Omeka in the classroom: The challenges of teaching material culture in a digital world

Abstract

An often-overlooked challenge to the field of digital humanities is the lack of interest in the discipline by young scholars. Despite being the so-called digital natives, many of my museum studies students have no desire to engage with new technology. This short paper is a snapshot of my attempt to teach digital curation and online exhibit development within the framework of my material culture seminar. It analyses 3 years of student exhibits developed using Omeka and points to new directions the project will go over the next several years. I began the research project by asking the following questions of my students: What does material culture look like on the web? How do you curate it? How does the public interact with virtual objects? What is the relationship between virtual and physical museum artifacts? However, after seeing the students struggle with basic web development, I expanded my own research questions to include: What skills do emerging professionals need and how can we integrate technical training into an academic program? For presenters and attendees at DH2011, there is no need to sing the praises of the digital world. We are the early adopters, the converted, the evangelists. But our colleagues across the humanities are not yet entirely convinced, and of more concern to me, neither are the students. As always, I enjoyed the papers at DH and was inspired by many of the fabulous projects. This paper goes in the opposite direction. I direct the museum studies track of the masters in public history at the University of South Carolina, one of the oldest public history programs in the country. It is a nationally competitive program, and our graduates have an impressive placement record: the Smithsonian; the National Park Service; federal, state, and local government. And yet, since I joined the faculty 4 years ago, I have been shocked that the students—the so-called digital natives—have little interest in the digital world as part of their professional training. They may communicate with each other using Facebook, share photos on Flickr, or post to their personal blogs, but when it comes to coursework they expect, and sometimes demand, a traditional graduate seminar where we read and discuss books. More than one student has balked at my assignments, whining, ‘I don’t need to learn how to program. I just want to be a regular historian.’ Unyielding in my persistence, I argue back that it is no longer an option. Wikis, blogs, and tweeting are everyday realities for museum professionals. At the very minimum, all curators and collections managers need to have a basic understanding of database architecture in order to structure their object databases and construct useful queries. More importantly, two decades of digitization have created new questions for curators of three-dimensional objects: What does material culture look like on the web? How do Correspondence: