Blog on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History Winner

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:19:17 +0000

Congratulations to Envisioning Seneca Village on being selected as the 2025 winner of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History!

Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the spring of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through the Visualization), a printable PDF guide with maps (A Map-based Tour), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience.

Lost in the Park: Roy Rosenzweig's Public History Legacy

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:14:41 +0000

I first learned of Seneca Village in 2020. That summer, people tired of having to explain why Black Lives Matter and with an online audience freshly enraged at racism turned to history to popularize further examples of how Black people in the United States had been systematically dispossessed and disempowered by the forces of White power. At the time I was researching Black park use in Kansas City, Missouri where Troost Boulevard, and later Highway 71, were used to displace Black “slums,” leaving lasting economic and health disparities.¹ I was finding, like other historians before me, that “although not created as a racial barrier, the parks and boulevards system served as one.”² The news of a Black village buried under what is now Central Park was not surprising. The renewed popular interest in Seneca Village prompted the Central Park Conservancy to install several historical markers at the site.³ They formed a large outdoor exhibit near the existing New York Parks & Recreation marker.⁴ What I did not know at the time was that this was not the first time Seneca Village became popular.

American Religious Ecologies Team Completes Digitization

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:30:00 +0000

American Religious Ecologies seeks to understand how congregations from different religious traditions related to one another by creating new datasets, maps, and visualizations for the history of American religion. After years of photographing, editing, cataloging, and uploading schedules to the American Religious Ecologies website, we are excited to announce that we have uploaded the last of the 1926 religious census schedules. Although our website indicates that we are only 98% complete, we have digitized every schedule from the 1926 Religious Bodies Census housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, over time, many of these schedules have been lost or destroyed. Paper is not a permanent object. It is easily lost, destroyed, and deteriorates over time. The work being done, not just by the Religious Ecologies team, but at RRCHNM as a whole, is essential to ensuring that future generations have access to archival materials. The American Religious Ecologies project is an excellent example of this work and the benefits it can bring to historians’ understanding of various facets of United States history. The completion of the digitization aspect of this project will enable us to focus more on analyzing the data we have gathered, creating maps, and examining various statistics to better understand the distribution of churches and religion in the United States around 1926.

Graduate Student Reflections: Sustainability Summer

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:40:25 +0000

This past summer I had the opportunity to work on RRCHNM’s sustainability team. Our work focused on flattening websites built with content management systems (CMS), such as Drupal, Omeka, and WordPress. Flattening refers to the process of simplifying dynamic, database-backed websites to static versions built with only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This minimizes server space and reduces security risks. However, flattening comes with trade-offs, such as losing dynamic features like a search function. One of my main roles this summer was creating a static site search for these flattened websites.

RRCHNM Receives Funding to Create Teaching Guides on the American Revolution

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Funded through the American Historical Association as part of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program, the teaching guides will support history educators in teaching a more comprehensive and complete history of American independence.

RRCHNM is proud to announce new grant funding to create two teaching guides for teachers on the history of the American Revolution. The guides are funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Mid-Atlantic & US Territories Region, managed by the American Historical Association. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library primary sources to better understand the complex relationships to independence experienced by various groups during the revolutionary era particularly the Black Americans and Indigenous Americans fighting for their own independence on both sides of the conflict. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians’ approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.

Saying Goodbye – Kristin Jacobsen

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:22:33 +0000

When the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media runs a job search for a project manager, it’s pretty common to get applicants who have an undergraduate or master’s degree in history. We’re always happy to get applicants who also have museum experience or familiarity with Omeka.

It’s a lot more unusual to get an applicant who was the commanding officer of a guided missile cruiser.

Kristin Jacobsen came to RRCHNM by way of the U.S. Navy and an M.A. internship with our local history partner, Historic Blenheim House. When we needed a project manager for our Digital Arnhem World War II postal history project, she stood out from the crowd and we were thrilled to hire her.

Report from the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:15:00 +0000

From March 19th to March 21st, 2025, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC hosted the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History. The conference theme, real-time history, drew on Roy Rosenzweig’s call to action that historians need to directly address the methodological potential and risks of the digital age.

Designed as a forum, the conference prompted attendees to share what opportunities, problems, and concerns arise while “documenting the now.” To allow space for unstructured creativity after long days of conferencing, the GHI team and I also arranged a zine-making workshop in which attendees crafted and exhibited their own mini magazines (just for fun!). As a first-time attendee to the DH conference, I was especially struck by how each presenter chose and justified different methodologies to achieve their project goals. The self-management evident in the still-emerging field reminded me of a Do-It-Yourself ethos usually applied to art and music. Scholars, practitioners, and activists discussed the following topics while sharing their experiences tackling real-time archiving.

Carrying On When the Grants Go Away

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Over the past three decades, RRCHNM has received many awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We’ve used a truly tiny portion of the federal budget to have a huge impact on individuals and communities. Students in public schools use our teaching resources. Visitors to public history sites learn more from our websites. Citizens wondering about the origin of our nation listen to our podcast about the American Revolution. For literally pennies per person we reach, we’ve had a huge impact on public understandings of the past.

Celebrating Women's History Month

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:27:33 +0000

Since RRCHNM’s founding in the 1990s, we have been committed to highlighting the contributions women made in the past. One of our first projects was a CD-ROM version of the textbook Who Built America? which grew out of efforts to reinterpret American history from “the bottom up”—drawing on studies of workers, women, consumers, farmers, African Americans, and immigrants—that has helped transform our understanding of the past. This textbook highlighted perspectives often neglected in traditional teachings of American history, including women’s history.

Teaching, Writing, and Research with AI

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:29:49 +0000

When Chat GPT first appeared in November 2022, the almost universal reaction in the humanities community could be summed up in one word – Yikes! Almost without warning this new tool seemed ready to make it incredibly easy for students to “write” essays using prompts that took no more than a minute to produce and then, if they were crafty, another 30 minutes to modify a bit so that it wasn’t quite so obvious that the essay had been written by a large language model (LLM).

Celebrating Black History Month

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:50:48 +0000

Just a couple miles from RRCHNM is the campus of Woodson High School, part of the Fairfax County Public School system. Until this past year the school was named for W. T. Woodson, the long time superintendent of FCPS and an opponent of school desegregation. Now the school is named after Carter G. Woodson. Born in 1875, Woodson was the second Black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. Excluded from the American Historical Association and other professional historical circles, Woodson was a creator of institutions to understand and study Black history. Among the many institutions he founded was Negro History Week, founded nearly a century ago in 1926. Woodson’s observance was the precursor to Black History Month, first observed in 1970 and then federally recognized in 1976 for the bicentennial.

Graduate Student Reflections: AHA Presentations

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000

At the start of January, I had the privilege of attending the American Historical Association and presenting a poster for the Religious Ecologies project. While it was fun to put the poster together and answer the questions from people who came up during the poster session, my favorite part, the most valuable part, was the time spent outside the sessions.

Rachel Whyte with her Religious Ecologies Poster

Graduate Student Reflections: How Network Analysis Influenced My Research

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000

As a fifth year PhD candidate in the History Department, I have combined my desire to learn everything I can about female preachers in the early American republic with my enthusiasm for any and all data visualizations and digital humanities tools. Committed to these women, just as they committed themselves to their itinerant ministries, I have expanded my research to include more women, especially Black female preachers, and those from England and Canada who came to the States, and vice-versa. My analysis in my dissertation—a traditional history dissertation—intersects an interest in gender, race, and body studies with a religious history methodology. My focus remains on the women who preached, despite opposition from their families, husbands, pastors, and many others. I center the women, and I still emphasize their relationships with others who supported them.

NEH Institute Participants Present at AHA on Higher Education History

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Five participants in the NEH-funded institute, Unpacking the History of Higher Education, presented the projects they developed at the institute at the AHA Annual Meeting in January along with project co-directors, Kelly Schrum and Nate Sleeter. The summer 2024 institute brought together faculty members from higher education programs who teach or support history of higher ed courses.

At the AHA 2025 annual meeting in January, RRCHNM’s Nate Sleeter and Kelly Schrum chaired the panel, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States.” The panel grew out of an NEH institute of the same name directed by Schrum and Sleeter in the summer of 2024 in which 25 faculty from universities nationwide came together to explore the teaching and research of the history of higher ed through archival sources. Institute participants included faculty, advanced doctoral students, librarians, and archivists who teach or support courses on the history of higher education in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs.

Connect With RRCHNM at AHA25

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Many RRCHNM-ers will be featured in sessions coming up this week at the American Historical Associations Annual Meeting. To connect with RRHCNM and learn more about our current projects, here is a list of those sessions.

Saturday, January 4

Digitizing Black History at HBCU’s: A Collaborative Public History Approach

Bowery (Sheraton New York, Lower Level), 8:30am-10am

Chaired by Marion McGee of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a panel with Catiana Foster of Tuskeegee University, Timmia King of RRCHNM and George Mason University, Raymond (Garrad) Lee of Jackson State University, Barbara Twyman of Florida A&M University, Shyheim Williams of Clark Atlanta University.

Digital Scholar Makes Year-End Donation to RRCHNM

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce a generous end-of-year donation from our friends and colleagues at Digital Scholar. Their gift of $100,000 will be split equally between the Director’s Innovation Fund, where it will allow us to experiment with new approaches to the study of history, and to the RRCHNM Endowment, which sustains our ongoing operations.

Digital Scholar is a nonprofit organization founded in 2009, and it is dedicated to the development of software and services for researchers and cultural heritage institutions, including Omeka, Zotero, Tropy, PressForward, and Sourcery. The original development of the Zotero and Omeka software projects took place at RRCHNM, and their long-term sustainability was secured via an independent non-profit corporation, Digital Scholar.

Announcing the Alumni and Friends Graduate Fellowship Endowment

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:15:00 +0000

Over its thirty years, graduate students in history have been a critical part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Graduate students don’t just take classes and work on faculty projects. They create innovative scholarship that fulfills RRCHNM’s mission of creating history in new media. Most recently, history graduate students at George Mason University have rethought what a dissertation in history can mean, creating dissertations not in the conventional form of a rough draft of a book, but using websites, computation, visualization, and audio to create entirely new forms of scholarship.

Introducing the Denig Manuscript Project

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:59:41 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of the Denig Manuscript Project, created in collaboration with the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.

The Denig Manuscript Project brings an eighteenth-century, Pennsylvania-made manuscript and watercolors to life through a collaborative multimedia digital project. High-resolution digital images, updated translations, forensic analysis, sound recordings, and contextual scholarship provide enhanced access to this extraordinary document of religious life in early America. Ludwig Denig (1755–1830) created the ink and watercolor bound volume in 1784, and it remained in private hands until the 1970s. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library acquired the manuscript as a gift in 2020. Recognizing both the importance of the volume and its fragile physical state, Winterthur received support from the Schwartz Foundation and The Paper Project at the Getty to study and digitize the book. Winterthur and a team of scholars worked with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to build a digital humanities site and provide greater access to Denig’s work.

R2 Studios Receives Dr. Scholl Foundation Grant

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is excited to announce that R2 Studioshas received a $10,000 grant from the Dr. Scholl Foundation to advance the studio’s mission to democratize access to history through podcasting.

Founded in 2021, R2 Studios strives to tell unexpected stories based on the latest research to connect listeners with the past.

“This generous grant from the Dr. Scholl Foundation provides meaningful support for the production of R2 Studios’ current and future series,” said Jim Ambuske, Co-Head of R2 Studios and host of Worlds Turned Upside Down. “We are especially pleased that it will help underwrite the fourth season of Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant, which follows the lives of women who lived through the era of the American Revolution.”

Religious Ecologies Project Releases Introductory Video

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Recently, the Religious Ecologies Project produced an introductory video that gives a brief history of the United States Census of Religious Bodies, an overview of this project, and the goals we hope to gain from digitizing these census schedules. Many who frequent our site may be curious about why since a great deal of this information is already in written format on our website. So, why spend time doing something that already exists?

Connecting Threads Launches Project Site

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

On October 11, 2024, the Connecting Threads project launched its website and celebrated the conclusion of the first phase of the project with a public symposium at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Connecting Threads is a collaborative digital history project dedicated to amplifying the contributions of Indian weavers and African Caribbean consumers to global histories of dress. Drawing on the work of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the project re-examined the history of the Madras handkerchief, an internationally popular dress accessory made of brightly coloured checked cotton, produced in coastal southeastern India and used by diverse cultures across the Global South. In the recently completed first phase of the project, we examined the influence of the Madras handkerchief on 18th and 18th century dress, particularly in the context of their use in the Greater Caribbean Region including coastal southeastern United States.

RRCHNM Launches New Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Funded by the Library of Congress, these four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching post-1970s U.S. history and civics and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on post-1970s history in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from theLibrary of Congress. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers new to the profession.

Coming This Winter: Finding Jane Austen Podcast

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 09:55:43 +0000

250 years after her birth, Jane Austen remains a giant in the cultural zeitgeist. Her works have been adapted hundreds of times over multiple mediums, and she remains one of the most popular writers in the English language. Yet little is known about Jane Austen the person. Her sister Cassandra burned her letters, leaving just 160 remaining. In the absence of her own direct testimony, where do we find the real Jane Austen? In her books? In her family and friends? In the “world” of Jane Austen or in the many iterations of her life and afterlife?

RRCHNM Hosts DH 2024: Reinvention and Responsibility

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:00:24 +0000

For over 35 years, the annual Digital Humanities Conference, organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), has been a premier gathering for scholars, researchers, practitioners, and professionals from around the globe. This event is a vital platform for fostering dialogue, sharing knowledge, and advancing digital research and teaching across various disciplines.

This year, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) hosted DH2024, coinciding with the center’s 30th anniversary. Since its establishment, RRCHNM has championed the democratization of knowledge through innovative uses of digital media and technology. This mission aligns well with ADHO’s diverse international membership and wide range of disciplinary perspectives.

Amanda Madden Receives Second Round of NEH Funding to Create a Digital Edition of Goro Dati’s Sfera

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:05:41 +0000

Amanda Madden of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with Carrie Beneš of New College of Florida, Laura Ingallinella of the University of Toronto, and independent scholar Laura Morreale, has been awarded a second major grant as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program. This grant will allow for a continuation of the scholars’ work on theLa Sfera Project, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem La sfera (The Globe).

Deepthi Murali and Jason Heppler Receive NEH Funding for Connecting Threads Project

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:31:22 +0000

Deepthi Murali and Jason Heppler of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level II) of $138, 256 in support of the ongoing global textile history project Connecting Threads: Digitally Connecting Collections, Expanding Public Engagement.

Connecting Threads is a collaborative digital history project dedicated to amplifying the contributions of Indian weavers and Afro-Caribbean consumers to global histories of dress. Drawing on the work of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the project in its first phase examined the history of the Madras handkerchief, an internationally popular dress accessory made of brightly coloured checked cotton.

Introducing Antisemitism, U.S.A.: A History Podcast

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Introducing Antisemitism, U.S.A.: A History podcast from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and R2 Studios

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University is excited to announce the launch ofAntisemitism, U.S.A., a limited podcast about the history of antisemitism in the United States. A narrative history podcast, Antisemitism, U.S.A. weaves together expert commentary with narration by Mark Oppenheimer to tell the story of antisemitism in the United States over the past 300 years.

Graduate Student Reflections: Teaching DH

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:15:44 +0000

This 2024 spring semester at George Mason University, I was an instructor of record of HIST 390 “The Digital Past” course. This course satisfies the university’s Information Technology and Computing (IT) requirement and aims for undergraduate students to learn how to use digital tools to study the past. As a PhD history candidate at GMU and former digital history fellow at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), I have strong experience in the field of digital history, and was excited for the opportunity to expand my research and technical skills through practical application and instruction in the classroom. Following university parameters around learning outcomes for this course, I designed my own syllabus and taught specific digital history topics regarding primary source research, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, project management research workflows, and how to write historical analysis. Overall, teaching HIST 390 provided me an opportunity to reflect on what I have learned as a PhD student of digital history and develop a curriculum to instruct these skills to undergraduate students new to the field.

