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Brief version

I’d like to have a practical session for (1) identifying DH tools (or sites, though that’s a little trickier) that need multilingual user interfaces and (2) taking the first steps toward making a MUI for one or more of them.

Long version

Most technology for learning languages, in my brief experience, is not even chocolate-covered broccoli — it’s carob-covered broccoli at best (or maybe broccoli ice cream). However, engaging students with an institution’s library and museum holdings through DH work provides them a way to strengthen their language abilities and DH abilities in tandem, and to see how language learning can open up new perspectives on their studies and new options for their academic (or other) life paths.

While I am always excited to see the wonderful tools coming out of the DH hacker community, it strikes me often that they are missing multilinguality. While localizing/internationalizing an application is not simple, the success of WordPress in getting translations for the core components is encouraging. (And yet: Even WordPress does not expose the multilinguality level of a plugin, leaving users hanging when they just want to find, say, a plugin to send messages in correctly formatted Hebrew to subscribers.) In keeping with the “more hack, less yak” motto, I’d like to get together THATCampers interested in doing DH in languages other than English to identify some important tools/sites that would benefit from crowdsourced translation, and then to start taking steps toward getting this translation done. My thought is that I’m talking about tools that can be used in or hacked for use in pedagogy, but there’s no reason we can’t look at research tools or library tools or museum tools or anything else. I’m certainly not talking about tools that were designed for language learning or SLA research, such as corpora.

The big kick in the pants is that I’m green enough that I don’t really know how best to start with such a project. (What are the most widely used? What tools are targeted at multilingual users?) This session would need people either who know more about the tool landscape than I or participants willing to do a bit of discovery/exploration first.

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Since I’ve begun teaching, I’ve become mildly obsessed with buying anthologies of primary sources. Until I had to get up in front of a classroom, I didn’t realize how difficult it was to select and make available primary sources to teach students with. A good anthology of sources has done more to advance the world’s knowledge than many a monograph.

But print anthologies have their flaws. First, no anthology has all the sources you need; you’ve got to pick and choose from them all. Second, they are expensive—no small issue for students. Third, many of them are out of print. Of course, there are some great anthologies of primary sources on the web: for example, History Matters and Do History. And of course, more and more there are large archives of primary sources online, like American Memory. But it seems to me that a useful tool for teachers would be a way of building your own anthology of sources for teaching.

Enter Omeka.

If you’re not familiar with it, “Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for collections-based research of all kinds, one that bridges the scholarly, library, and museum worlds through a set of commonly recognized standards. In doing so, Omeka puts serious web publishing within reach of all scholars and cultural heritage professionals.” The self-hosted version of Omeka is easy enough to use, if you have some basic skills at installing and running web apps. But even better, the recently announced Omeka.net offers a hosted service that will make the software even easier to use.

In this session, I’d like to talk about the possibilities of using Omeka to create an anthology of primary sources for teaching. Specifically, these are the topics we might discuss:

• What would an Omeka anthology of sources look like? How would it be organized?
• What might be the best practices in creating an Omeka anthology?
• What are the copyright issues involved in creating an anthology? Does it make a difference if the anthology is publicly available, or available only to students in a given class?
• Can teachers roll their own Omeka anthologies, especially with Omeka.net, or should educational technologists get involved?
• What can Omeka offer that printed and bound anthologies cannot? I’m thinking here of capabilities like geo-tagging primary sources, as well as including media like audio, photos, and video that print cannot.

Most of all, let’s get our hands dirty and actually start using Omeka! I’ll have a self-hosted Omeka installation to use as a sandbox, and it’s easy to sign up for an Omeka.net account. In the words of Dave Lester, we need “more hack, less yack.”

If you’re interested in this session and want to think about it in advance, you might take a look at some of the fine Omeka sites that are already on the web. Two that I think are particularly good models of sites that are useful for teaching are Making the History of 1989 and The Object of History. You can see other examples at the Omeka showcase and at this wiki list of Omeka sites.

One last thing: if we have time, we might also discuss how to use Omeka as a repository of sources for research. Looking towards my future dissertation, I’ve set up an Omeka installation to collect the conversion narratives that I plan to study. (My Omeka archive is almost completely empty now, but here is the shell.) Can we use Omeka to promote transparency in research? If being an active researcher makes for better teaching—one of the assumptions of our research universities—then can making our sources available in Omeka make us better teachers?