Hello,
I’m after some bright ideas from Omeka users as to how best curate a collection of letters.
The letters have been digitised and transcribed and at the moment they are individual items classed as a physical object under Dublin Core. I have added the translation as text connected to the Item title and this displays well.
What I am trying to achieve is to let public users explore themes, people, places and objects which are discussed in the letters. For instance, is is possible to markup the translated text so that users can explore the tag (i.e., a link to a glossary for archaic terms, or a link to another Item).
We handle text slightly differently in S than we did in Classic; in Classic, you could have a metadata field called “Transcription” or something and put all sorts of markup in there, links for example.
In S, you “attach” a “media” to your item, with the media type HTML. Then you could paste all the same text with markup in there. Which is a bit different than uploading a file as your only media, and having the transcription in a metadata field. But it should work for your purposes.
Then you would need to think about how Omeka handles media, which in your case means the letter content HTML and the image file would be appearing in the same place everywhere.
Here I’m doing some quick custom styling of the HTML block (different background colour, different font) to differentiate it, using the CSS Editor. You can rearrange media to prioritize or deprioritize the image or the text, and use the resource page customization to decide where to show your metadata and your media:
I’m sure you understand marking up text would need to be done manually. So, say you ran a search for all instances of “London” in the letter transcriptions. You could edit the media, highlight “London” in the HTML text, and add a link to another item, etc. But you would have to do it manually for every instance of “London” that you find.
I’m actually seeing an issue right now where the conents of my “letter” aren’t coming up in search results, so I’ve filed a bug report for that. I imagine it will be fixed sometime in the next few months.