Religious Digitization: A Step Beyond a Database

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:00:22 +0000

Every ten years from 1906 to 1946, the United States Census Bureau surveyed religious congregations, synagogues, and other religious groups in a census similar to the population census. At the time, churches were considered a public good, similar to a public park or school. Through these religious censuses, the government could ensure counties had enough churches and what religions and spiritual sects were growing/prospering within the United States at any given time. Of the five religious censuses that the bureau conducted (1906-1946), only the schedules from the 1926 census still exist.

RRCHNM Delivers Arnhem Postal History Prototype Database

Thu, 16 May 2024 08:55:14 +0000

Many of us started “pandemic projects” large and small over the past several years. Tim Gale’s project, a prototype website and database of his extensive collection of postal artifacts, is one of those projects that is finally coming to life. Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Arnhem Postal History will be a website with a database, an interactive map, and philatelic exhibits focusing on World War II in the Netherlands based on the 1,500 items in Gale’s collection. Arnhem Postal History is named in honor of the Battle of Arnhem which was fought in September of 1944. However, the scope of the collection is much wider than the Battle of Arnhem, encompassing postcards, letters, postal covers, and other documents from 1939-1945.

AHA Survey Finds RRCHNM’s Teachinghistory.org and History Matters to be Top Resources for K-12 Teachers

Tue, 14 May 2024 10:35:06 +0000

A recent survey of K-12 social studies teachers by the American Historical Association finds that Teachinghistory.org remains a frequently used resource with 56 percent reporting that they used the site. Funded by the Department of Education from 2008 to 2012 and directed by former Director of Educational projects Kelly Schrum, Teachinghistory.org (initially known as the National History Education Clearinghouse) is a central online location for accessing high-quality resources in K-12 U.S. history education.

Antisemitism, U.S.A. Podcast Receives Generous Support from the David Bruce

Fri, 10 May 2024 10:20:07 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is excited to announce that R2 Studioshas received a $50,000 gift from the David Bruce Smith Foundation to support Antisemitism, U.S.A., our forthcoming narrative podcast series on the long, complicated history of antisemitism in the United States.

In production since 2022, this limited series is hosted by Mark Oppenheimer and features contributions from over two dozen leading experts in history, religious studies, politics, and public policy to explore how antisemitism has evolved in America since the nation’s founding.

Graduate Student Reflections: Brandan P. Buck

Wed, 08 May 2024 14:30:13 +0000

My name is Brandan P. Buck, and I am currently in my fifth year as a Ph.D. candidate in history at George Mason University and graduate research assistant at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), where I have spent four of the last five years of my Ph.D. program with Mason. In this, my final semester with the RRCHM, I thought I would share how my work here and the skills learned in the history department’s “Cilo wired” series of digital history courses have afforded me invaluable skills for public-facing scholarship. Through this combination of experiences, I have learned how to work with and clean “messy” data, analyze it using computational and spatial methods, and present it to audiences through crisp and efficient visualizations. The skills gleaned here at RRCHMN, whether banal or advanced, have aided my dissertation project and helped me turn some of its findings into a portfolio of public-facing work for popular and scholarly audiences through my blog, opinion pieces, and several podcast appearances.

The McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution Supports the Production of Worlds Turned Upside Down

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 13:04:14 +0000

RRCHNM’s R2 Studios is thrilled to announce that Siena College’s McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution has generously invested $3,000 in support of our latest podcast, Worlds Turned Upside Down.

Worlds Turned Upside Down tells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it. Just in time for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, Worlds expands the story of the revolution by exploring how the crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.

RRCHNM Receives NEH Grant in Collaboration with Seven Local Partners for Digitization of Civil War Graffiti

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:45:50 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with seven local partners—the Office of Historic Resources, (City of Fairfax, Virginia); the Brandy Station Foundation; the Office of Historic Preservation, (Prince William County); R.B. Toth Associates; the Manassas Museum System; NOVA Parks; and the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation—has been awarded a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program.

This grant will allow for the continuation of work started by RRCHNM, Historic Blenheim, the Brandy Station Foundation, and R.B. Toth Associates. This new round of funding will support the building and publishing of a digital archive focused on soldiers’ graffiti found in Civil War-era structures located in the greater Northern Virginia region operated by our six local project partners. The digital archive will provide scholars, students, and the public access to the graffiti and a reasonably large collection of ancillary archival material associated with the graffiti.

RRCHNM Receives NEH Grant to Support Worlds Turned Upside Down Podcast

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:45:23 +0000

R2 Studios at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is excited to announce that Jim Ambuske, Jeanette Patrick, and Mills Kelly have been awarded $272,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of our latest podcast, Worlds Turned Upside Down.

Worlds Turned Upside Down is a narrative documentary podcast series about the history of the American Revolution. The series draws on contributions from an international cast of leading experts to explore the conflict through the lives of British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples who experienced it as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war.

Religious Ecologies Hits Digitization Milestone

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:56:01 +0000

The 1926 Census of Religious Bodies collected more than 232,000 schedules from religious organizations across the United States. The Religious Ecologies team frequently receives requests about which denominations have been uploaded to our website, specifically which denominations have all of their schedules uploaded. As we approach the halfway point of our digitization process, we are pleased to announce that we have uploaded 121 out of the total 213 denominations to our website. These 121 different denominations consist of more than 110,000 schedules and span across dozens of states. Below is a list documenting all 121 completed denominations on our website. We are excited about this milestone and look forward to the second half of the digitization process.

The End of Our Hike

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Every hike has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some are short, some are long. In the case of the Appalachian Trail, one of those hikes can last less than an hour, or it can stretch almost 2,200 miles. On October 5, 2021, the team at RRCHNM’s R2 Studios began our journey through the history of America’s most iconic long distance hiking trail with episode one of The Green Tunnel p odcast. Over the past three years we’ve made more than 40 episodes of original content on this complex history and our listeners have downloaded those episodes more than 160,000 times.

World History Commons Adds Several New Primary Sources

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:44:58 +0000

World History Commons recently prioritized adding primary sources from lesser-covered regions and time periods to give a more thorough overview of world history for educators to pull from. As the Project Associate heading this endeavor, I focused my efforts on ancient and post-classical Oceania, North/Central America, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

My largest effort went to include sources for Oceania, which had the lowest overall coverage of any region. Oceania, as a small region of dispersed island nations with less written history than other areas of the world, often receives less attention in curricula seeking to cover large amounts of space and time. However, Oceania’s vibrant history and culture can easily be incorporated into larger classroom topics regarding human migration and peopling, archaeology and material culture, early architectural advancements, imperialism, and colonization history. I included visual materials about pottery and figurines, canoes, maps, and stone structures.

Apply Now for the Gerda Henkel Fellowship in Digital History

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:55:22 +0000

With the generous support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at the George Mason University (RRCHNM), and the German Historical Institute (GHI) invite applications from postdoctoral scholars and advanced doctoral students based in Europe for a 12-month fellowship in digital history

This fellowship aims to connect scholars from Europe to digital history in the United States. The fellowship is intended to support a junior scholar working in the field of digital history or a junior scholar with less experience in digital history but interested in learning new research methods. We welcome applications from scholars who are seeking seed-funding in order to develop an innovative idea into a new project and/or funding proposal as well as from scholars who wish to pursue fully-fledged research projects.

Connect with RRCHNM at AHA24

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 11:00:28 +0000

There are a lot of great sessions coming up at this week’s American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, many of which feature RRCHNM-ers. To make finding those sessions easy for you so you can easily connect with us and learn more about our current projects, we thought we’d list them all here for you.

Friday, January 5

Teaching History in the Digital Age

Plaza A (Lobby, Hilton Union Square), 1:30 - 3:00 pm

The John Carter Brown Library Supports the Production of Worlds Turned Upside Down

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 10:45:06 +0000

RRCHNM’s R2 Studios is thrilled to announce that The John Carter Brown Library (JCB) has generously invested $10,000 in support of our latest podcast, Worlds Turned Upside Down.

Remembering: Angel David Nieves

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:05:37 +0000

Written by: Steve Brier

It is with great sadness that the members of the Advisory Board and the staff of the RRCHNM note the sudden passing on December 5th of our colleague and RRCHNM board member, Ángel David Nieves. A distinguished and pioneering scholar in the digital humanities and the development of experimental online publishing platforms, Ángel was Dean’s Professor of Public and Digital Humanities, Professor of African American Studies and History, and Director of Public Humanities at Northeastern University. His scholarship focused on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, social justice, and technology in the United States and South Africa. He brought to that work a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and comradely enthusiasm for collaboration. His presence will be sorely missed in all of the sites and places that he supported and improved, including RRCHNM.

Worlds Turned Upside Down Receives Funding from Virginia’s 250 Commission

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

RRCHNM’s R2 Studios is thrilled to announce that the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission has generously awarded $10,000 in support of our latest podcast, Worlds Turned Upside Down.

RRCHNM Launches Next Round of Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:05 +0000

Funded by the Library of Congress, the four teaching guides support new prospective teachers teaching Indigenous history and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on Indigenous history in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the Library of Congress. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers new to the profession.

A Veteran’s Day Salute to our Valued Partnership with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting

Sat, 11 Nov 2023 11:31:17 +0000

This Veteran’s Day, we at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) would like to highlight the incredible work of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). The mission of the DPAA is to provide the fullest possible accounting for American personnel lost in foreign conflicts going back to World War II, with the ultimate goal of finding these lost personnel, completing their stories, and bringing them back to their families and loved ones, thus bringing closure to them and to the nation. Such a monumental effort requires an army of professionals working tirelessly across the globe, including administrators, military personnel, historians, archeologists, doctors, scientists, and field specialists.

Talking to the Dead: Spiritualists and Seances

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:29:23 +0000

During my time working on the American Religious Ecologies project I became focused on female ministers and other types of religious leadership that appear in the Census. This interest aligns well with my dissertation research, which focuses on female preachers in the nineteenth century and their bodily experiences, analyzing even earlier examples of successful female religious leadership.

One religion with a large amount of female representation in twentieth century leadership are the different denominations of Spiritualists. In studying the National Spiritual Alliance, I found that almost 40% of the preachers listed on census schedules were definitely women, compared to the 25% of men listed, seen here in the map “Male and Female Pastors in the National Spiritual Alliance” (a number of pastors only had their initials given, making it hard to know their gender). Though the importance of female leadership and representation are one of the more significant markers of the Spiritualist faith, anotherimportant facet of their faith is the belief in communicating with the dead.

Exploring True Crime in Early Modern Europe in the Classroom

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 10:34:04 +0000

This semester I’m using my expertise on crime and violence in a new way: I’m teaching an upper-level undergraduate course “True Crime in Early Modern Europe.” When we think of the true crime genre, we tend to think of documentaries, Netflix shows, Pulp Fiction, and podcasts, to name just a few popular formats. What most people don’t know, however, is that “true crime” as a genre originated in the early modern world–mostly Europe but also premodern China and the Americas. Bestsellers in the genre included pamphlets, murder ballads, and executioner’s songs which sensationalized crimes, spoke of motives, and reflected on justice.

Revolutionary Beginnings

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:00:40 +0000

We all know how the American Revolution ends, but do we really understand its beginnings?

In the mid-1750s, far from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or Charleston, and farther still from London, Paris, or Madrid, the choices made by British settlers, French colonists, and Indigenous peoples in a place they knew as the Ohio Country sparked a global war with revolutionary implications.

Nothing about their actions was inevitable, nor could they have known of what was to come.

Jessica Otis Receives NEH Funding To Develop and Host Summer Institute On DH Methods

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:00:16 +0000

Jessica Otis of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) in collaboration with Ashley Sanders of UCLA, have been awarded funding as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program. This grant will facilitate an institute that will guide participants through fundamental mathematical concepts that underpin common Digital Humanities (DH) methods.

The Mathematical Humanists will include a series of in-person, online, and asynchronous professional development workshops to be hosted by George Mason University and the University of California, Los Angeles, on statistics, graphs and networks, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics methods that inform computational humanities methodologies such as network analysis, and text mining and analysis.

Nate Sleeter and Kelly Schrum Receive NEH Funding To Host Summer Faculty Institute

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 12:08:19 +0000

Dr. Nate Sleeter, of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), and Dr. Kelly Schrum, of the Higher Education Program (HEP), at George Mason University have been awarded funding as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Institutes for Higher Education Faculty program. This grant will facilitate an institute on the history of higher education, which is central to understanding higher education’s present and future, especially for students in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs who will lead our colleges and universities for decades to come.

Amanda Madden Receives NEH Funding to Create a Digital Edition of Goro Dati’s Sfera

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 12:08:10 +0000

Amanda Madden of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with Carrie Beneš of New College of Florida, Laura Ingallinella of the University of Toronto, and independent scholar Laura Morreale, have been awarded a major grant as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Scholarly Editions and Translations program. This grant will facilitate collaboration among a team of scholars to complete theLa Sfera Project, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem La sfera (The Globe).

Nate Sleeter Becomes RRCHNM’s Director of Educational Projects

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:04:00 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that Dr. Nate Sleeter has become our new Director of Educational Projects. The K–12 and college educational resources that RRCHNM makes freely available to teachers, students, and parents regularly receive millions of visits per year, and they are used in the curricula of schools from Virginia to California.

Nate has for several years been RRCHNM’s primary specialist in creating educational resources. His new role as Director of Educational Projects reflects both the results he has achieved in creating educational materials at RRCHNM for more than a decade, and the renewed emphasis that RRCHNM is making on history education in schools.

RRCHNM Past, Present, and Future

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:16:40 +0000

The first time that I came across the name Roy Rosenzweig was in the textbook for a class titled simply, “Historiography.” The book discussed Rosenzweig’s 1983 book, Eight Hours for What We Will, as a key work in American labor history. Since Eight Hours is a history of workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, just thirty miles from where I grew up, I went to the library and checked out the book. As I read, I was captivated by how Rosenzweig had captured the lives and labors of working-class people.

Passing the Baton

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:00:24 +0000

At the 2001 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Roy Rosenzweig dumped a cup of coffee on me. He didn’t mean to, of course, but he did.

It happened in the days when search committees often interviewed job candidates in hotel rooms and I was there to interview for a job at George Mason University. Roy and I had spoken on the phone about the position prior to my interview and, not knowing Roy, I’d been a bit intimidated during that call. I had read several of his books and articles in graduate school and he was the guy when it came to digital history.

RRCHNM Receives Additional Funding to Create More Teaching Guides

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Library of Congress funding for these teaching guides builds upon earlier work that supports new prospective teachers as they teach difficult subjects in history.

RRCHNM is proud to announce funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the Library of Congress for 2023-24. With these funds we will create four more teaching guides for pre-service teachers on difficult to teach topics. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history — with a focus on topics that can be especially challenging for teachers who are new to the profession. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians’ approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.

RRCHNM To Host DH2024 Conference

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled that in just about a year from now, RRCHNM and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) will be bringing DH2024 to Washington, D.C.!

The annual ADHO Digital Humanities Conference is the central and largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe, presenting them with a unique opportunity for the exchange of their work and ideas and the fostering of future collaborations. In 2024, approximately 1,000 people from around the globe are expected to attend DH2024 from August 6 - 9. This will be the first time the conference has been held in the United States in a decade.

Collaboration With NMAAHC and HBCU Partners Moves Into Beta Testing Mode

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

A team from RRCHNM spent three days in Atlanta in June conducting an Omeka S training workshop for the five HBCU partner institutions in the HBCU History Culture and Access Consortium sponsored by the Office of Strategic Partnerships at the National Museum for African American History and Culture. Our PhD students Timmia King (below, left) and Amber Pelham (below, right) worked closely with project teams from the five HBCUs in the project – Jackson State University, Tuskegee University, Clark Atlanta University, Texas Southern University, and Florida A&M University – as the project moves from the initial training phase into beta testing mode. Timmia and Amber designed the training workshop themselves and executed it with great skill. During the second day of the convening our team and the HBCU partners spent some time thinking through the critical metadata issues involved in such a complex multi-institutional public history project. Over the coming year the HBCU partners will populate the database with items from their incredibly rich collections and designers from the Smithsonian will develop the front end experience for website visitors.

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant Joins the R2 Studios Network

Mon, 15 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This post is cross-posted on r2studios.org with further details about the announcement.

RRCHNM’s R2 Studios and historian Kathryn Gehred are excited to announce a new partnership that will bring the highly-rated podcast series Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant to the R2 Studios network.

