Creating Exhibits in Omeka

By Nathan Weaver Olson, DCL Graduate Assistant

GETTING AN OMEKA ACCOUNT

The first step in creating an Omeka exhibit is to set up an Omeka account. Currently, the best way for individuals connected with the University of Minnesota to do this is to contact DASH Domains and open an account through them. Check out the DASH website to see if this is an option for you. If you have access to a web server, you can actually download Omeka directly. Alternatively, Omeka will host your collection at Omeka.net. Omeka.net’s basic plan will give you 500 MB of free storage, although more robust storage options are available for an annual fee.

ADDING ITEMS

Once you have Omeka up and running, the first step in building an Omeka exhibit is to add the digital objects or “items” you wish to include in your exhibit to your Omeka account. Do this by clicking “Add an Item”, the green button at the top of the screen. Once you have a new item, you need to add the necessary metadata (i.e. data about the data), which you can do by clicking through the various tabs entitled “Dublin Core” metadata, “Item Type Metadata”, “Files”, “Tags”, and “Map”. For the “Mud-Brick Mosques of Mali” exhibit I added some twenty-three items to our account.

ADDING AN EXHIBIT

Once you have added all of your items to your Omeka account, you can add a new exhibit to your account by clicking on the “Exhibits” tab and then clicking “Add an Exhibit”. The look of an individual exhibit is largely controlled by the exhibit theme. Several themes come pre-loaded in Omeka, but these are just a fraction of the themes available. In fact, users can design themes of their own. In my case, I wanted to use a theme that would allow me to insert my own background image and logo. I settled on the “BigStuff” theme and then added it to our Omeka account using the DASH Domains File Manager.

THEME CONFIGURATION

When you create a new Omeka exhibit, the first page available to you is the “Edit Exhibit” page, where you select and configure the exhibit theme, design the exhibit’s main page, and add new exhibit pages to the site.  In the image below, my theme, “BigStuff”, is clearly visible in the drop down list.

Themes can also be further configured to fit your particular aesthetic and presentation interests. “Big Stuff” allows me to insert my own background image, logo, and header images. In my case, these were images that I designed in Photoshop before uploading them to Omeka.

ADDING PAGES

The content of my exhibit is stored and organized using different pages, accessed through the “Edit Exhibit” link. Each new page includes title and “slug” fields, but users are then able to add one or more blocks of content layouts entitled “File with Text”, “Gallery”, “Text”, “File”, “Geolocation Map”, “Neatline”, and “Neatline Time”.

With the exception of the “Text” layout, all of these page options allow you to pull the “Items” you created into the exhibit. When you add an item, you can also add a caption below the image. I chose to make every caption a link back to the original image in DCL Elevator. My principal goal was to showcase images from John Archer’s collection, but I was also able to locate individual mosques in space as well using Omeka’s “Geolocation Map” layout option.

PAGE ORDER

Finally, when you are on the “Edit Exhibit” page, it is easy to rearrange page order and even nest some pages below others. In my case, I have five principle pages: “Mosque Design Elements”, “Regions and Styles”, “Image Gallery”, Further Reading”, and “About the Photographer”.  Yet several of these pages contain sub-pages, and sub-sub-pages, as a tool for organizing content.

Those are the basics of exhibit building in Omeka. Now that you know the basics, it’s time to get an Omeka account of your own, decide on a narrative you would like to represent as an online exhibit, and get to work adding items to your account.

The exhibit used as an example in this tutorial, “Mali’s Mud-Brick Mosques”, is just one of a number of Omeka exhibits that we have been working to create at the DCL in recent months. We should be rolling them out on our website soon. But you can find Omeka-powered exhibits and websites all over the Internet. Check out Omeka.org’s exhibit showcase for more ideas.

John Archer and Mali’s Mud-Brick Mosques: Exhibit Building with Elevator and Omeka

By Nathan Weaver Olson, DCL Graduate Assistant

Picture a vast interior space, dark and cool, its edges hidden by a forest of columns. The only visible light is that which trickles in through an ornate window screen. You are inside one of Mali’s monumental mosques, a sacred space, and the walls, columns, and even the lofty minaret towers are likely not stone but molded earth, mud bricks plastered with a layer of mud and rice hulls. It is a vulnerable structure in a region of intense heat and seasonal torrential rains, forever dependent upon an army of skilled workers to maintain its elegant and massive form. If cared for, it will last a century or more. If neglected, it will quickly fall to ruin.

