Omeka and Other Digital Platforms for Undergraduate Research Projects on the Middle Ages
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses how digital projects can be employed to encourage undergraduates to think across disciplinary divides, to integrate field and online research, and to confront methodological issues in a more direct way. One of these projects draws on an open-source, web-publishing platform called Omeka and was designed for an interdisciplinary course on the archaeology and history of medieval London offered at Fordham University’s London Centre. The project aimed to give students first-hand experience with the material culture of a medieval city and consisted of two parts. The first, an Object Report, required each student to research and write a short essay on a single medieval object on display at the Museum of London, highlighting the significance of the object within the context of civic, religious, and domestic life in medieval London. In addition, students uploaded images and found illustrations of their objects in medieval manuscripts. The second part, a Site Report, required a visit to a medieval London location – a church, a monastery, or cemetery, for example – to research its significance in the middle ages. Students also uploaded images of their site, which they photographed themselves, and identified the site’s location on a (preferably medieval) map of London. Another similar project was designed using the Weebly web-editing platform for students taking Western Tradition I at Marymount California University, which does not have access to Omeka. Both the Omeka and Weebly projects allowed students to grapple with larger questions about integrating material objects into pre-modern history, but they were especially valuable for teaching students about the importance of being a responsible researcher since students contributed to a digital humanities project that made their research available to a wide public.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it