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a women’s history podcast that showcases 18th and early 19th-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. Using her training as a historian and documentary editor, Gehred and her guests dig into the story behind each letter and the lives of the women who wrote or received them.

Welcome, Kristen Jacobsen!

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

RRCHNM welcomes our newest team member–Kristin Jacobsen! Kristin comes to us with experience in military history, public history, and digital projects–she has an MA in Applied History from George Mason University and a MMAS in Military History from the US Army Command and General Staff College. She is on her second career, having served as a Naval Officer for 27 years; she was deployed around the globe, from the Middle East to the Caribbean and participated in multiple joint and international exercises and has visited six of seven continents. In addition to her extensive professional experience, she has competed on jeopardy so we anticipate she’ll be leading the lunchtime trivia charge. She has volunteered for the Girls Make History Program at the Navy Museum and as a coach with Girls on the Run.

American Religious Ecologies Receives Second NEH Grant to Work with 1926 Census of Religious Bodies

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:06:35 +0000

We are grateful to acknowledge a second NEH grant in support of our American Religious Ecologies project. The National Endowment for the Humanities announced this week that RRCHNM will receive a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant for $350,000 to continue our work with the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies for the next three years. This new grant follow on our previous award, also from the HCRR program in the NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access, which was received in 2019.

Tropy 1.13 Release

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The Tropy team is pleased to announce the release of Tropy 1.13. In addition to several performance and user interface improvements (see full release notes here), this release introduces the new standard project type. In standard projects, all imported images are copied into a bundled project folder, which can be moved around freely or shared with other devices without having to consolidate photos. Users can opt to continue working with the previous project type, which is now called an “advanced” project. Users may also convert their projects into standard projects if they wish. For more details, see the latest Tropy blog post.

Leadership Gift from Digital Scholar Kicks off 30th Anniversary Campaign

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0000

We are very pleased to announce the lead gift for our 30th anniversary Campaign for RRCHNM. Our friends and former colleagues at Digital Scholar have made an incredibly generous gift to our Center – $15,000. This first major gift helps us launch the Campaign for RRCHNM with a bang and is a great step forward in our efforts to raise funds to help us continue to provide the best possible digital historical projects, to give our students amazing educational opportunities, and to make high quality educational resources related to history available to all. Everyone here extends our thanks for this very generous gift.

Bon Voyage

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

This week we bid bon voyage to two of our graduate research assistants, Laura Brannan Fretwell and Caroline Greer. But it’s a happy bon voyage because Laura and Caroline are leaving RRCHNM to go spend three months at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). During their residency in Luxembourg, Laura and Caroline will be working closely with faculty at C2DH on digital projects there and will be sharing what they’ve learned here at RRCHNM with their new colleagues and friends.

Announcing Death by Numbers Beta

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:00:00 +0000

RRCHNM is excited to announce the formal beta launch of the Death by Numbers database. There’s over a year left to go in the project and we’re still hard at work adding data to the database and building our first visualizations, so don’t be surprised at how large some of the gaps are in the dataset. But we wanted to go public and give our audience a chance to provide feedback on what we’ve created so far.

Production Now Underway For Worlds Turned Upside

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

This post is cross-posted on r2studios.org with further details about the announcement.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and R2 Studios are excited to announce that production is underway for Worlds Turned Upside Down. This new podcast seriestells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it.

For many modern citizens of the United States, “the cause of America” that gave birth to a new nation in 1776 and the heroic stories we tell ourselves about its founding remains “in great measure the cause of all mankind.” But for the people who lived through it, the revolutionary era upended their lives in ways they could never have imagined. The crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.

Schedule for the RRCHNM data working group, spring 2023

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The RRCHNM data working group meets every other week each semester. The working group exists to aid and abet one another as we seek to create data-driven histories. In our sessions, we share work-in-progress, discuss readings, and teach one another the techniques of the trade. Each semester we create the schedule collaboratively. Here is our schedule for spring semester, 2023.

1 February 2023: Check-in and planning
15 February 2023: Discussion of readings
1 March 2023: Text analysis techniques
29 March 2023: Notebook computing
12 April 2023: Creating and consuming data APIs
26 April 2023: Data visualization challenge

New this semester is our data visualization challenge. Participants in the group will all work on the same dataset (to be determined) and create a data visualization. We will then compare results to see how different people approached the problem. There won’t be a single winner: instead, we will give out yearbook-style superlatives (“most likely to succeed,” “quirkiest,” “most likely to work in finance” and so on).

RRCHNM Receives Grant in Collaboration with Fairfax City’s Office of Historic Civil War Graffiti

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with Historic Blenheim and the Civil War Interpretive Center (Fairfax City, VA) and the Brandy Station Foundation (Brandy Station, VA), has been awarded a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division for Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources.

This planning grant will facilitate collaboration between the three partners for the planning of a digitization project focused on Civil War graffiti found in Civil War buildings located in Virginia and elsewhere. The grant will also facilitate the development of collaborative workflows between the three organizations and digital preservation professionals.

RRCHNM at the AHA

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The first week of January 2023 was quite a week for the team at RRCHNM. Close to twenty of us were at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, presenting papers, taking part in round tables, and showing off work at poster sessions. Our fantastic graduate students made up a significant share of all the research posters presented at the conference.

If you know RRCHNM, you probably know us as a research center creating new approaches to digital history. But our mission is also to build the future of our field by providing students a wide variety of opportunities to grow as historians. And it’s because education is so central to our mission that we were so excited to see how many of our students were on the program at the conference this year.

Basics of Tropy

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Each semester, RRCHNM hosts a series of “Basics Of” sessions that teach the basics of an application, process, or methodology so our graduate students, affiliates, and faculty can get together and learn about that topic. These sessions are hosted by RRCHNM members who are resident experts on the selected topic.

This semester, our first session will be “Basics of Tropy” with Postdoctoral Research Fellow Douglas McRae. Read on to learn more about this session happening on Tuesday, January 31, 2023, from 1-2pm EST.

Remembering Paula Petrik

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Today we share the sad news that Professor Paula Petrik, our former colleague here at RRCHNM, has passed away at the age of 74 at her home in Montana.

Paula was an early pioneer in digital history and was the author or co-author of several books and/or CD-ROMs in Western history, women’s history, and digital history. As a faculty member in the Department of History and Art History here at GMU, Paula taught a number of very popular courses and was the original instructor for the second course in our digital history sequence for PhD students.

Connect with RRCHNM at AHA23

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Friday, January 6

Doing Accessible Digital History

Philadelphia Marriot Downtown - Grand Ballroom Salon K, 10:30 am - 12 pm,

Saying Goodbye - Julia Hoffer

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 12:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever worked in a grant-funded research center you probably know just how important having a professional grants administrator on your team is to the success of your projects. This week our long-time grants administrator Shu-Tyng (Julia) Hoffer is departing RRCHNM for a new opportunity at one of the other Georges (Georgetown) here in the greater DC metro area. We’re all very sad she’s leaving and thrilled for her that she has this new opportunity to grow and expand her already considerable talents.

Saying Goodbye - Megan Brett

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:00:00 +0000

One of the more famous presents ever to grace RRCHNM’s annual White Elephant Gift Exchange is a small statue of Chairman Mao. Year after year, the statue reappears, is generally stolen at least once, and vanishes into someone’s office or the top of a bookcase until December rolls around again. This year, the provenance and history of this statue was recorded in a bit of paper that was rolled up and stuffed into the statue’s base. Both the statue and the documentation owe their existence to long-time RRCHNM staff member who recently finished her Ph.D. in History at GMU: Megan Brett.

Welcome, Tony Trinh!

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to welcome Tony Trinh as our new systems administrator. Tony is a graduate of George Mason University, and we are glad that he has returned to his alma mater. Since graduating from GMU, Tony has worked as a developer and in other technical roles, including as a government contractor. At RRCHNM, he assumes responsibility for maintaining the many websites that we have created over our thirty year history, as well as consulting with our historians and other technical staff on new projects.

How Philip Lampi recovered the lost history of early American elections

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 13:07:19 +0000

As Americans go to the polls to vote in today’s midterm Congressional elections, they will be able to watch results flow practically in real time. By the end of the day, the data for the election returns will be more or less available. For much of United States history, of course, information flowed more slowly. But even still, we can take it for granted that there are regular records of elections, and that it is straightforward to find out who won.

Welcoming Jim Ambuske to R2 Studios

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that Dr. Jim Ambuske has joined RRCHNM and R2 Studios, RRCHNM’s podcast studio. Jim is a historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World and has directed several digital history projects. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia in 2016.

Jim joins us from The Washington Library’s Center for Digital History at George Washington’s Mount Vernon where he designed and executed several digital research and public history projects. In addition to co-creating and co-writing the eight-part podcast docuseries Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, he also hosted and produced the podcast Conversations at the Washington Library.

Welcome Alexandra Krebs!

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 12:00:00 +0000

We at the center would like to extend a warm welcome to Alexandra Krebs, our new Gerda Henkel Fellow in digital history in partnership with the German Historical Institute (GHI).

Alexandra studied history, Latin, and educational sciences at the University of Mainz (Germany) and the University of Palermo (Italy) and has since worked as a high school teacher and as a research assistant and lecturer in theory and didactics of history at the University of Paderborn where she is finishing her PhD. Her teaching and research focus on digital history learning in cooperation with archives and other institutions beyond the classroom. She has been developing an innovative web-based learning environment, the App in die Geschichte [App into History] which enables students to conduct historical research in digital archives.

R2 Studios Launches Season 2 of The Green Tunnel Podcast

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 13:30:00 +0000

Season Two of The Green Tunnel podcast, produced here at R2 Studios, launched today. In this season we will be focused on the larger question of who the Appalachian Trail is for and will come at that question from a variety of directions. When Benton MacKaye first proposed the trail in 1921, he wanted it to be a place for working class people to get away for a few hours or a few days, to get some fresh air, and to experience the healing power of time under the trees. Today’s trail, visited by millions of people each year, is a complex place with overlapping audiences and identities. MacKaye likely would have been very surprised to see the diversity in the hiking population—diversity that cuts as many ways as you can count.

Introducing DataScribe 101

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 12:30:36 +0000

Fall workshops hosted by the DataScribe project team will further support user exploration of DataScribe 101’s capabilities.

Earlier this year, RRCHNM released DataScribe, a structured transcription module for the Omeka S platform. This module enables scholars to identify the structure of the data within their sources, speed up the transcription of their sources, and reliably structure their transcriptions in a form amenable to computational analysis. Scholars can turn sources into tables of data stored as numbers, dates, categories, and more.

R2 Studios Receives Grant for Podcast on History of American Antisemitism

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 10:30:00 +0000

R2 Studios and The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) are excited to announce that Jeanette Patrick, John Turner, and Lincoln Mullen have been awarded $50,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation to begin work on a podcast exploring the history of American antisemitism.

RRCHNM’s R2 Studios, led by Patrick, will produce the project, which will be written by Turner and Mullen, both historians of American religion. Zev Eleff, president of Gratz College and a leading historian of American Judaism, is collaborating with the RRCHNM team on this project.

Welcoming Douglas McRae to RRCHNM

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:00:00 +0000

We are happy to announce that Dr. Douglas McRae has joined our team at RRCHNM as a postdoctoral fellow. Douglas received his PhD from Georgetown University in 2021 and his research interests are in urban environmental history, particularly the history of water and sanitation in Brazil and throughout Latin America. His work focuses on the changing relationship between São Paulo, Brazil and its water resources since the 19th century. Douglas will be working on the next phase of the Tropy project, which mostly involves outreach efforts to promote the software to audiences in North America and Latin America. As a fluent speaker of both Spanish and Portuguese, Douglas will be working with diverse audiences all across both continents.

New Interpretive Essays Added to Collecting These Times

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:00:40 +0000

Collecting These Times (CTT), funded by Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Jim Joseph Foundation, Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, and The Russell Berrie Foundation, documents the many ways that diverse communities of American Jews have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The core of CTT is a portal that connects users to the many archives, libraries, and other institutions around the country that collected digital and physical materials about the Jewish experience of and response to the pandemic. CTT also displays materials collected by RRCHNM and its many partners in this effort.

RRCHNM Launches New Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Funded by the Library of Congress, the four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching the history of religion and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on the history of religion in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the Library of Congress. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers who are new to the profession.

RRCHNM Welcomes 25 Graduate Students for the new Academic Year

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 14:00:00 +0000

The start of the academic year at RRCHNM also means the return of many of our graduate students. This week RRCHNM welcomed twenty-five graduate research assistants or graduate affiliates.

RRCHNM on the first day of classes.

Graduate students are a critical part of the work that RRCHNM creates, and RRCHNM is in turn core to the experience of many of the graduate students in GMU’s Department of History and Art History.

RRCHNM Kicks Off Collaboration With NMAAHC and HBCU Partners

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000

This year the team at RRCHNM began a unique collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and five HBCU partners. The HBCU History, Culture, and Access Consortium (HCAC) brings together NMAAHC and the archives of Tuskegee University, the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, the Meek-Eaton Black Archives Research Center & Museum at Florida A&M University, the University Museum at Texas Southern University, and the University Art Museum at Clark Atlanta University.

RRCHNM Partners with Winterthur Museum to Present Pennsylvania Illuminated

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:00:00 +0000

RRCHNM is happy to announce a partnership with the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library to present the history of a fascinating and unique eighteenth-century American manuscript.

Ludwig Denig Manuscript, 2021.0011, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, Gift of Alessantrina and David Schwartz, and the Schwartz Foundation. Photograph, Courtesy of Winterthur Museum.

RRCHNM's Custom API for Data-Driven Projects

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 17:25:00 +0000

RRCHNM is a shop that is more and more working on computational history and historical data visualization. But we are also first and foremost a web shop: ever since Roy Rosenzweig saw the potential of the internet and left CD ROMs behind, we’ve been committed to delivering history via people’s web browsers. Those two commitments are becoming increasingly compatible. For example, Ben Schmidt has written persuasively about the next decade of data programming happening in the browser via JavaScript. But combining data analysis and the web takes work. In this blog post, I want to explain how we are solving one aspect of that challenge via our custom data API.

What Came Before

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 09:20:23 +0000

Episode 2 of The Green Tunnel podcast launched today. In this episode we tell the story of the settler communities that existed along the route of the Appalachian Trail before the AT arrived. We’ve chosen three examples of those communities, each of which helps tell the story of life in the Appalachian mountains before Benton MacKaye dreamed up the AT in 1921. One community was home to people recently emancipated from enslavement, another was a thriving coal mining and railroad town until the mines played out, and the people of the third community had to rally their friends and neighbors to try to find a little boy who had wandered away from his schoolhouse in 1891. What was life like in the Appalachian mountains before the trail? Listen to our episode to learn more.

New Grant from Library of Congress to Create Teaching Resources for Teachers

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:13:09 +0000

RRCHNM is excited to announce a new grant award from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. As part of the grant, RRCHNM will develop teaching resources on difficult to teach topics with a focus on teaching the history of religion in the United States in K-12 schools. Teachers, especially if they are new to the profession, are often reticent to approach topics that might potentially be controversial or give rise emotional reactions. As a result, important themes for understanding history can receive less attention than they deserve in K-12 education.

Remembering the Creation of the September 11 Digital Archive

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 13:49:13 +0000

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the team here at the Center for History and New Media, in collaboration with our partners at the American Social History Project at CUNY, began building a new kind of digital archive, one that would be open to all contributions from anyone who wanted to contribute a memory, a photograph, an email, or whatever they wanted preserved. With the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we were able to assemble a team of collaborators committed to collecting and preserving the history of that terrible day. What began as a crazy idea turned into a project that now houses 72,000 personal stories, more than 6,000 images, and more than 900 audio and video files. The September 11 Digital Archive is truly one of the richest collections related to the history of the events surrounding the events of that day and their aftermath.

Models of Argument-Driven Digital History

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 06:00:00 +0000

The Models of Argument-Driven Digital History website launched today: find it here. It contains a set of published journal articles annotated by their authors to highlight the use of digital methods to make historical arguments. The site is part of a larger project on which I have been collaborating with Lincoln Mullen since 2017, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to encourage argument-driven digital history as a form of digital scholarship.

