I haven’t encountered Dower’s book, but I’ll definitely check it out. Editorial cartoons have really gotten a lot more scholarly attention than comic strips– yet another reason why I think getting a project like this under way could be a good idea.

Interestingly, when I was doing my Hearst research, I discovered that, before the comics in that paper had their own dedicated page, they were actually spread out over three pages– the Sports Page, the Womens’ Page, and the penultimate page of the paper, which they shared with editorials.

So historically speaking, the line in the sand between the two may be a bit more illusory than one might expect.

Omeka doesn’t have to be exclusively (or even primarily) visual, although it is a danger, depending on who’s using it. Keep an eye out for our (CHNM’s) Bracero Archive project, due to launch one of these days (don’t have the calendar in front of me…) When everything’s up, it will contain documents (both facsimile and transcribed), photographs, and sound files of oral histories, which will also be both transcribed and translated into English.

It’s an ambitious project that seems to be coming along nicely. The oral histories are very powerful– even to someone like me, with relatively weak Spanish skills. Just the ability to hear the voices of these people, see their pictures, look through their paperwork…

I think it will show how well sound files can be incorporated into an Omeka site. I don’t think we have any video, though… But Omeka should be able to handle it if it did– we have a couple dozen videos up on the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank, which wasn’t made with Omeka, but with something that might be described as Omeka’s older cousin.