At THATCamp Prime this summer, I considered entering the Maker Challenge with this very problem. Four months later, I’m still working on it, so why not try again?
During DorkShorts on Saturday, I’ll present the current version of Encodinghfrs.org, the website I am building with the goal of developing a community of practice focused on markup of historical financial records (HFRs) within the international Digital Humanities community.
My goal for this site has always been to include an Omeka-powered library/repository of things like the white paper for our 2011 ODH Start-Up grant and the ODD file for the TEI model we are trying out. (Oh, and limericks.) It would be possible simply to post these files using WordPress, but I want to use Omeka because of its facility for recording metadata. Given the choice, I always prefer to be able to include more information than less because I can’t know how others will be interested in using my stuff.
I also want to be able to pull links to the Omeka objects into the WordPress theme because I’m now happy with the look of the website. This summer the whole website (version 0.1?) was made from the Omeka theme “Thanks, Roy,” and I just did not know enough about Omeka to make a site that satisfied me. Sigh.
To date, I haven’t had time either to learn enough PHP to write code myself or to find the best of all possible code on GitHub that I can just tweak…. So. I’m using the maker challenge as incentive. Because needing a stable url for a publication (by like, yesterday) just doesn’t seem to be enough.