Transcribing Structured Data with the DataScribe Module for Omeka S

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 10:10:56 +0000

by Janet Hammond

DataScribe is an Omeka S module that helps ease laboriously detailed transcription work. Created at RRCHNM and funded by the NEH, this module allows users to complete a two-step process. The firstis to craft transcription forms for structured data, which is particularly useful when transcribing historical forms and other highly structured documents. (Greta Swain’s write up on American Religious Ecologies’ bloggoes into detail about this process.) Then, professionals can use these forms to transcribe data into a format amenable to computational analysis, combining the data creation and data cleaning steps of a project into a single process. This blog post focuses on the second step.

Jessica Otis Receives Major NSF Grant

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 15:07:13 +0000

RRCHNM Professor and Director of Public Projects Jessica Otis has been awarded $443,425 from the NSF to support her digital work on the history of the plague in early modern London. The project, called “Assessing the Arithmetic of Early Modern London’s Bills of Mortality,” involves the creation, publication and computational analysis of a dataset of weekly and annual mortality statistics produced for the city of London between 1603 and 1752.

Plague was one of the most dreaded diseases in early modern England. The city of London alone lost an estimated 225,000 people to plague in the century between 1563 and 1665. As an extension of government attempts to track plague deaths during outbreaks, London officials started publicly distributing a weekly series of mortality statistics called the Bills of Mortality at the turn of the seventeenth century. Jessica’s project uses the Bills of Mortality to investigate how lived experiences of plague outbreaks intersected with an emerging quantitative mentality among the people of early modern England. It examines how ordinary people aggregated, transformed, and interpreted death counts in order to draw conclusions about changes in the early modern use of and trust in numbers over time. In doing so, the project investigates contemporary perceptions of numbers and historicizes a quantitative method of knowledge generation that has become central to twenty-first-century understandings of the world.

New Digital Military History Postdoctoral Fellowship (Relisted)

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:44:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will be collaborating with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) to host a new postdoctoral fellowship in digital military history here at our center. The DPAA is the Defense Department agency charged with providing the fullest possible accounting for America’s missing military personnel to their families and the nation. Researchers and scientists from DPAA travel to wherever American military personnel have died or gone missing in order to provide accurate and timely information to the families of those who remain unaccounted for. Funding for this three-year fellowship will allow an emerging scholar to work directly with DPAA staff and scientists on a variety of digital military history projects that further the agency’s mission.

Jessica Mack Receives Grant for Project on Universities and Power

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 15:33:29 +0000

Our postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Jessica Mack, has received funding from the 4VA consortium for her digital project Mapping the University: A Digital Resource for Studying Virginia Campus Histories. Her project is an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project that will analyze the histories of Virginia campuses using university archives, digital mapping, and aerial photographs.

Mapping the University is a timely inquiry into the planning, construction and expansion of the campus at George Mason and Old Dominion University. In a collaborative effort that will prioritize building undergraduate and graduate research skills, students at the two universities will work with university archivists, historians, and digital scholars to better understand student life on campus, academic priorities, historical exclusions, and town-gown relations, and to contextualize recent discussions about building naming, monuments and memorialization on campus. In collaboration with Mason’s Special Collections Research Center at Fenwick Library, RRCHNM, the Department of History and Art History, the Geography and Geoinformation Science Department, and colleagues at ODU, the project will provide training for students in archival research methods, digital history tools, and spatial analysis of materials such as maps, architectural plans, and aerial photographs. The result will be an open access, interactive website that will provide access to digitized archival documents alongside digital maps and interpretive content.

Lincoln Mullen Selected for Library of Congress Initiative

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 11:27:15 +0000

Professor Lincoln Mullen, Director of Computational History at RRCHNM, will join two other digital humanists at the Library of Congress as fellows working on the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud initiative. Mullen will use this opportunity to extend the work he has done in his award-winning America’s Public Bible project and will be applying lessons from that project to a wide range of digital collections at the Library. The CCHC initiative is a first foray by the Library into using AI tools to transform access to knowledge and we are very proud of our colleague for being selected for this prestigious fellowship.

Mills Kelly honored by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz for teaching excellence

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 13:22:29 +0000

Mills Kelly, the executive director of RRCHNM and a leading expert on the scholarship of teaching and learning for history, has been an honored guest at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz the past two weeks. Kelly has been in residence at the university, and has been honored in a ceremony signing the university’s Golden Book. The reception celebrated Kelly’s previous receipt of the Gutenberg Teaching Award, which was rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Welcoming Jason Heppler to RRCHNM

Tue, 25 May 2021 16:56:56 +0000

RRCHNM is pleased to announce that Jason Heppler will be joining us this June as a web developer. Jason is well known in digital history circles for his exciting and pioneering work on data visualization, community engagement, and environmental and urban history. His best known work which he led or to which he contributed as a developer-scholar includes Machines in the Valley, The Geography of the Post, the American Indian Digital History Project, and many other mapping or visualization projects. He is also the co-editor of Digital Community Engagement and the author of the forthcoming The Nature of the Valley: Politics and the Environment in Postwar Silicon Valley.

Congratulations to Dr. Janelle Legg

Wed, 05 May 2021 10:35:38 +0000

Here at RRCHNM we are very proud of our former graduate research assistant and recent Mason PhD, Dr. Jannelle Legg who has just accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities at Gallaudet University where she will also be part of the team and the Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center beginning this fall. Jannelle, who defended her excellent dissertation last month, is an expert on the intersection of deaf history and digital humanities and we are looking forward to having her back in the greater DC area. Congratulations Jannelle!

Come Work With Us!

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 13:37:31 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is collaborating with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) to host a new postdoctoral fellowship in digital military history here at our center. The DPAA is the Defense Department agency charged with providing the fullest possible accounting for America’s missing military personnel to their families and the nation. Researchers and scientists from DPAA travel to wherever American military personnel have died or gone missing in order to provide accurate and timely information to the families of those who remain unaccounted for. Funding for this fellowship, which may be renewed, will allow an emerging scholar to work directly with DPAA staff and scientists on a variety of digital military history projects that further the agency’s mission.

Welcome Amanda Madden!

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 16:31:35 +0000

We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Amanda Madden will be joining us here at RRCHNM this fall as an assistant professor of digital history and our Director of Geospatial History. Amanda is a digital historian and historian of early modern Italy who specializes in geospatial history and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). She is a former a Marion L. Brittain postdoctoral fellow in Digital Pedagogy at Georgia Tech and former research scientist at the Center for 21st Century Universities (C2IU), also at Georgia Tech. She’s Co-PI of the collaborative historical GIS project, Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, and has written on vendetta violence, course design, and teaching with video games. She’s currently finishing her first book, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and State Formation in Early Modern Italy and is working with her students to design a mobile app that provides a walking tour of unmarked historic sites central to the history of Civil Rights era Atlanta.

NMAAHC/HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 14:56:06 +0000

We are very proud to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will be playing a lead role in the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium announced today. The Consortium brings together the National Museum of African American History and Culture and five Historically Black Colleges and Universities with the goal of making public the riches of the special collections and archives at these five institutions: Tuskegee University, Clark Atlanta University, Jackson State University, Florida A&M University, Texas Southern University.

Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 12:18:22 +0000

Join RRCHNM for an exciting new series, organized and hosted by Dr. Deepthi Murali, on “Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present.”

TheMaterial Histories of the Indian Ocean Worldwebinar brings together scholars from different disciplines that work primarily on the study of artistic materials produced, circulated, and used in and through the Indian Ocean World (IOW) post the advent of European mercantile powers in this part of the world. This webinar seeks to look at the study of transcultural and transoceanic objects, architecture, and material culture through an interdisciplinary perspective. Using their expertise in different types of materials, regions, and methdological questions related to the IOW, participants will discuss their own research experiences and methdological approaches while also providing insight into the challenges of such research. The series runs from March 24, 2021 - April 22, 2021.

RRCHNM Receives NEH Chairman's Grant

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 11:26:29 +0000

We are pleased to announce that RRCHNM has received an National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman’s Grant. Funding from this grant will help us assist Dr. Jewon Woo, Associate Professor of English at Lorain Community College (Ohio), with her digital project on the 19th-century Black press in Ohio. Her project, which is also supported by the NEH, is titled, “Rhizomatic Democracy in the Nineteenth-Century Black Press of Ohio.” Professor Woo will be using digital humanities tools to illuminate the distinctively collaborative editorship of these newspapers and through that research will help us better understand the complexity of 19th century African American communal life. We are pleased to be collaborating with Professor Woo on this exciting project and are very grateful to the NEH for making that collaboration possible.

Releasing a Web Monetization module for Omeka S

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 17:40:26 +0000

Today RRCHNM is announcing the release of a module for Omeka S that will allow cultural heritage institutions to enable Web Monetization on their digital collections, so that users can stream micropayments for their support.

That was a lot of jargon. Let’s back up a few steps.

First, a principle: We believe that cultural heritage institutions (like RRCHNM!) should align their mission with the users that they serve. It would be ideal, in other words, if what was financially good for an institution aligned with what was best for its constituents. It is very rarely the case, however, that providers of digital content are supported by their users. More often they have a different revenue stream. While this is not all bad, it can lead institutions to be funder-driven rather than mission-driven. And it does leave institutions vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of their funding.

Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic Invites Communities to Contribute to Collections Documenting Jewish Life During Pandemic

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 16:11:23 +0000

For Immediate Release

DATE 3/8/2021

Contact: Jason Edelstein, 510-239-1102

Collecting Projects Led by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Council of American Jewish Museums Are Accessible to All

Washington, DC — A new web portal connects American Jews to Jewish institutions and collecting projects that are gathering and preserving materials related to Jewish life during the pandemic. The interactive website, Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic (CollectingTheseTimes.org*),*was developed by theRoy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University in partnership with the Council of American Jewish Museums, the Breman Museum, the Capital Jewish Museum, Hebrew Theological College, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools.

We're hiring a full-stack developer

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:17:02 +0000

RRCHNM is hiring a full-stack web developer. We’re looking for a developer or developer-scholar who can help us fulfill our mission to democratize history. RRCHNM has a twenty-five year track record of bringing history to public and educational audiences, and we have many exciting new avenues of research underway, ranging from historical visualization and computational history, to podcasts, to our existing strengths in public history. We are a great, friendly place to work, and whoever enters this position will have a chance to develop professionally while collaborating with a large team of faculty, grad students, staff, and undergraduates who share a common mission to bring history online and make it accessible.

Collecting These Times: RRCHNM Gathers and Interprets COVID-19’s Impact on American Judaism

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 11:21:01 +0000

by Anne Reynolds

From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) has worked to document the ways in which the virus has impacted religious communities through its Pandemic Religion digital collection. As part of this effort, American Jewish Life launched in July 2020 to document and interpret the experiences of Jewish individuals and communities.

An interfaith Chavurah made up of members of Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, PA celebrates the fourth night of Hanukkah together over Zoom. A pandemic didn’t stop this Chavurah’s 20+ year tradition!

Saying Goodbye -- Kim Nguyen

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 09:08:36 +0000

Have you ever looked at one of our websites and asked yourself what kind of design firm RRCHNM uses? For a large number of our projects, that design firm has been Kim Nguyen, our long-time in house web designer. Since 2011, Kim has been the person we all turn to for questions about everything from color compatibility, to making our work accessible to all, to how to insure that our sites look good across multiple platforms. Along the way, Kim has helped professionalize our design efforts, especially through the application of best practices in all aspects of design.

Saying Goodbye -- John Flatness

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 07:49:57 +0000

If you’ve ever gone to the Omeka forums looking for help with a vexing problem, big or small, with your Omeka-based website, there’s a pretty good chance that the response you received was from John Flatness (jflatnes in the forums). What you might not know is that the person who just gave you excellent advice and a solution to your problem also happens to be the lead developer on the project. John has worked at RRCHNM on the Omeka project since 2010 and has been the lead developer for many of those years, guiding the team of developers through multiple versions of Omeka Classic and now Omeka S.

Saying Goodbye -- Ken Albers

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 09:43:03 +0000

Sixteen years ago, Ken Albers was a new doctoral student in history here at George Mason University. Part of his program included being assigned as a graduate research assistant at what was then known at the Center for History and New Media. In those days we were located in the beautiful Pohick Module, which, truth be told, was anything but beautiful. There are no longer any photos of Pohick online, but this image will give you the general feel for the trailer we were in when Ken started.

Saying Goodbye -- Jim Safley

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 11:11:48 +0000

In 2002, Kelly Schrum, the long-time director of educational projects at RRCHNM, told a student in Mason’s BA program in applied history that he should apply for a job that was opening up at the Center. That student was Jim Safley and until that moment, he had assumed he would find a job at a traditional archive or library. “I never considered a career in digital humanities given my technical inexperience, but I couldn’t turn down the prospect of working with Roy Rosenzweig,” Jim said of that moment 19 years ago.

New Directions at RRCHNM

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 14:40:15 +0000

Fifteen years ago a team of faculty, students, and developers here at RRCHNM began an ambitious new project. They wanted to create a browser plug-in that would allow users to capture and save things they were looking at online, but not just as a simple save of those items. They wanted to capture the metadata associated with those pages, images, datasets, .pdf files, and everything else the user was looking at, and to save it in ways that were searchable, shareable, and would allow all that data to be organized for research, writing, and teaching. In short, they wanted to kill the 3x5 card that had been the ubiquitous tool of scholars and students in the humanities (and lots of other disciplines) for decades. The result was Zotero, possibly the most successful piece of open source software ever to come out of a humanities center.

Documenting, Sharing, and Learning from Jewish Life During the Pandemic

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:50:58 +0000

The Council of American Jewish Museums and George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Receive Grants for Major Archiving Project Led by Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah

January 27, 2021 — The Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) and George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) are launching two new collecting initiatives with support from a group of Jewish funders, the Chronicling Funder Collaborative, to document diverse Jewish experiences of the pandemic. The Rosenzweig Center received a grant to create a web portal that will serve as a digital content hub reflecting Jewish life during this time. The grant to CAJM enables it to partner with 18 member institutions to lead a broad-based oral history collecting initiative.

Jessica Mack @ CLAH 2021

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 10:13:08 +0000

Dr. Jessica Mack, a postdoctoral fellow at RRCHNM, will chair and present in a panel titled “Building Modernization: Urban Megaprojects in 20th Century Latin America” at the Conference on Latin American History’s 2021 annual meeting. Dr. Mack will present her work titled “Building the Lettered City: Planning and Construction in Ciudad Universitaria, 1950-54.” You can watch the panel online on Sunday, January 10, at 4:30 p.m.

PhD Students Brannan and Hubai Accepted as HASTAC Scholars

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 14:08:10 +0000

Two PhD students in GMU’s Department of History and Art History, Laura Brannan and Janine Hubai, have been accepted as HASTAC Scholars. The HASTAC scholarship program supports graduate students across many colleges and universities who are working at the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities, and sciences. The scholars accepted to the program join a cohort across the more than two hundred institutions that participate worldwide. Brannan and Hubai are both working on a digital project around Black Lives Matters and the racial reckoning of the United States. They have worked with GMU’s Professor Spencer Crew, interim director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on building a digital history project that will help contextualize the racial history of statues that are currently contested. Their project focuses in particular on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia—one of the nation’s hubs for protests around Confederate statues—as well as on statues of Ulysses S. Grant. This work in progress will be part of their participation in the HASTAC program, and both will also have opportunities to extend their professional and interdisciplinary connections.

Murali's "Visualizing the Interwoven World" Receives Grants from AIIS

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 13:32:51 +0000

Dr. Deepthi Murali has received a Digital India Learning Scholarship grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies in support of a new digital art history project. Visualizing the Interwoven World of Eighteenth-Century Indian Textiles will collate and analyze more than five hundred images and associated metadata of South Indian textiles from publicly accessible museum collections to produce a searchable aggregated database on these textiles, the first of its kind. The project will also publish interpretive results on patterns of use, circulation routes of textiles and merchant communities, and centers of production. Digital output will include data visualization in the form of interactive maps, visual charts, blogs, and audio recordings. This is a pilot project for a larger born-digital project on the material histories of Indian Ocean World with a focus on South Asia. The work for this project will take place over 2020 and 2021. After receiving her PhD in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dr. Murali joined RRCHNM as a postdoc. She is an expert on the history of the art in India, and she has contributed to a number of digital art history and digital history projects at RRCHNM and other institutions, including World History Commons, the Masala History Podcast, the Humanities Without Walls Consortium Podcast, and the Consolation Prize Podcast.

