Omeka in the Classroom | Digital Scholarship

Why use Omeka?

So you're thinking about using Omeka for your next project? That's great! Omeka can be a very useful platform for a variety of projects including online exhibitions, classroom projects, presentations and more. Omeka is similar to site building tools such as Wordpress, but with a greater capacity to expand on metadata and relating information to each other. There are certain plugins / modules you can use to enhance your project. Please read the following to learn what Omeka can do for you, as well as see some working examples of sites created by Union College faculty, students and staff.

Omeka has the following features that students and faculty can use:

Present Images, Videos & Audio

You can present your research in the form of text, images, video & audio.

In the example shown here, students submitted their videos in a Differential Vector Calculus course.

View these student videos in the Omeka site...

Annotations

Faculty and students can have the ability to draw custom areas on top of images in order to provide information about that part of the image. A user can have their own images to annotate, or one image can be annotated by multiple users.

View Annotations in Qingming Shanghe Tu

Timelines

You can present your data in the form of a timeline.

Maps

You can present your data in different points on a map, along with a timeline. Thumbnails of images are also present on the timeline.

View Mapping in The Erasure of Native American Culture in the Adirondacks

Tagging

You can organize your images, videos, and general data into categories and have results be searchable by pre configured terms. You can also allow for free form tagging and display a tag cloud on your site.

View tagging in The Social Distancing Experience

Collecting & Crowdsourcing Data

You can create a custom form for others to submit data in order to contribute to your project. Faculty can set up a form for students to submit data to a site, which can also be automatically added to a map, for example.

Visit Black to the Future to see how Omeka collects information for the timeline and map