I’m interested in the use, and usefulness, of what I’ll call here (both for want of a better term, and as a deliberate provocation) “scholar-scale” collections of materials. To flesh out what I’m talking about, let me given an example: for a while I have been fascinated by a French painting which had a truly remarkable, and remarkably productive, afterlife in the United States in the first half of the twentieth-century: Paul Chabas’s 1913 September Morn. After inspiring a short-lived obscenity controversy (featuring American anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock), the painting was reproduced on postcards, pennant flags, watch fobs, and many other places; it was turned into a musical, a short film, and continued to be a key point of well into midcentury. An online archive uniquely allows one to capture and share the mass of material related to this painting, and the way in which an unremarkable French academic painting became an occasion for American popular cultural reflection on art, obscenity, and (most pressingly) race.

I have collected all sorts of material related to this painting and at one point started putting it all in an online “archive” (I now regret that term); while I haven’t updated or improved it in age, it is still online at septembermorn.org.

I’m interested in both big questions of why (and maybe when) one would want to share one’s personal research archive, and whether it is worth the effort, as well as the smaller practical questions of how to do so (my own collection of September Morn material, for instance, is built on Omeka—a platform made more attractive with the release of Neatline).

I would be happy for this session to turn into a practical discussion of the hows of Omeka (installation, use, etc), or a more conceptual conversation about the way that web technologies may potentially allow us to tap the scholarly potential of odd, personal, hobbyist, semi-scholarly, or para-scholarly collections.