Hanging Depicting a European Conflict in South India, before 1763, southeast India (for the British market), Cotton, plain weave (drawn and painted, mordant and resist dyed), 296.5x261.6cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 2014.88).

40,000+ Documents from Religious Bodies Census Digitized Nearly a Century Later

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 10:19:00 +0000

Today the American Religious Ecologies project is releasing the initial version of a website that makes available tens of thousands of documents from the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies. These schedules, or forms, describe religious congregations from the early twentieth century from a wide range of religious traditions. These documents are freely available to scholars, students, and local historians, who can browse or search for them by location or by religious identification. For the first half of the twentieth century, the U.S. Census Bureau collected remarkably detailed information about American religious institutions. The Bureau undertook this survey every ten years, from 1906 until 1946. In 1926, the Bureau tabulated 232,154 congregations, including groups such as Roman Catholics, Baptists, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Jews, and over a dozen relatively new Pentecostal denominations. For each congregation, the Bureau collected a schedule (or form) detailing information such as its membership by sex and age, its buildings and finances, and its location. The schedules from the other religious bodies censuses have been lost or destroyed. Only the schedules from the 1926 census survive. These schedules are a treasure trove of information, the single richest historical source of data about American congregations. Until today, however, these documents have been available only in an uncatalogued collection housed at the National Archives. With the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, historians on the American Religious Ecologiesproject have been photographing and cataloging this collection. The initial release of the collection features schedules from over 40,000 congregations across the country. Users can find schedules by religious identification, by state and county, or by browsing them on a map. The project staff will continue to add schedules to the website on a rolling basis, as well as eventually adding transcriptions of the data contained in the schedules. All materials created by the project are either in the public domain or released under an open-access license, and they are thus free for use by scholars, educators and students, and local historians and genealogists. For additional background information, you can read about the history of the Religious Bodies censuses, about what we have learned about the Census Bureau’s efforts to count religion, or about what you can learn from a Religious Bodies census schedule.

Cross-posted from the*American Religious Ecologies blog.*

New Publication Model, Editor for Current Research in Digital History

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:57:40 +0000

For the past three years, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has been publishing a peer-reviewed journal, Current Research in Digital History. Over those three years, our mission for CRDHhas been consistent. We think that digital history needs more scholarship that makes interpretative or argumentative claims within specific fields of history. Digital history methods, in other words, ought to produce new historical insights, and those new historical insights ought to be shared with, say, scholars of American legal history or of Ottoman culture. CRDH exists to provide a home for—or sometimes a waypoint to—such scholarship. We publish short-form essays of about 3,000 words. We have built a platform which we will continue to expand that can host whatever kind of digital history content an author can imagine. We publish the articles open access. And we envision this as a place where scholars can either write up the interpretative aspects of a digital history project or publish a brief version of an idea that they will develop more fully elsewhere. Part of that is that we publish quickly: less than a year from submission through peer review to publication, and faster if we can.

For the first few years we published CRDH in conjunction with an annual conference that we held at RRCHNM in Virginia. The purpose of the conference was to bootstrap the journal, by helping provide guidance to digital historians who were applying their digital methods to argumentative history for the first time. We have found CRDH to be a modest success. A number of scholars have seen how we are trying to enable their work and have taken advantage of the venue. We are especially pleased that the journal has been a useful home for graduate students and early career scholars who want to publish work in digital history. Today we published the 2020 issue, but we are also making a step to a new publication model. We will begin accepting and publishing submissions on a rolling basis. In other words, instead of waiting to publish all the articles we receive all at the same time, we will publish them as they become ready for publication. And the journal will now be completely decoupled from the conference, which we will no longer hold. We are making these steps for two reasons. First, there were always scholars who could not attend the conference, and we will be able to draw from a wider pool of scholars now. And second, we like to keep the current in CRDH, and this move will allow us to publish articles faster. If CRDH sounds like a venue in which you could publish your work, we encourage you to send submissions or even just questions to the editors. We have another important piece of news about CRDH as well. For the past three years, Greta Swain has been the journal’s editorial assistant. No one has done more for the success of the journal—or of its authors—than Greta. Starting now, she will join the journal as an editor alongside Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen. She is a gifted scholar of early Americas and of digital history, and will bring a keen eye for both historical argumentation and the craft of digital history to editing the journal. As a PhD candidate at George Mason University, she will also be a part of the journal’s strategy in reaching out to graduate students and early career scholars. We are grateful that Swain is taking on this new role as the journal transitions to a new publication model. While CRDHis finalizing its editorial board, we are grateful that the following scholars have agreed to join the editorial board. All of them have been long-time supporters of the journal’s mission, and they will bring their wide-ranging experience to bear in helping us accomplish that mission.

Current Research in Digital History 2020

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:55:18 +0000

Today RRCHNM is publishing the third issue of our open-access, peer-reviewed publication Current Research in Digital History. This issue features six essays on topics ranging from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) national network-based infrastructure, maritime mobility in mid-nineteenth century Puget Sound, and reimagined regional identities of Colorado and New Mexico’s San Luis Valley, to women’s key roles as mediators in Ottoman-Algerian socio-political networks, a critique of History’s (formerly The History Channel) nominally historical programing, and the “news(paper) diets” served up to early-twentieth-century American readers.

From Historical Sources to Datasets: A Preview of DataScribe

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:10:54 +0000

Updated November 11: The beta release is now available for download (zip file). Scholars in history and related humanities fields are increasingly turning towards data analysis and visualization in order to understand the past. Historians have of course long used sources with quantitative informations, such as probate records, tax lists, bills of mortality, censuses, and the like. The mass digitization of historical records has only made those types of sources more readily accessible. And yet there is a huge gap between having a historical source (even a digitized one) and having a dataset which can be analyzed. By analogy, you can think of the difference between having an image of a manuscript and having a text transcription of that document. But with datasets, the problem of transcription is even more difficult, because data has structure. For example, historical documents may have many small variations in how they are laid out, but when transcribed they should all use the same variable. Or it may be important to standardize the transcription of a set of categories. Historians and scholars who are creating their own datasets have been transcribing them in software not really designed for the purpose, perhaps in spreadsheets. But those ad hoc approaches have many limitations. (Believe us, we’ve run into them many times!) And those limitations great affect the speed, accuracy, and usability of the datasets that are transcribed. Enter DataScribe. In September 2019, the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities awarded RRCHNM a grant to develop software to tackle just this problem. We have been diligently—but quietly—developing this software over the past year. As we approach our initial round of testing outside of RRCHNM, we are ready to start giving you previews of what this software will be able to do. DataScribe is built on the Omeka S platform. Many, many humanities projects are already using Omeka S to describe and display collections of historical sources. You will be able to add the open-source DataScribe module to Omeka and use it to transcribe historical sources. You can define what a dataset should look like: the variables you are going to transcribe and the types of data (numeric, categorical, textual, as well as custom data types) that go into those variables. Teams of people will then be able to transcribe the sources, and we are building in a workflow for reviewing and managing transcriptions. Transcribers will see the historical sources side by side with the fields they need to transcribe, and managers will be able to see the status of the project. While this software is in very rapid development and will continue to change, you can get a sneak preview of what it looks like in the screenshots at the end of this post. So, when can you get your hands on DataScribe? The answer is soon. DataScribe is currently alpha software, and you can follow its development and open issues at our GitHub repository. On November 11 we will move into our first round of public beta testing. If you are interested in testing DataScribe—or even just want to receive periodic updates about the project—please fill out this very brief form. We will add you to a mailing list to keep you up to date about the project, and if you indicate an interest in testing we will be back in touch with the details. Our project website and the draft documentation are also great ways to learn about the project. One of the ways that humanities discipline is moving forward is by creating (and sharing) new datasets. Very few historians working with data are dealing with off-the-shelf datasets which are already ready to be analyzed or visualized. To create new historical or humanities knowledge, scholars need to be able to create new datasets. And that is what DataScribe will help them do. Screenshots of the DataScribe module (click for full resolution images)

DataScribe allows users to see the documents they are transcribing, to enter the transcription into fields that ensure data accuracy and consistency, and to manage the workflow of the project.

DataScribe also allows transcribers to focus just on the document and the fields that they need to enter.

Project managers can use DataScribe’s form builder to define which fields should be transcribed and to decide which types of data, such as numbers, dates, and categories, should be associated with those fields.

Consolation Prize -- a New Podcast From RRCHNM

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 07:52:18 +0000

When you think of the most exciting, controversial, or salacious moments in American history, your first thought probably isn’t the story of a U.S. consul. Consuls were charged by the U.S. State Department with reporting American trade in cities across the world, as well as taking care of Americans abroad, but they had little official diplomatic power. They weren’t negotiating treaties or starting wars; they weren’t leading charges into battle or changing the political landscape. Or were they? The responsibility for the United States’ reputation in other parts of the world often fell squarely on the shoulders of consuls, who were the first ones called in when Americans got themselves in trouble or were mistreated while they were abroad. How they interpreted their duties sometimes got them involved in all kinds of complicated circumstances. And often, their actions on a personal level had ramifications far up the chain, even making a difference in national politics or international relations. The stories of these consuls deserve to be told. Here at RRCHNM, we’re starting a podcast to tell them. Consolation Prize is a narrative-style podcast, hosted by Abby Mullen, who talks to scholars across the historical discipline about consuls and their world. You’ll also hear the voices of these consuls, their colleagues, and their enemies, telling their own stories. In this season, you’ll hear about rhinoceroses, and coffee trading, and hymn writing; you’ll hear about imprisonment, slavery, and oppression. You’ll hear stories of revenge, humiliation, and bitter feuds, but also stories of triumph, joy, and delight. You’ll go places as close to home as Vera Cruz, Mexico, and as far away as Canton and Zanzibar. Please join us as we travel the globe with nineteenth-century consuls! You can visit our website for more info, including where to subscribe so you don’t miss any episodes. You’ll also find our show notes there, which include transcripts of the episodes, bios of our experts, further readings, and so much more. You can also follow us on Twitter at @ConsolPrize, or join our Facebook group, to get more resources and behind-the-scenes content. Episode 1 of Consolation Prize takes us to Vera Cruz, Mexico, where we investigate what happens when personal affairs and official duties intermingle; in Episode 2, we head to Liverpool during the height of the impressment crisis before the War of 1812. Episodes post every three weeks on Tuesdays.

Congratulations to Capital Jewish Museum on Groundbreaking Festival

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 16:46:32 +0000

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, RRCHNM has been collaborating with a series of partners on its Pandemic Religion and American Jewish Life project. We have been very fortunate to have had the chance to work with these partners to collect and preserve sources about the impact the pandemic is having on American religion. One of our partners—and neighbors—is the Capital Jewish Museum, which has also accepted a GMU student as an intern. But the Capital Jewish Museum is not even officially open yet! The work they are doing is all the more remarkable, then, and we are all the more pleased to share this announcement of their groundbreaking festival, coming up on September 12 to September 18.

Laura Brannan Speaks at African American Museum Conference

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 11:20:52 +0000

In August, PhD student and RRCHNM graduate research assistant Laura Brannan spoke at the annual meeting of the Association of African American Museums–the organization’s first ever virtual conference. Laura writes about her experience speaking at the conference: “Recently, I virtually presented at the Association of African American Museums conference (AAAM). I admit I was a bit hesitant; this was my first virtual conference and I was unsure what to expect. Nevertheless, my experience at AAAM demonstrated the possibilities and slight limitations of presenting and attending a completely digital conference. The AAAM staff built the conference site from the ground up via the platform PheedLoop. This recreated the conference experience to the best of its abilities, with the user able to message and video chat with anyone in the virtual “lobby” room and access all recorded sessions after the fact. In this sense, the digital format was very helpful and made me feel connected to other participants. As a presenter, overall, I found that the various digital platforms helped me successfully prepare for my roundtable discussion. My co-panelists and I rehearsed beforehand via Zoom, shared notes via Google Docs, and communicated with our panel moderator during the presentation via the chat feature in Zoom. The roundtable was conducted as a Zoom webinar, where I was a panelist and could only see the tiles of my fellow panelists. Though strange and somewhat alienating to not see the faces of the audience members during the presentation, in a way the digital format actually helped me focus more easily on the conversation. Alongside members of the John Mitchell Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race from the School of Conflict, Analysis, and Resolution at George Mason, our session discussed the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) as a site of healing, pilgrimage, and controversies in the context of COVID-19 and the current racial reckoning in the U.S. today. As a scholar of race, gender, and public memory in the U.S., I pointed out the institutional legacies NMAAHC contends with as the first museum to exclusively center African, African American, and Black voices in the U.S. yet still be a part of the Smithsonian, an institution created in the mid-nineteenth century. In the current state of racial reckoning throughout the country, I also spoke of the importance for white people to visit museums like NMAAHC that center lives and stories different from theirs. Through exhibits and programming, Black-centered museums such as the NMAAHC encourage visitors to confront the history of oppression and racism in the U.S. while also serving as potential spaces to promote healing and reconciliation. Although AAAM was not a typical conference by past in-person standards, its success serves as a model for how virtual conferences can be typical in the world of COVID-19 and remote work. More importantly, AAAM showed how digital tools can facilitate important conversations between people in different parts of the world that would otherwise not be possible.”

American Jewish Life: A Pandemic Religion Project

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 14:49:27 +0000

Today the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is launching American Jewish Life, a digital collecting project that will document and interpret the experiences of individuals and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the Center’s larger Pandemic Religion project, American Jewish Lifehas been created in partnership with the Breman Museum; the Capital Jewish Museum; the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life; Hebrew Theological College; the Houston Jewish History Archive at Rice University; and Yeshiva University. The six Jewish institutions who have partnered with American Jewish Life are broadly representative of the geographic and theological diversity of American Judaism.

Most of the initial items on American Jewish Liferepresent the prior collecting of our partner institutions. Others have been contributed by visitors to the Pandemic Religion site. You may wish to browse some of the items that have already been contribute:

Pandemic Religion Digital Stories Fellowship: Call for Participants

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:36:40 +0000

Lived Religion in the Digital Age, a project of St. Louis University, in partnership with the Pandemic Religion project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, welcomes applications for a short-term Digital Stories Fellowship. The Digital Stories Fellow will work from the Pandemic Religion database to create, compose, and/or curate original material for the Digital Stories platform. The fellowship carries an award of up to $1,500. Digital Stories prioritizes the study and practice of visual, aural, multimodal, and other embodied storytelling techniques, particularly as they are shaped, transformed, or confronted by digital life and cultures. Preferred contributions include visual essays, short documentaries, soundtracks or podcasts, data visualizations, digital exhibits, multimediated content, and short essays, among other possible modes of public scholarship. The Digital Stories fellow will have expertise in religion, theology, American studies, performance studies, visual studies, or related fields or professions and will contribute a series of original entries to the site during the funding period. This fellowship is expected to begin immediately and be completed by December 31, 2020. To apply, please submit a letter of interest (1–2 pages), current CV or resume, and brief writing or multimedia sample (links to digital content are encouraged). Please submit fellowship application materials or general queries to LRDA Administrator Dr. Samantha Arten at livedreligion@slu.edu. Applicants may also apply through this form. Applications received by June 15 will receive full consideration. In addition to this fellowship, Digital Stories welcomes contributions on a rolling basis. Please contact Digital Stories Editor, Dr. Adam Park (adam.park@slu.edu) for questions and submissions. Download this CFP as a PDF.

ACLS Digital Extension Grant for World History Commons

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 17:00:02 +0000

The American Council for Learned Societies has awarded our World History Commons project a digital extension grant. “Expanding the Commons: Supporting Emerging World History Scholars and Community Colleges through the World History Commons OER.” This grant will extend the reach and impact of World History Commons, which provides valuable resources to teachers, students, and researchers, including scholarly essays, teaching materials, historical thinking strategies, and curated primary sources. Expanding the Commons expands on the current project in two key ways. The first is by recruiting early career scholars to write new scholarly essays and incorporating their cutting-edge historical research into the project. The second is by partnering with experienced community college faculty to connect World History Commons to the community college curriculum and to promote its use among community college world history teachers and students, increasing both access and visibility. Led by former Kelly Schrum, Nate Sleeter, and Jessica Otis, this project will provide a valuable resource to world history educators for many years to come.

