As this week has progressed, I have been doing a lot of serious thinking about the content of what I want to do for my final project and how I want to present it.
My project, A Woman of the Century: Nineteenth and Twenty-First Century Creators, is a collection of items within my A Woman of the Century: A Crowdsourcing Project of the Nineteenth and Twenty-First century Omeka site. This project is being created for my audience, which is both my students in my Fall 2017 Women in American History course and other contributors to the A Woman of the Century project. Some activities will be more directed to students, but several components will be very helpful to all contributors to the project.
Looking back at the Nineteenth Century Creators, this project explores the way that A Woman of the Century was put together, both the way that some of the biographical sketches and images were created and included in the book and the fascinating publishing history behind it. To facilitate the research and item creation processes for all Twenty-First Century Creators, there will be screencasts which show contributors how to utilize several primary source resources and how to create item record descriptions and metadata. In addition, there will be items describing and linking to these primary sources.
For the students, the project includes learning through a series of activities which are being created using Omeka’s Lesson Plan Item Type Metadata. Students will move from learning about the early creators and analyzing the biographies, images, poems, and contexts, to comparing and contrasting two versions of biographical sketches, to exploring metadata, to creating item records, to creating description fields, and to adding additional research material to the item records. Along the way, they will be writing blog posts about this learning process.
