January 20th-

This week I explored a couple Omeka sites. The sites that I reviewed were found under this link: https://omeka.org/classic/docs/GettingStarted/UsingOmeka/.

I specifically gravitated towards the examples under Educators and Enthusiasts. For the article under Educators, I explored “Fifteenth-Century Italian Art”1. I really enjoyed this site because it offered a really unique way to navigate around this time-period of art. My favorite aspect of this site was their Interactive Map. Their map allowed you to click on different colored icons on the map and it would lead you to a specific building/location with different artifacts, paintings, architecture, etc. that corresponded with the area. They provided the artists involved, dates, location, a brief description, and the format of the art itself. It was so fun and fascinating to navigate around this map because it felt like I was actually visiting these places. The map appeared as satellite images, so you were able to move around the map and see the actual building/location and the surrounding area.

The second site that I explored was an example under the Enthusiasts tab. The site is called “A Shoebox of Norwegian Letters”2. The premise of the site was to document and preserve the work of Siri Holm Lawson, the daughter of John Holm. She sent out to find out more about her relatives and made a post on “Rootsweb”. This then eventually led to the contact of John Holm’s great-grandson and and Alma C. Wilson’s grandson, Terry Wilson, who approached Siri about a shoebox containing letters that were written in Norwegian. Siri took it upon herself to months of translating where she found that the letters contained messages from her own father and grandmother as well as a whole band of other relatives. These letters belonged to a Norwegian-American family discussing their daily lives and moments in history as the letters branched from 1911 with most being from the 1940s. It shows a connection with Norwegians and relatives that emigrated to the United States. Most of the letters were coming from Norway, often containing pictures of relatives, news paper clippings, requests for things to be sent over, and seasonal magazines. A common theme of expressing homesickness and gratitude for the kindness while not being able to repay it. Also covering topics such as having fears of invasions or an unidentified flying object in 1934. These letters provide incredible detail and a very unique perspective on life at that time. I loved going through this site and learning about this family and the efforts in documenting and digitizing their work. It is so fascinating to find this kind of personal history and I am so glad that it is shared and that their story is told.

January 22nd-

For todays blog entry I reviewed a few sites, firstly being one site under the Rosenzweig Prize Recipients. I decided to look into the 2015 recipient, “First Days Project”3. This project shares currently a total of 837 stories of immigrants’ first days in the United States. Overall, I really like how their front page is formatted. Two elements I really enjoy are the time line and the rotation of quotes. Both serve as really great visual elements which automatically inform the reader on what the website is about without having to dive too far into the site itself. I also like how the option to browse through stories and the option to provide/write your own story are right at the top of the page and is easily accessible and encourage for others to tell their stories. Something I liked that I would want to incorporate into the site is that they didn’t have too many pages that the reader needs to click on to get the information they’re looking for. I feel like when there are a lot of pages it can overwhelm the viewer and can quickly turn them away from the site. I really like how everything was well organized and easy to access from the home page. This site was created in 2014, but I couldn’t tell the age of it when I first went on the site. It is really nicely updated and kept timely. The sources that this site presents are all of the stories. They are presented in multiple ways giving the readers a variety of options on how the would like to engage them. The provide them through the timeline, the rotation of quotes, by map, by gallery, and an option to browse a “random story”.

Next, I reviewed “The Valley of the Shadow”4 which focuses on the lives of people during the American Civil War coming from two communities, one in the North and the other in the South. My first thought about this site was that it is very sleek. Starting with the homepage there are only three buttons that can be clicked on. Underneath a simple but informative explanation on what the reader will find within the site. While exploring it I found it decently easy to navigate. It does eventually lead you to a good amount of different pages but they are well organized and explained to inform the reader exactly what they are clicking on which is really helpful.

Additionally, I looked into “The Emilie Davis Diaries”5 which is a compilation of pocket journals owned by Emilie Davis, an African-American woman living in Philadelphia during the U.S. Civil War. The journals are from the years 1863, 1864, and 1865. The site seemed a little dated mainly due to the layout of the site and their navigation bar. But overall it has been kept well and it easy enough to navigate. I specifically enjoy that they provide scanned copies of her journal pages to show her hand writing and following beside it the translated version. I also found it interesting that they provide a comments section located in the middle of the page for people to ask questions or to give a second opinion/set of eyes on the translation of the journal pages. I think that a comment section this centralized can be a pro and a con. It can be interesting for readers to see how others are reacting or if they are seeing anything different, but it can also be distracting on the page. It is also difficult to filter what people comment, so it would be important that the comments were checked and maintained often.

Sources:

  1. Riesenberger, Nicole. “Fifteenth-Century Italian Art.” Omeka RSS. Accessed January 18, 2026. https://www.quattrocentoitalia.artinterp.org/omeka/. ↩︎
  2. Lawson, Konrad M. “A Shoebox of Norwegian Letters.” Omeka RSS. Accessed January 18, 2026. https://huginn.net/shoebox/letters/. ↩︎
  3. First Days Project, 2014. https://firstdays.saada.org/. ↩︎
  4. The Valley of the Shadow. Accessed January 22, 2026. https://valley.newamericanhistory.org/. ↩︎
  5. Emilie Memorable Days: The Emilie Davis Diaries. Accessed January 22, 2026. https://davisdiaries.villanova.edu/about/. ↩︎