In the mid 1990s, Minnesota Professor John Archer, now Professor Emeritus, visited the country of Mali with his camera and an eye for timing and image composition. He took hundreds of images of Mali’s people as well as its natural and built environments. The majority of this wonderful collection is currently housed at LATIS’ Digital Content Lab, where we are slowly adding Archer’s images to the Digital Content Library, which currently contains over 300,000 objects. So far, we have added nearly three hundred and fifty images from John Archer’s trip to Mali to the DCL and organized them into thirty-seven different “works”, each with between one and thirty-nine attached images or “views”. Among the works already available through the DCL is a collection of images of mud-brick mosques ranging from the country’s oldest, to its most iconic and monumental, to more humble examples. It is a unique collection, and now, thanks to Omeka, we have been able to create an online exhibit using many of these images to teach our users about vernacular architectural traditions in Mali while also introducing them to our object database, called DCL-Elevator.

Searching the DCL

One of our goals at the DCL is to make our collections widely available to scholars and students, not only those at the University of Minnesota, but also those working outside of the U. While many items in our collection require the user to possess an X500 to receive access, quite a few of the objects in the DCL are part of our “Open Collections”, objects available to anyone who visits the DCL’s website. Users can currently view Archer’s Mali collection on the DCL by performing an advanced search in Elevator, our database tool, and sorting by collection and keyword.

Elevator includes comprehensive and relatively intuitive finding aids, but here at the DCL we are also looking at additional tools to better familiarize users with the site and its extensive contents. Lately we have begun to do this by building exhibits using Omeka.

Omeka Exhibits

Omeka is an open-source web-publishing platform that is oriented towards users from disciplines within the Humanities. Students, professors, librarians, and archivists can all use Omeka to develop and display scholarly collections. In the case of the DCL, Omeka allows us create exhibits that highlight our collections by focusing the user’s attention on a limited number of objects from the DCL and then sending them into Elevator to find the materials themselves. In practical terms, this has meant festooning our exhibits with links that transport the user to specific images within the DCL Elevator collection. In the exhibit featured in this post, “Mali’s Mud-Brick Mosques”, I put a “Find it in the DCL” link under nearly every image I added to exhibit, as well as a link to an exhibit that Ginny Larson created for the photographer, John Archer.

The structure of an online exhibit, which is essentially a narrative, presents the user with a familiar set of tools for viewing the collection and making sense of its contents. Instead of searching through thousands of images, an online exhibit introduces the user to a finite collection that allows them to approach the more generous holdings of the DCL Elevator database from the vantage point of a specific theme. Because our Omeka exhibits serve to not only showcase the DCL Elevator Collection, but to also extend its pedagogical value for our users, I added a “Further Reading” page to the exhibit as well.

These are all things that anyone reading this post, and especially anyone connected with the University of Minnesota, can do as well. While there are free versions of Omeka available, they have a very limited online storage capacity. But U of M users are able to acquire a more substantial Omeka account through Dash Domains. The DCL has its own domain account through DASH, and through it we have the capacity to access a number of content management applications, including Omeka. To learn more about how to create your own Omeka exhibit, click here for detailed instructions.

“Mali’s Mud-Brick Mosques” is just one of a number of Omeka exhibits that we have been working to create at the DCL in recent months. We should be rolling them out soon. But in the meantime, check out the DCL’s collection and let us know if there are other themes that you would like us to explore as online exhibits.

The Stamp Project: Extruding Vector Graphics for 3D Printing Using Tinkercad

By Rachel Dallman

I have recently been experimenting with 3D printing using the ETC Lab’s MakerBot Replicator Mini, printing different open-source models I found on Thingiverse. I wanted to start printing my own models, but found traditional full-scale 3D modeling softwares like Blender and Autodesk Maya to be intimidating as a person with minimal modeling or coding experience. In my search for a user-friendly and intuitive modeling platform, I found Tinkercad – an extremely simplified browser-based program with built in tutorials that allowed me to quickly and intuitively create models from my imagination. The best part about the program, for me, was the ability to import and extrude vector designs I had made in Illustrator.

Tinkercad’s easy to use Interface

For my first project using this tool, I decided to make a stamp using a hexagonal graphic I had made for the ETC Lab previously.

My original graphic is colored, but in order to extrude the vectors the way I wanted to, I had to edit the graphic to be purely black and white, without overlaps, meaning I needed to remove the background fill color. I also had to mirror the image so that it would stamp the text in the correct orientation (I actually failed to do this on my first attempt, and ended up using the print as a magnet since it would stamp the text backwards).  I’m using Illustrator to do all of this because that’s where I created the graphic, but any vector based illustration software will work (Inkscape is a great open source option!). You can also download any .SVG file from the internet (you can browse thousands at https://thenounproject.com/ and either purchase the file or give credit to the artist). If you’re confused about what parts of your image need to be black, it’s helpful to imagine that all of the black areas you create will be covered in ink. Below is a picture of what my image looked like in Illustrator after I had edited it.

To do this, I started by selecting each individual part of my graphic and changing the fill and stroke color to black, and removed the fill from the surrounding hexagon. To reflect the image, I selected everything and clicked Object > Transform > Reflect. My stamp-ready file looks like this:

In order for Tinkercad to read the file, I had to export it in .SVG format by going to File > Export > Export As… and choose .SVG in the drop down menu. If you’re doing this in Illustrator, you’ll want to use the following export settings:

I then opened Tinkercad and imported my file. Much to my dismay, when I first brought the .SVG file into Tinkercad, it couldn’t recognize the file format, meaning I had to do some digging around online to figure out what was going on. I found that the problem was with the way Illustrator exports the .SVG file. I had to add in a single line of code to the top of the file in order to solve the problem. The problem is that Illustrator is exporting the file at .SVG version 1.1, and Tinkercad can only read .SVG 1.0, so I had to manually revert the file to the previous version. I downloaded Atom, an open source code editor and pasted in the following line of code at the very beginning of the file and saved it. This step might be irrelevant to you depending on the software you’re using, so be sure to attempt importing the file into Tinkercad before you change any of the code.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

I then imported the updated file, ending up with this solid hexagon. This was not what I wanted, and I assumed that Tinkercad was simply filling in the outermost lines that it detected from my vector file. Apparently, the price for the simplicity of the program is one of its many limitations. 

After I noticed that it was possible to manually create hexagons in Tinkercad, I decided to go back into Illustrator and delete the surrounding hexagon and then simply build it back in Tinkercad after my text had been imported. Depending on the complexity of your design, you may decide to do it like I did and build simple shapes directly in Tinkercad, or you may want to upload multiple separate .SVG files that you can then piece together. This is what my new vector file looked like after I imported it.

Next, I wanted to make the base of the stamp, and a hexagonal ridge at the same height of my text that would stamp a line around my text like my original vector file. To do this, I selected the hexagonal prism, clicking and dragging it onto the canvas. I then adjusted the size and position visually by clicking and dragging the vertices (hold Shift if you want to keep the shape proportionate) until it fit the way I wanted it to. I then duplicated the first hexagon twice by copying and pasting. I then scaled one of those hexagons to be slightly smaller than the other and placed it directly on top of the other, until their difference was the border size that I wanted. I then switched the mode of the smaller hexagon to “Hole” in the righthand corner, so that my smaller hexagon would be cut out of the larger one, leaving me with my hexagonal border. Next, I positioned the hollow hexagon directly on top of the base, and extruded it to the same height as my letters, so that it would stamp. For precise measurements like this, I chose to type in the exact height I wanted in the righthand panel. My final stamp model looked like this:

Then, I downloaded the model as an .STL file, and opened it in our MakerBot program and sized it for printing. Around three hours later, my print was ready and looked like this:

 

As you can probably tell, the stamp has already been inked. While my print turned out exactly the way I planned it to, I found that the PLA material was not great for actually stamping. On my first stamp attempt, I could only see a few lines and couldn’t make out the text at all.

 

I assumed that the stamping problems had something to do with the stamp’s ability to hold ink, and the stiffness of the plastic. I decided to sand the stamp to create more grit for holding ink, and tried placing the stamp face up with the paper on top of it instead, allowing the paper to get into the grooves of the stamp. This process worked a bit better, but still didn’t have the rich black stamp I was hoping for.

 

Because of this difficulty with actually stamping my print, in the end, I actually preferred my “mistake” print that I had done without mirroring the text, and turned it into a magnet!

 

This process can be applied to any project you can think of, and I found the ability to work in 2D and then extrude extremely helpful for me, as I feel more comfortable in 2D design programs. Tinkercad was simple and easy to use, but its simplicity meant that I had to do a few workarounds to get the results I wanted. I’m still troubleshooting ways to make my stamp “stampable”, and would appreciate any ideas you all have! As always feel free to come explore with us for free in the ETC Lab by attending Friday Open Hours from 10:00am to 4:00pm, or email etclab@umn.edu for an appointment.