Abstract
Omeka S is a web publishing platform designed for creating digital collections and online exhibits. It has been hosted by LSA Technology Services since 2019 as a pilot and became a full service in August of 2021. The service is built upon an OpenShift container hosting solution that uses GitLab for version control and deployment. Omeka S is currently used in several digital humanities projects across campus.
Our presentation focuses on “Below the Line: The Feuilleton & Modern Jewish Cultures”— a collaborative project in Judaic Studies that aims to foster research into the feuilleton, a popular form of writing in newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We believe that our experiences with adapting Omeka S for this project would be useful for other research teams considering Omeka as a platform for their projects.
“Below the Line” was originally conceived as a series of international conferences and workshops. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a dramatic shift for this NEH-funded project, and its focus became creating an online collection in Omeka S. An international team of scholars was engaged in the selection, translation, and study of 20+ original feuilletons. They produced media files and metadata to be collected, stored in a database, and displayed on a searchable, open-access website. The website team faced significant organizational and technical challenges. On a short timescale, we were able to create a workflow for collecting the data, successfully customize Omeka S for specific project needs, and launch the Below the Line website.