Omeka: Faculty Use Cases

School of Foreign Service

Kelly Smith, a professor in post-Communist studies in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in the School of Foreign Service, has students in her class (REES 577: Socialist and Post-Socialist Cities) work together on the Omeka site called Digital Moscow.

"I would say that the point of the assignment (and perks of Omeka) was that it allowed students to illuminate aspects of a complex place—the city of Moscow—over time. Students working in groups or alone chose their own lens on the city and built up the site over three iterations (so far) of the seminar. For me, the other reasons to make the leap to doing a digital project was so that students would have work that they could easily show potential employers and to push those with language skills to use more primary sources in their research." - Professor Kelly Smith on working with Omeka

Clinical Bioethics

Omeka exhibits can help explore and illuminate varied or even disparate perspectives on significant and perhaps controversial topics. For example, Maggie Little and Randy Bass asked students in "Bioethics and Moral Imagination" to develop a site that could serve as an “impartial resource of civil discourse” about the Obama Administration’s mandate that insurance companies provide coverage for contraceptives. The students created an exhibit to understand the policy, explore the basis for objections, and articulate the range of views among Catholics.

Latin American Studies

Omeka sites can also be used to bring together documents linked by geography. Nick Ebert and Camila do Amaral, students in the Latin American Studies M.A. program, used Omeka to build their capstone project LUHPLA: Literature on Urban Health Policy in Latin America. The project brings together documents from a wide variety of sources, creating a valuable reference resource for scholars in this area.