RRCHNM Joins Nonprofit Finance Fund Cohort

Tue, 19 May 2020 13:40:48 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has been selected to join an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded cohort of six digital humanities organizations in a three-year initiative focused on building financial resilience in the digital humanities. This initiative, managed by the Nonprofit Finance Fund, will be structured around helping all six DH organizations become more adaptable and financially resilient while staying true to our individual missions. Since our founding in 1994, RRCHNM has been committed to open access and open source, but these commitments make it challenging to create a business model that provides sufficient resilience in a rapidly changing world. Through the support of this project, we look forward to finding new ways to continue our mission of democratizing access to historical information while also strengthening our financial model and becoming a more adaptable organization. We are also very excited to be part of a cohort that includes the Hathi Trust, the HBCU Library Alliance, Humanities Commons, Rhizome, and the South Asian American Digital Archive. The best ideas in the world come from collaborations among diverse groups of people who bring new ideas and perspectives to the table. We couldn’t be happier about being part of this cohort of such excellent organizations.

RRCHNM to Create Classroom Simulations on History of Diplomacy

Wed, 06 May 2020 11:00:16 +0000

RRCHNM is excited to announce a new project with the National Museum of American Diplomacy (NMAD) made possible by generous funding from the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. This project will create three classroom simulations based on significant events in the history of U.S. diplomacy that teachers in high school and post-secondary can use with their students. These simulations will build on the success of diplomatic simulations previously developed by the NMAD and RRCHNM which explored present-day foreign affairs topics such as peacebuilding, wildlife trafficking, and crisis in the oceans, among others. The historical diplomatic simulations to be developed as a part of this project will include primary sources, interviews with historians to provide context, and an easy-to-follow guide for implementing the simulations with students. The project will conclude in January of 2022. The NMAD is dedicated to telling the story of the history, practice, and challenges of American diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State and also receives support from the Diplomacy Center Foundation.

Pandemic Religion Project to Document Changes in American Religion

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 12:56:14 +0000

As the world undergoes wrenching changes—some temporary, some permanent—in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, religious communities in the United States have also been deeply affected. Many have hastily moved services online: a change which has been influenced by the hugely varying liturgical, theological, legal, and financial resources available to different groups. Of course a few religious groups have made it into the news by challenging government-mandated shutdowns. Some people are attending online services at communities that are not local and of which they are not members, perhaps to share an experience with family from whom they are distant. Others are finding their religious community in relatively new forms, such as Facebook groups. As the pandemic more seriously affects older people, religious communities have grappled with their ministry to the elderly and to the sick. The pandemic has disproportionately killed racial minorities and left them disproportionately unemployed: Black religious traditions are no exception. These changes have happened at the same time that Jews have celebrated Passover, Christians have celebrated Easter, and right before Muslims celebrate Ramadan. To document these changes, today the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is launching Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive. This project will collect and preserves experiences and responses from individuals and religious communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We invite contributions from people of any religious tradition, community, or perspective. We encourage contributions either from your individual perspective, or documenting what is happening in your religious community. We hope you will contribute items like these:

RRCHNM and Covid-19

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 15:00:26 +0000

Like every other organization everywhere in the world, here at RRCHNM we are feeling our way forward during this year of the Covid-19 virus. George Mason University is closed and we’ve been booted from our offices, so we have moved to 100% remote work. Between the various virtual connections we have – Basecamp, Slack, WebEx, Zoom, email, and good old-fashioned phone calls – we’ve managed to say connected and we continue to work on our many digital projects. I would be lying if I said that this transition has been seamless or easy for us. Each of us feels the stresses of this moment in different ways and at different times – sometimes several different ways on the same day. We’re finding new locations in our homes where we can work, figuring out how to balance our own health with the needs of those we love, and trying to get used to never seeing one another except as little faces on a Brady Bunch style screen. None of us is old enough to have lived through a moment like this one, so we are creating new benchmarks on a daily basis. A few of us report being just as productive as ever, others less so. For now, what we can do is what we can do. We are very thankful that our various external partners have been so flexible with their expectations of us and have been willing to accept adjusted work plans and in some cases to extend funding windows. Without that flexibility, we’d really be struggling. With expectations adjusted, we are on schedule and on budget. In addition to keeping up with our existing work, we have our own responses to the Covid crisis. The first of those is that we are in the process of standing up a new collecting history project in the vein of past projects like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. The “Pandemic Religion” project will collect, preserve, and contextualize the major changes happening to American religious congregations and institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and grows out of the prior work in religious history by RRCHNM Director Lincoln Mullen and our partner in crime, Prof. John Turner from Mason’s Department of Religious Studies. We are also pleased to be providing back end support to the Covid-19 Archive project at Arizona State University. RRCHNM is assisting this excellent project with site planning, site hosting, and general project support as it gets off the ground and we are very happy to be collaborating with Mark Tebeau and his team. Finally, we are working hard to support K-12 and college teachers with the many educational projects we have created over the years. Making history education resources available for free to a broad audience was how RRCHNM started 25 years ago. Who knew how important that mission would be today when students can only access learning resources online? When the new year began none of us could have predicted a moment like this. We’re happy to be doing our part to help collect and preserve the history of this moment and to help teachers, students, and parents navigate a new world of online only learning.

RRCHNM Partners with Shapell Manuscript Foundation to Develop Teaching Materials

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 15:47:50 +0000

RRCHNM is excited to announce an agreement with the Shapell Manuscript Foundation (SMF) to develop education materials that will make use of the Foundation’s rich and engaging digital collection. RRCHNM will create four teaching modules for secondary school teachers that will be hosted on the Shapell Manuscript Foundation website. Each module will feature teaching strategies including differentiation for diverse learners, a sample lesson plan, ideas for assessment, a Document-Based Question activity for AP courses, the national history standards met by each module, and links to related SMF resources. The Shapell Manuscript Foundation features an impressive collection of primary sources related to United States presidential history, the history of Israel and the Holy Land, as well as rare letters from prominent figures in American literature including Mark Twain and Herman Melville. The modules should be available for teachers by the end of the year.

RRCHNM Faculty Fellow CFP

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 17:14:36 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason is seeking applications for a faculty fellow at the Center for the Fall 2020 semester. The purpose of the fellowship is to help individuals conceptualize digital humanities projects that have the potential for significant external grant support and that will be realized in partnership with RRCHNM. With the generous support of the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, RRCHNM faculty and staff will work with the fellow on the planning of such a project and the submission of grants to support the work. The fellowship carries a one course teaching reduction for the Fall 2020 semester along with technical staff support at the Center. Sample project categories include but are not limited to:

10/10/2019: RRCHNM @ Religion in Place

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 11:23:52 +0000

John Turner and Lincoln Mullen will be participating in a symposium hosted by St. Louis University from October 10 to 12 on “Religion in Place: Spaces | Borders | Bodies.” They will be discussing RRCHNM’s recently begun project, American Religious Ecologies.

2019 CHSS Celebration of Achievement

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:04:02 +0000

The George Mason University College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ annual Celebration of Achievement will take place on October 17th at the Country Club of Fairfax. The reception will begin at 5pm with the awards program starting at 5:45pm. The event will highlight the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media in celebration of our 25th anniversary. Interested guests were asked to RSVP here by October 3rd.

Mills Kelly Named Executive Director of RRCHNM

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 12:15:48 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are pleased to announce that Mills Kelly has been named the new executive director of RRCHNM. This year RRCHNM is celebrating its twenty-fifth year, and Kelly has been a part of the Center for eighteen of those years. He joined the department and CHNM in 2001 to work with Roy Rosenzweig, the founder of CHNM. Kelly has contributed to the Center’s work in several distinct ways, both as a project leader and as one of the faculty directors of the Center. A specialist in Czech history and the history of Eastern Europe, Kelly was the project leader on Making the History of 1989, an NEH-funded digital project that provides sources and narratives about the fall of Communism. Kelly was also co-project leader on World History Matters and Women in World History, two projects which were and are widely used in classrooms. Those projects won the 2007 James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association, as well as the 2009 Merlot award for as an exemplary online teaching resource. Kelly has become a leader in the scholarship on teaching and learning in history. In the past year he was president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. And in 2013 he published Teaching History in the Digital Age with the University of Michigan Press, a work which was simultaneously released as an open-access web publication and a print book. Most recently, Kelly has turned to Appalachian Trail Histories, creating a digital project in spatial, social, and environmental history that began in several of his undergraduate classes at Mason and has expanded in scope as it received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. In addition to his scholarship in digital history and teaching and learning, Kelly has a proven track record as an administrator. For a time he served as the the director of the Global Affairs program at George Mason University, and at GMU he has been fellow in the offices of both the provost and the president. He has been especially active in European non-profit work, currently serving as a trustee of the Romanian-American Foundation and earlier as chair of the board of directors of the Civic Education Project, an international non-governmental organization working to promote democracy in post-Communist Eastern Europe. Brian Platt, the chair of the Department of History and Art History, commented on Kelly’s leadership: “Dr. Kelly has a long history with the Center and has been involved in a number of its signature projects. He’s also a gifted and experienced administrator. We are incredibly lucky that we have someone with his experience—and someone whose loyalty to the Center’s mission is so strong—to lead the Center.” Asked about his appointment, Kelly said, “I came to George Mason University in 2001 to work at the Center for History and New Media and to work for Roy. I am incredibly honored to be able to carry his legacy forward and to work with so many talented people.” Kelly will lead an internationally prominent research center that is home to nearly two dozen designers, developers, project managers, staff, faculty, and graduate students.

Current Research in Digital History 2019

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 02:00:31 +0000

Today RRCHNM is publishing the second annual issue of our open-access, peer-reviewed publication Current Research in Digital History. This issue features 13 essays on topics ranging from Catholic enslavers in early Maryland, women’s activism in the 1970s Black Arts Movement, and a social network analysis of the Colored Conventions, to Latter-day Saints of black-African descent, nineteenth-century postmistresses, and African American Freedom Colonies in Texas.

The issue was edited by Lincoln Mullen and Stephen Robertson, with crucial input from a program committee consisting of Elizabeth Bond, Kalani Craig, Michelle DiMeo, and Crystal Moten. Editorial Assistant Greta Swain worked throughout the summer to prepare the essays for online publication, in a platform designed by Kim Ngyuen and Ken Albers that allows for interactive visualizations, data and code appendices and other features not typically available from other humanities journals.

Maritime Asia: War and Trade Launch

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 09:00:47 +0000

RRCHNM is excited to announce the launch of Maritime Asia: War and Trade, an international collaboration with Adam Clulow at Monash University/University of Texas at Austin and Xing Hang at Brandeis University. This digital world history project explores the fierce rivalry between the Dutch East India Company and the Zheng maritime network as they fought for control over key trades and sea routes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYkKDaKN-kQ&feature=youtu.be The project includes digital exhibits on these maritime powers, the deerskin trade and territorial claims to Taiwan, as well as a timeline, biographies of key actors, an archive with primary sources, and an annotated bibliography for further exploration. Maritime Asia also features an exciting classroom simulation exercise, “Pirates, States, and Diplomacy in a Multipolar Maritime Asia” for advanced high school and college students. This is designed to place students at the center of a turbulent maritime world in which a range of territorial powers and armed trading enterprises competed for control over key sea lanes. It explores issue of statehood, political legitimacy, trade and identity.

Homepage of Maritime Asia: War and Trade

Maritime Asia: War and Trade enriches our understanding of early modern East and Southeast Asian history and how trade, colonization, and armed maritime enterprises influenced world history.

RRCHNM to Digitize the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies

Mon, 20 May 2019 18:45:47 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that it has received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Mapping American Religious Ecologies. The generous funding comes from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program within the NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access. Mapping American Religious Ecologies will digitize the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. Every ten years from 1906 to 1946, the U.S. Census Bureau surveyed congregations, synagogues, and other religious groups in a census that supplemented the better known population census. While the Census published summary reports from that data, the forms (or schedules) filled out by each congregation have not been widely used. Only the schedules from the 1926 Census survive, and those are located in a collection at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, which has been cataloged but not inventoried. This project will photograph and make available approximately 232,000 schedules, like the one shown below. These schedules contain a wealth of information about each congregation, including its membership by age and sex, its expenditures on buildings and missions, its minister’s name and whether he or she had gone to seminary, and its denominational affiliation, which the Census Bureau cataloged into 213 different groups. Just as important, the schedules include the location of the congregations—almost always by county and city or town and in many cases the street address as well.

This schedule was filled out by a Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Candler, North Carolina. Candler was an unincorporated town and was too small to be worth mentioning in the published population census of 1930, yet the Census of Religious Bodies was able to count its 84 Adventists in 1926. Taken from Box 3, Schedules of the Census of Religious Bodies, 1926–1928, National Archives Identifier 2791163, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

This project will associate each of the records with spatial data, linking each congregation to its state and county, and in most cases with a town or city as well. Researchers will be able to browse the schedules by denomination and place in a way that they could never feasibly do in the archives. The project team will also begin to transcribe the data contained in these records, make the rest available for crowdsourced transcription, and create maps of religion at the national and local levels. The result will be a detailed and comprehensive spatial dataset for American religion, useable by scholars in history and religious studies, by local historians, and by the public. We envision the final project being used to look up individual congregations, to study the history of a town or county, and to better understand the religious groups that the Census Bureau surveyed. But we also think that it will provide a new angle of vision onto some of the perennial questions in American religious history. For instance, observers of American religion have often noted its pluralism, and have described how different groups often competed, sometimes collaborated, and usually coexisted in the same places. But while it is straightforward to assert, for example, that in a large city like New York or Los Angeles there were many religious groups, what about in small towns or sparsely populated places? What were the range of congregations available in, for example, the small unincorporated town of Candler, NC? Did those congregations come from similar or different denominations? We hope to turn the 1926 Census into a dataset that can provide some empirical evidence for significant questions such as these. The core team at RRCHNM will include Ken Albers, Kim Nguyen, Jim Safley, and Greta Swain, as well as undergraduate research assistants majoring in history or religious studies. The project is led by Lincoln Mullen and John Turner. At George Mason University, the project is a collaboration between RRCHNM, its parent Department of History and Art History, and the Department of Religious Studies.

Mapping Early American Elections Releases Essays, Maps, Tutorials, Data

Mon, 13 May 2019 13:10:15 +0000

The Mapping Early American Elections project has made their final release data, maps, and essays covering the history of elections to the U.S. House of Representatives during the First Party System. The site now includes six essays that introduce the website and the history of the politics during the early American republic. We have also released our data and tutorials on how to use it. You can start at the site by reading the introductory essay which provides an overview of the site, or read today’s blog post from the project explaining the latest release.

Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 Relaunch

Mon, 06 May 2019 15:15:59 +0000

The Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 digital editorial project has officially relaunched with a fully redesigned user experience. This project began in 1993, when Ted Crackel and a team of researchers worked for nearly a decade to piece together the records of the War Office that burned in 1800, destroying everything inside. You can read more about the history of the War Department here. In 2006, RRCHNM took over the project, and moved the collection from CD-ROM to the web. In 2011, RRCHNM developed Scripto, a community transcription tool that allows users to transcribe the over 40,000 items in the collection.

In 2017, the Papers team entered a new phase of the project supported by an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension Grant and a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities. Sheila Brennan led the team as our first Principal Investigator until June 2018, when our Editor-in-Chief Christopher Hamner moved into this role. The NEH grant allowed us to upgrade the Scripto plugin, now available as a beta, to further enhance the transcription experience for Papers of the War Department and the many digital projects that rely on this tool. Over the next year, the team will continue to refine the Scripto tool as well as a Transcription theme for Omeka S. The ACLS grant facilitated the redesign of the Papers of the War Department website, including a new browsing and transcription interface and teaching modules to bring the War Department papers into the classroom. Our lead developer Jim Safley managed the migration of nearly 200 gigabytes of content to the new website and developed the new Scripto module. Our lead designer Kim Nguyen fully redesigned the website and user experience and is building the Transcription theme for Omeka S.

