren't stuck with "author" or "artist", but instead the more general "creator", that can encompass both.

Screenshot of back-end page to add files to Omeka item

Collections in Omeka

Think boxes of items, described with the same Dublin Core metadata

Items can't go in multiple collections

Your turn

harvardartmuseums.org

Exhibits in Omeka

Exhibit ^{(http://base.url/exhibit-name)}
- Page ^{(http://base.url/exhibit-name/page1)}
  - Block
  - Block
  - Block
- Page ^{(http://base.url/exhibit-name/page2)}
  - Block

Your turn (again)

Omeka's Extra Features

Neatline

Student-created map

screenshot of an interactive map of the middle east

IIIF Toolkit

Omeka Resources

Omeka as a service at Harvard
Omeka user manual
Omeka Sugar - Short, targeted tutorials
Omeka Showcase - collection of exemplary Omeka sites
Omeka developer documentation

Scalar

Scalar Examples

Students in Service at Harvard

Imperiia

Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller's Pandemonium

Why Scalar as a Service?

https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/

Scalar Content Types

Media

Annotations

Organizing Content

icons representing different types of content floating in a void

Paths

visual representation of connecting content with a linear path

Visualizations

Group Activity

Scalar Book: “Harvard in the Public Sphere”
Find a partner and pick a person from the Wikipedia "List of Harvard University People"
Each pair will produce a Scalar path for a Harvard alumni
Guidelines
- The path should add Dublin Core metadata (dc:date and dc:spatial) on the path page for the figure’s
- The path should use tags on the path page for the figure’s occupation(s)
- The path should include at least 3 pages, and at least one of the pages should use a layout other than “Basic”
- The path should include at least 4 pieces of media (of at least two different kinds, eg photo and video)
- The path will include at least one Scalar widget (Timeline, Map, Tag or Path visualization)
- The path will be added to the larger path and the Table of Contents

Explore the book

Take three minutes to look at the work of other teams
With a partner:
- Did other teams take different approaches to constructing paths?
- What works well in Scalar?
- What is less successful?

Scalar Resources

Scalar 2 User’s Guide - Very detailed; API and Javascript
Scalar GitHub
Book: Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Tara MacPherson, HUP 2018)
Past Webinars
Video: “Writing Digital Scholarship,” Curtis Fletcher