This week I had the exciting job of putting together everything I’ve learned into an online exhibit.
For now, I’m focusing on learning how to use the Exhibit Builder plugin in Omeka and creating a draft of the exhibit so I can get further feedback from Mark.
Exhibit Builder was a little tricky to learn; like the rest of Omeka, it’s not really intuitive. However, I got in a lot of good troubleshooting practice and learned how to update the plugin when it isn’t working correctly as well as how to navigate Omeka tutorials and help forums–all useful experience.
I currently have three exhibit pages, one for each soldier whose scrapbook I’ve digitized, each representing a different place for American soldiers during the war (training camps, the front, and non-combat work). I’m mixing quotations with images to help readers experience each soldier’s story.
It was especially satisfying to pull together materials from the Ochs collection to create an overarching narrative that shows how he developed as a person and how his attitude toward not fighting matured. There are also some good “slice of life” quotes as he describes the war happening around Paris. I was excited to find photos of the “Big Bertha” gun he mentions at one point in one of the other online collections, so I’m including those pictures in the page so readers can see what he was talking about.
There’s still one more page left, plus the introduction to the exhibit, before I can call it a full draft, so I will work on finishing those early next week.
