Web Publishing

Jeremy Guillette	Cole Crawford
Instructional Technologist (AT-FAS)	Humanities Research Computing Specialist (DARTH)

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

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

IIIF Toolkit

Scalar

Scalar Examples

Students in Service at Harvard

Web Publishing

Overview

How does stuff get online?

Content Management System

Omeka

Omeka Examples

Items in Omeka

Dublin Core

Collections in Omeka

Your turn

Exhibits in Omeka

Your turn (again)

Omeka's Extra Features

Neatline

IIIF Toolkit

Scalar

Scalar Examples

Students in Service at Harvard

Imperiia

Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller's Pandemonium

Why Scalar as a Service?

Scalar Content Types

Pages

Media

Annotations

Organizing Content

Paths

Tags

Visualizations

Table of Contents