Alyssa Fahringer served as Project Manager during the first phase of the redesign, while Jessica Dauterive has stepped in as Project Manager since January 2019. Both Fahringer and Dauterive worked closely with Megan Brett, who serves as Outreach Coordinator, to implement a new outreach strategy for the project. The team has made several public presentations, including a teaching demonstration at the National Council for History Education meeting in Washington, D.C.; a poster session at the National Council on Public History annual meeting in Hartford, CT; and a lightning talk on the project at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Philadelphia. We are grateful that the Papers has been able to maintain a committed base of transcribers and researchers. A new Twitter outreach plan will invite new users into this community, including genealogists, teachers, and researchers in various fields from Native American to food to federal history. You can follow us @wardeptpapers.

07/25/2019: RRCHNM @ ACH 2019 Conference

Mon, 06 May 2019 12:20:39 +0000

Laura Crossley will be presenting “Mining for the Implications of the Changing Landscape of Digital Humanities Blogging” at the Association for Computers and the Humanities 2019 Conference in Pittsburgh on July 25, 2019.

Who Built America? to Become OER with Revamped History Matters Content

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 13:29:04 +0000

With funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities, RRCHNM is partnering with the American Social History Project (ASHP) at the City University of New York on *Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History.*This project creates an updated, completely free, open education resource (OER) and continues a 38-year effort to make social and labor history accessible to the broad public — a core commitment of Roy Rosenzweig’s. The project will update content from the History Matters website, developed by RRCHNM in 1998, including over 1,000 annotated primary sources in the site’s Many Pasts section and vital historical thinking resources in Making Sense of Evidence. The updated site will supplement the 2-volume Who Built America? textbook and ASHP’s varied multimedia teaching resources from the Who Built America? CD-ROMs to create the free online textbook. The new Who Built America? site will guarantee that the highly used History Mattersresources will continue to be available and sustainable in the future for teachers and students of U.S. history.

07/10/2019: RRCHNM @ DH2019

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:50:25 +0000

Jessica Otis and Faolan Cheslack-Postava will be presenting in the session “Clearing the Air for Maintenance and Repair: Strategies. Experiences, Full Disclosure” at DH 2019 in Utrecht, from July 9-12, 2019

04/06/2019: RRCHNM @ Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 11:47:55 +0000

Alyssa Fahringer will be presenting “Papers of the War Department: Updating the Digital Edition and Community Transcription Project” in the lightning round on Women in Digital and Public History at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Philadelphia on Saturday, April 6, 2019

07/18/2019: RRCHNM @ SHEAR

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:40:47 +0000

Greta Swain and Jordan Bratt will be presenting as part of the roundtable “Visualizing Democracy: Voting, Political Parties, and the Mapping Early Americans Elections Project” at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) in Cambridge,MA, on July 19-21, 2019.

02/18/2019: RRCHNM @ Sussex Humanities Lab

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 10:01:50 +0000

Sean Takats will be presenting “Subjectivity and Digital Research” at the Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex, on Mondary, February 18, 4PM.

Participants Selected for Workshops to Develop Digital History Articles

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 10:32:02 +0000

We are pleased to announce the eight historians who will participate in the workshops to develop digital history articles for a special issue of the Journal of Social History, a project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They were selected from more than 50 proposals for the workshop, far more worthy applicants than could be accommodated. The participants’ projects range from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, examine settings from Brazil and Berlin to the Caribbean, Los Angeles, and Louisiana, and explore questions about the circulation of people, communities, and ideas, as well as about networks, sound and everyday life. These are the workshop participants and the working titles of their articles in progress:

03/25/2019: Elizabethan Court Day By Day Encode-a-thon @ RRCHNM

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 13:02:31 +0000

The Elizabeth Court Day By Day Encode-a-thing will take place in Fenwick Library 1014B from 10:30am-3.00pm on March 25, 2019.

The Elizabethan Court Day by Day is a dataset of day-by-day accounts of Queen Elizabeth I’s court for the entirety of her reign. The Folger Shakespeare Library is conducting a project to mark up the dataset in XML using volunteer coders, to enable the easier extraction and analysis of the dataset and shed new light on the quotidian events of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Participants will learn to use the Folger’s custom transcription and tagging software to encode and create preliminary visualizations of extracted data throughout the course of the event. The dataset, and its derivative projects, are all published under a CC-BY-SA International license (meaning you’re free to take the data and run with it, if something catches your interest.)

03/09/2019: Current Research in Digital History 2019 @ RRCHNM

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 11:00:33 +0000

RRCHNM is hosting the 2019 Current Research in Digital History conference on March 9, 2019, at the Arlington campus of George Mason University. The conference program features short presentations that offer historical arguments and interpretations rather than showcase digital projects. This year’s conference features two panels sponsored by the African American Intellectual History Society and the Colored Conventions Project. Presentations are peer-reviewed and published in an online publication that accommodates dynamic visualizations and narrative.

02/28/2019: RRCHNM @ Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 10:53:13 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be presenting “Law & (Dis)Order in the 1935 Harlem Riot,” at the Center for Law, Society, and Culture, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, February 28, 2019.

05/31/2019: RRCHNM @ Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 10:37:43 +0000

Jessica Otis (& John Simpson) will be offering the course “Fundamentals of Programming/Coding for Human(s|ists) at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria, Canada, from June 3 to June 16, 2019, and the course “Introduction to Network Analysis in the Digital Humanities” from June 10 to June 14, 2019

04/17/2019: RRCHNM @ Shakespeare Association of America Meeting

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 10:30:46 +0000

Jessica Otis will be presenting “Death by Numbers: Quantitatively Analyzing the London Bills of Mortality” at the Shakespeare Association of America Meeting in Washington, DC, on April 19, 2019

02/27/2019: RRCHNM @ Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 10:18:00 +0000

Lincoln Mullen will be presenting “Finding Biblical Quotations in Historical Newspaper Corpora" at the Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies at the University of Toronto’s Fields Institute on February 27, 2019

The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike Website Has Launched

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 10:40:23 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is excited to announce the launch of a new digital history project, The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike. Working with two scholars in Australia, Bain Attwood at Monash University and historian Anne Scrimgeour, this project brings together the rich and multi-layered history of the strike that began in the Pilbara region of Western Australia in 1946. Fighting for better wages and working conditions within a settler colonial system, the strike ultimately resulted in positive changes for the Aboriginal community, as well as influencing nationwide advocacy for Aboriginal rights. The website is part of the first major scholarly study of the strike as one of the most important, yet often overlooked, events in Australia’s indigenous history. https://youtu.be/1CM5SyPsdRE The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike features digital exhibits that foreground Aboriginal voices through oral history recordings, biographies of the different people involved in the strike, such as community leaders, portraits of the organizations involved, including government ones, as well as an interactive timeline and digital archive. The project is aimed toward Aboriginal communities, humanities scholars, and post-secondary students, offering a nuanced history with many perspectives and over 500 primary sources to explore, including oral histories, newspapers, photographs, and film footage.

Homepage of The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike.

The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike project highlights the actions of the Aboriginal people who fought for their rights and influenced the campaign for Aboriginal rights across Australia.

11/30/2018: RRCHNM @ National Council for Social Studies Conference

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 12:58:08 +0000

Sara Collini will be presenting “Eagle Eye Citizen: Online Civics Interactive” in a poster session at the National Council for Social Studies Annual Conference in Chicago on November 30, 2018 at 11.30 am.

12/11/2018: RRCHNM @ CNI Membership Meeting

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 11:18:43 +0000

Stephen Robertson, with Seth Denbo of the American Historical Association, will be presenting a project briefing on “Promoting a Public Face for Scholarly Journals” at the Coalition for Networked Information Membership meeting in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, December 11 at 10.15am

11/07/2018 Jens Pohlmann (Gerda Henkel Postdoc) @ RRCHNM

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 12:57:51 +0000

On Wednesday November 7, 2018 at 12 noon in the RRCHNM lounge Jens Pohlmann, the 2018-19 Gerda Henkel Fellow in Digital History at RRCHNM, will present on his project “Mapping the German Tech Blog Sphere and its Influence on Digital Policy.”

The goal of this project is to build a corpus consisting of German tech blogs that will allow researchers to identify important actors and their networks in the tech blog sphere and to trace whether their arguments have an impact on public discourse in the mainstream media and eventually on the development of digital policy. In our first study of this tech blog corpus, we will focus on the public discussion of the German Network Enforcement Act or “NetzDG,” also called the “Facebook Law”. This controversial law with its implications for basic rights such as freedom of expression, for the democratic decision-making process in elections, as well as for global internet governance represents a very rich and extremely relevant use case for the analysis of the ways in which the political and societal implications of technology are discussed and negotiated in different fields of the public sphere.

01/03/2019: RRCHNM @ the American Historical Association Annual Meeting

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 13:17:14 +0000

There are four sessions involving RRCHNM on the program at the 133rd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago:

Stephen Robertson, “Teaching Digital Humanities Online: George Mason University’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities,” The Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities Roundtable,(joint session with the MLA), Thursday, January 3, 2019, 1.45PM-3.00PM
Abby Mullen, “Digital Methods for Archival Research withTropy,”(Workshop), Friday, January 4, 2019, 3.30PM-5.00PM
Jessica Otis, “Network Analysis and Historical Scholarship: Roundtable,” Saturday, January 5, 2019, 1.30PM-3.00PM & “Death By Numbers: Plague Networks in Early Modern England,” Saturday, January 5, 2019, 4.50PM

10/25/2018: RRCHNM @ Reconstructing Historical Networks Digitally

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 12:57:13 +0000

Jessica Otis will be presenting “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: Gender, Social Network Analysis, and Early Modern Britain” at Reconstructing Historical Networks Digitally: New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Social Network Analysis, the Third Annual German Historical Institute Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History, in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2018.

Next Steps for Tropy

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 11:30:53 +0000

We’re delighted to announce the funding of a second phase of development for Tropy, the free and open-source software that helps humanities researchers use digital images gathered from archives. With the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tropy will enable cloud storage and remote access of research images, metadata, and archival templates over the next two years. Tropy will also significantly expand the range of media it imports and expose that media and metadata to computational analysis. To introduce and demonstrate Tropy and its new features to a variety of audiences, our team will offer training workshops at regional centers of higher education in the United States and abroad. The first workshops will take place at Northeastern University in Boston on November 13. We’ll announce new features and releases of Tropy on the project blog as they become available. Thanks for trusting Tropy with your research and for letting us know how it works for you; we look forward to making it even better with your feedback.

Workshop to Develop Digital History Articles for a Special Issue of the Journal of Social History

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 09:55:57 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Journal of Social History with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks historians to participate in a series of workshops that will develop articles based on digital research to be published in a special issue of JSH. Scholars will receive travel funding to participate in three workshops, facilitated by Matt Karush and Sam Lebovic (editors of the JSH) and Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen (at RRCHNM), to help them develop their research from digital projects into journal articles that speak to historiographical conversations in their specific fields. The first one-day workshop in March 2019 will focus on two-page outlines prepared in advance by each participant. Those outlines will each be workshopped by the group in the course of the day, with the goal of ensuring that the authors leave with a clear framework around which to construct their argument. A second two-day workshop in August 2019 will focus on complete drafts of the articles and provide each author with a close critique and feedback to use in refining the draft for submission in January 2020. The final one-day workshop in June 2020 will be devoted to revising the manuscripts in response to the peer reviews. Authors will annotate online versions of their articles to serve as models for digital history argumentation. These will appear on a site hosted by RRCHNM. The workshops will be held at George Mason University, in Arlington, VA. The Journal of Social History is a leading journal in social and cultural history, widely recognized for its high-quality and innovative scholarship. Since its founding in 1967, it has served as a catalyst for many of the most important developments in the history profession as a whole. The JSH publishes articles covering all areas and periods and has played an important role in integrating work in Latin American, African, Asian and Eastern European history with socio-historical analysis in Western Europe and the United States. All submissions will be sent out for peer review to two experts in the relevant subfield. Participation in the workshop does not guarantee acceptance for publication. Historians who are interested in participating should send a one-page description of their research which makes an initial attempt to explain how they will use digital history methods or collections to advance historiographical conversations within their specific subfields. Send materials to lmullen@gmu.edu by December 17, 2018. Scholars selected to participate will commit to traveling to the workshops and to submitting a complete manuscript to JSH. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages in their careers, all levels of experience with digital history, and all fields of history, and from women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other individuals who are under-represented in the historical profession.

Annual Report 2017-2018

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 11:00:57 +0000

Our short annual report has recently been mailed out to RRCHNM’s friends and supporters. Produced in collaboration with the Development Office of College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the annual report describes project launches and grants for new projects in the academic year 2017-2018. In it you can find brief descriptions of five of those new projects, and of a busy year of teaching, training, and professional development. A report on the Center’s endowment completes the document. You can download a copy of the Annual Report here.

ABMCEducation Reimagined

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 09:50:17 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has recently completed revisions to the educational site American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC).

Life of a Soldier, designed by social studies teacher Katie, challenges students to understand the personal stories of those who fought in World War I.

Formerly focused solely on World War II, the updated site now includes World War I activities. Teachers developed the activities following their participation in a professional development program to research a fallen servicemen and women. Trips have been to Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. Each teacher’s activity features a number of sources including videos, interactive sites, books, and historic photographs. One of the new features on the site are “Teacher Voice” pieces for some activities. These provide a teacher’s impressions on their experience with teaching the activity in their classroom and includes suggestions for adapting the activity according to time restraints or specific classroom needs. Activities offer different levels of challenge, adaptations, and methods for extension. There is also a a backpack feature that allows the user to bookmark items. The ABMC maintains American military cemeteries outside the United States to commemorate the service, achievements, and sacrifice of U.S. armed forces.

Teaching History Refresh

Thu, 27 Sep 2018 09:40:05 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of the updated Teaching History website. Teaching History, a Teaching American History project funded by the U.S. Department of Education, provides educational resources and materials in U.S. history to K-12 students and teachers.

Teaching History has a renewed focus on the site’s most important content:

Teaching Materials — teaching guides, lesson plan reviews, and ELL resources
History Content — historical knowledge, teaching resources, and website reviews
Best Practices — teaching in action, examples of historical thinking, and techniques for promoting historical inquiry
Digital Classroom — digital tools and platforms to use in the classroom

This streamlining highlights current educational projects and technologies for the 21st-century classroom. Teaching History features the following new content and site changes:

Dying for Equality: African Americans in Alexandria

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 14:47:20 +0000

United States Colored Troops in Alexandria, Virginia. Source: Private collection of Charles Joyce; used with permission.

“‘Entreat me not to leave thee, for whither thou goest I will go’, ‘and where thou fightest I will fight’, and ‘where thou diest I will die’, and ’there will i be buried’, and for this, your humble petitionars will ever pray."– USCT, L’Ouverture Hospital, 1864

ReSounding the Archives has launched!

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 09:48:43 +0000

This interdisciplinary project bridges digital humanities, history, and music by bringing historic sheet music back to life through digitization of sheet music, performance of each piece, and student research about each piece. The website makes all of these resources freely available for use by students, teachers, researchers, and public audiences under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The launch of the website marks a year’s worth of work by faculty, librarians, archivists, digital humanists, and students across various departments at Mason, UVA, and VT. You can learn more about the collaborative process here and here.

10/03/2018: RRCHNM @ DARIAH beyond Europe

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 15:45:36 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be speaking on Public Humanities at the DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop at the Library of Congress on October 3, 2018.

10/15/2018: RRCHNM @ dhnord2018

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 13:30:53 +0000

Sean Takats will be presenting “Quelles collaborations au sein des structures dédiées aux humanités numériques?” [Which collaborations within structures dedicated to digital humanities?] at dhnord2018: Materialities of Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, in Lille, France, on October 15, 2018

10/12/2018: RRCHNM @ Society for History of Technology Annual Meeting

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 13:23:22 +0000

Sean Takats will be presenting “Digital History as Artifacts” at the Society for History of Technology Annual Meeting in St. Louis on October 12, 2018, at 10.30am.

09/26/2018: RRCHNM @ Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 16:41:21 +0000

Sean Takats will be presenting “How to build a research tool for historians? Tropy as a case study” at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, September 26, 2018, at 2.00pm.

10/29/2018: RRCHNM @ University of Richmond

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 16:33:59 +0000

Lincoln Mullen will be presenting “Finding biblical quotations in historical newspaper corpora” to the Department of Mathematics Colloquium at the University of Richmond on October 29, 2018, at 4.30 pm.

09/27/2018: RRCHNM @ Department of History, Brandeis University

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 16:28:56 +0000

Lincoln Mullen will be discussing “Digital literacies for history undergraduates” at the Department of History at Brandeis University on September 27 & 28, 2018

09/21/2018: RRCHNM @ Digital Rough Magic: Advancing the Miranda Digital Asset Platform Workshop

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 15:22:29 +0000

Jessica Otis will be participating in Digital Rough Magic: Advancing the Miranda Digital Asset Platform, a workshop at the Folger Shakespeare Library, on September 21-22, 2018

Discovering the Links: Helping Students Piece Together a Story from Alexandria National Cemetery

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 12:00:11 +0000

Just after midnight on April 24, 1865, the Massachusetts, a side-wheel steamer carrying some 300 soldiers, collided with the Black Diamond, a small propeller boat anchored in the lower Potomac River. The Massachusetts struck the Diamond mid-ship, throwing soldiers overboard by the shear force of the collision. The Diamond took on water rapidly, reportedly sinking in three minutes, while the Massachusetts also sustained damage and struggled to stay afloat. All told, over sixty men from the Massachusetts and four crewmen of the Diamond were lost. Hailed by newspapers as a “sad and terrible disaster,” this tragedy was one of the worst riverboat accidents up until that time, receiving not only local, but also national media attention.

Learn Local, Think National: Connecting Alexandria National Cemetery to American History

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 09:56:14 +0000

“They didn’t even spell out her name!” This outraged exclamation from an 11th grader at T.C. Williams High School made me absurdly happy. Why? Because against all odds I had somehow managed to interest a high schooler in the story of women buried Alexandria National Cemetery (ANC). And the student was outraged! I couldn’t be more thrilled. In Spring 2018 when we received a contract from the National Cemetery Administration (NCA) to work on a website for the Veterans Legacy Program, I wasn’t sure how we would make it interesting for students. Even as a senior history major, I was skeptical as to how interesting a national cemetery could be. Personally, I didn’t know much about the ANC and I had no experience writing lesson plans. Where should we start?

At a site visit to Alexandria National Cemetery, Mr. James Saunders, Cemetery Superintendent, recounted the history and significance of ANC. Source: RRCHNM.

As a research team, we knew the cemetery offered a rich history to work with but were not sure where to begin to tell its stories. Established in 1862 as one of the first fourteen national cemeteries, ANC is the final resting place for veterans who fought for their country throughout its history. That’s a lot of choice and we started, more or less, tracking down stories that sounded interesting and followed where they took. There were interesting stories we found that we just couldn’t choose because they did not necessarily connect to curriculum standards or there wasn’t enough information. Sometimes serendipity is a researcher’s best friend and that was how I stumbled upon an article about Alexandria’s L’Ouverture Hospital and its segregated wards for black and white soldiers. The story I found unraveled to involve United States Colored Troops, the Quartermaster Department who oversaw all national cemeteries, and a fight against institutionalized racism in the United States. Trips to the cemetery and the National Archives Administration (NARA) pieced together the story that linked ANC to a Freedmen and Contraband Cemetery, a former slave grave site. Research unearthed collections that provided first-hand accounts of the cemetery and life around it. For example, the Julia Ann Wilbur diary courtesy of Haverford College, provided insights on racial inequalities during the Civil War, while the private collection of Charles Joyce preserved the image of a USCT Honor Guard in Alexandria, VA. With the launch of For Us the Living, the L’Ouverture Patients’ Petition for burial in the national cemetery will be digitally published in its entirety for the first time. Bringing our research together into cohesive narratives was satisfying but only half of the project. Pilot-testing with students and educators at TC Williams High School in Alexandria, VA ensured the lesson modules worked for high school audiences. Writing for a high school audience has challenges, but this encouraged all of us to find the clearest way to tell our stories and ask questions that guided learners through the historical research process. Testing the site in an actual classroom was terrifying but ultimately as helpful and important as every other step in our process. Working with four classes of 11th and 12th grades allowed us to observe how they understood the content and interacted with the site. Their feedback brought issues to our attention– questions that were too difficult or words that needed defining– as the students worked through the modules. They also gave us great encouragement with comments like “The creators did a good job and I hope they make things like this for other historical locations in the Alexandria area.” The pilot testing teachers, Sarah Whelan, Patrick Deville, and Philip Engle, also provided us with insights on how to improve the site as a teaching tool and make it more appealing to teachers. Our final Teach page was a direct response to their feedback on how to integrate the site into national standards. The contribution of ACPS strengthened For Us the Living as a tool for teachers and students across the country. As a recent graduate and relative newbie to digital humanities and history education, this project has been a roller-coaster learning experience as well as a reaffirmation of why I love history. For Us the Living is the first project I have contributed to from start to finish. I worked with experienced professionals from different fields– from the National Cemetery Administration to local public school educators– and learned about the importance of different perspectives and interpretations when creating lessons for students. It was fun to piece together our stories and figure how each fit into the nation’s larger narrative. That I was able to be part of a team with the larger purpose of supporting the NCA’s Veterans Legacy Program and encouraging students to get involved in local and national history makes it all the more meaningful to me.

RRCHNM welcomes Jessica Otis

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 09:00:51 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are very happy to welcome Jessica Otis (@jotis13) to our ranks as a director, and as an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History. Jessica comes to us from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was the Digital Humanities Specialist in the University Libraries.

Otis is a historian of early modern Britain, she received both a MS in Mathematics and a PhD in History from the University of Virginia. Subsequently, she was a CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Data Curation working on the NEH-funded Six Degrees of Francis Bacon at Carnegie Mellon University. She also co-founded the dSHARP digital scholarship center and the PGH|DH regional digital humanities group. Jessica’s research focuses on the cultural history of mathematics, cryptography, and plague in early modern England*.*

Current Research in Digital History

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 14:14:20 +0000

The inaugural issue of RRCHNM’s new annual open-access, peer-reviewed publication Current Research in Digital History is now live. The issue was edited by Lincoln Mullen and Stephen Robertson, with crucial input from a program committee consisting of Kalani Craig, Jessica Marie Johnson, Michelle Moravec, and Scott Weingart. Editorial Assistant Greta Swain worked throughout the summer to prepare the essays for online publication, in a platform designed by Kim Ngyuen and Ken Alpers that allows for interactive visualizations, data and code appendices and other features not typically available from humanities journals.

World History Commons receives NEH Award

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 14:03:42 +0000

We are delighted to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create World History Commons in partnership with the World History Association and Associate Professor Adam Clulow of Monash University (Australia). World History Commons, an Open Educational Resource (OER), will provide high quality, peer-reviewed resources for teaching and research in world and global history. World History Commons will introduce new humanities scholarship and pedagogy while preserving and enhancing widely-used resources from World History Matters, the award-winning, NEH-funded collection of world history websites, and the Global History Reader, a collaboration between scholars at Monash University and Warwick University (UK). World History Commons is one of 15 Digital Humanities Advancement Grants funded through the Office of Digital Humanities.

08/09/2018: RRCHNM @ DH@Wake

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 14:10:56 +0000

Megan Brett is leading a workshop “Multimedia Exhibit Building with Omeka” at the DH@Wake Summer Institute at Wake Forest University on August 9, 2018.

10/07/2018: RRCHNM @ Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute

Tue, 17 Jul 2018 12:57:01 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be part of a team working on Promoting a Public Face for Scholarly Journals at the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute from October 7-11, 2018. Together with Lisa Brady, Liz Covart, Seth Denbo, Robert Greene II, and Catherine Halley, he will be developing a guide to platforms and strategies for public engagement to disseminate online, and present at the journal editors’ breakfast at the 2019 American Historical Association conference.

08/15/2018: RRCHNM @ Society of American Archivists Conference

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 15:28:00 +0000

Megan Brett, Stephen Robertson and LaQuanda Walters Cooper will be presenting a lighting talk on Creating Local Linkages at the Public Library Archives and Special Collections Section meeting during the Society of American Archivists Conference on August 15, 2018, at 4.00 PM. Creating Local Linkages is an online course to introduce public librarians to researching and publishing local history using digital tools.

06/22/2018: Omeka S Workshop @ RRCHNM

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:48:11 +0000

We are happy to announce a day of workshops and activities for developers and users of Omeka S on June 22, 2018. The event will include an overview of the design of Omeka S, as well as introductions to resources (mostly items, but other things as well), module, and site development from the Omeka team. The morning will give a high-level conceptual overview of Omeka S, and the afternoon will involve hands-on exploration of site building and module development. It’s a Friday, so we expect to wrap up around 3pm.

ReSounding the Archives Symposium

Mon, 21 May 2018 07:00:16 +0000

On Tuesday, April 24, the first ReSounding the Archives Symposium was held in the Garden Room of the Colonnade Club at the University of Virginia. This event culminated the first year of work on the ReSounding the Archives digital project that seeks to bring historic sheet music back to life through contemporary recordings and contextual essays.

Faith Ellen Lam and Jimmy Stevens close out an evening of performances.

The symposium showcased the work of 22 students from George Mason University (Mason), the University of Virginia (UVA), and Virginia Tech (VT). An interdisciplinary group of 17 undergraduates presented their research on the social, cultural, and musical context of WWI-era sheet music. After each presentation, performing arts students from VT and Mason performed the pieces. In addition, UVA doctoral student Joseph Thompson presented on the ways he is incorporating digital humanities into his dissertation project, “Sounding Southern: Music, Militarism, and the Making of the Sunbelt.” VT English student Libby Howe also contributed two posters exploring the visual rhetoric of WWI sheet music. The 17 songs presented and performed at the symposium will provide the initial ReSounding the Archives website content, including digitized sheet music, live recordings, and studio recordings produced by students at VT and Mason. Each song is accompanied by a contextual essay. All sheet music and recordings will be available for download under a Creative Commons license and freely available for educational use. The website will launch in summer 2018.

The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 09:49:47 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to announce a new international project in collaboration with scholars in Australia, The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike website. Working with Bain Attwood, a scholar of Australian history and settler colonialism at Monash University, and Anne Scrimgeour, a scholar of Aboriginal history, this digital project will be part of the first major scholarly study to examine one of the most important events in Australia’s post-war history: the Pilbara Aboriginal strike of 1946.

Mustering in the Pilbara. Image credit: Anne Scrimgeour.

In 1946, Aboriginal stockworkers led a strike in the Pilbara region of Western Australia against harsh working conditions and meager pay by walking off their pastoral stations. Though police and the government tried different repressive strategies to stop the strike, the Communist Party, trade unions, women’s organizations, and churches came together to help the strikers. Ultimately, the strikers were successful as they gained better pay and working conditions, but many Aboriginal workers then formed mining co-operatives, forging their own economic, social, and cultural space. Amidst the backdrop of settler colonialism and World War II, the strike resulted in changes in public policy and influenced nationwide advocacy for Aboriginal rights. The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike website will detail the events of the strike and historical context, the co-operative movement, and the commemoration of the strike through today. The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike aims to highlight Aboriginal communities’ roles in this event. It will feature oral histories of Aboriginal people from the Pilbara region, foregrounding their voices in this history. The project also strives to show the multiplicity of voices and perspectives involved in the strike and beyond. Geared toward Aboriginal communities, scholars, and post-secondary students, the site will include multiple exhibits of narrative content, as well as an interactive timeline, a primary source archive, and a section that spotlights the individuals and organizations who played integral roles in the strike and its aftermath. Launching later this year, The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike digital project is an exciting transnational collaboration that will showcase the actions of the Aboriginal people who fought for their rights and for Aboriginal rights across Australia.

04/25/2018: RRCHNM @ Case Western University

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 16:36:10 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be participating in a roundtable on digital humanities at Case Western University, from 11.35am-12.45pm on April 25, 2018

Veterans Legacy Program contract awarded to RRCHNM

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 15:24:20 +0000

RRCHNM students receive a tour of Alexandria National Cemetery with James Sanders, Director of the Quantico and Alexandria National Cemeteries. Photo credit: Chris Preperato

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to announce that we received a contract from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Cemetery Administration (NCA) in support of their Veterans Legacy Program. Students working within RRCHNM’s Education Division will be researching the history of Alexandria National Cemetery, one of the original 14 national cemeteries established in 1862. RRCHNM will create online learning modules that teachers and high school students in the Alexandria Public Schools will pilot test later this spring. The modules will include a digital activity or service learning activity aimed at exploring commemoration, historical memory, and national mourning. On completion, these modules will be available to other classrooms around the country. RRCHNM received one of nine contracts awarded to academic organizations across the nation. For further information about the Veterans Legacy Program, visit https://www.cem.va.gov/legacy/.

04/24/2018: RRCHNM @ ReSounding the Archives Symposium

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 12:57:58 +0000

A concert and symposium showcasing the work for the ReSounding the Archive project will be held at the the Colonnade Club on the campus of the University of Virginia on April 24, from 5.30-8 pm. The project brings World War I sheet music to life through recordings and live performances, and a website that will provide digitized sheet music, historical context, and usable recordings of each song.

05/14/2018: RRCHNM @ Conference for High Impact Research at American University

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 14:41:00 +0000

Stephen Robertson & Megan Brett will be presenting sessions at the Conference for High Impact Research at American University on May 14, 2018. Stephen Robertson will be leading a session entitled “Adding a Digital Dimension to Your Research” from 10.45am - 12.00pm. Megan Brett will be part of a session entitled “Omeka and Preserve the Baltimore Uprising 2015: The Power of Online Exhibits in High Impact Research” from 2.15pm-3.30pm.

04/20/2018: RRCHNM @ NCPH Annual Meeting

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 14:27:11 +0000

Sheila Brennan will be facilitating a roundtable entitled “Extending the Power of Public History through Open Access Digital Publishing,” at the National Council on Public History Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, on April 20, from 3.30-5.00pm.

03/15/2018: RRCHNM @ American Federation of Teachers Share My Lesson Virtual Conference

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 10:55:12 +0000

Sara Collini will be participating in a panel session on Eagle Eye Citizen and critical thinking for the American Federation of Teachers Share My Lesson Virtual Conference, “Metacognition and Media: Developing Students’ Critical Thinking Skills.” The session will be live March 15, 2018 at 4pm eastern time.

03/02/2018: RRCHNM @ Middle States Council for the Social Studies Conference

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 10:52:32 +0000

Sara Collini and Brianna Nuñez will be at the Middle States Council for the Social Studies Conference in Tysons Corner, VA on March 2 and 3, 2018. Sara Collini will be presenting “Eagle Eye Citizen: Online Engagement with Civics” on March 3 at 11:15am.

ReSounding the Archives

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 16:37:40 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) received a 4-VA Research Grant to fund the digital project, ReSounding the Archives. ReSounding the Archives is an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together digital humanities, history, and music. Partners include:

RRCHNM and the College for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) at George Mason University (Mason);
McIntire Department of Music and Music Library at the University of Virginia (UVA); and
History and English Departments, School of Performing Arts, and Special Collections at Virginia Tech (VT).

The project’s goal is literally to “re-sound” the archives — to bring World War I sheet music to life through recordings and live performances. Students from Mason, UVA, and VT will work together to select, research, and record music, exploring history from new vantage points. The project website will provide digitized sheet music, historical context, and usable recordings of each song.

Contemporary students live very musical lives. Allowing professors to integrate historical sheet music into their undergraduate and graduate courses via audio recordings will provide a way for students to historicize that experience and deeply engage historical resources through lyrics, artwork, and the songs themselves to better understand their social, cultural, and political uses. By making the recordings freely available, ReSounding the Archives also addresses the lack of historical music available for classroom use. During spring 2018, students in Dr. Elizabeth Ozment’s “ReSounding the Archives” course at UVA, working with librarians Abigail Flanigan and Winston Barham, will select and research WWI-era sheet music. Students in the English and History departments at VT, led by Trudy Harrington Becker, Tom Ewing, and Mark Barrow of the History department, Jim Dubinsky of the English department, and Marc Brodsky of Special Collections, will also select and research sheet music. Music students at Mason and VT will work with student sound engineers to create studio recordings of each piece. Performances and song recording will be organized by Nicole Springer, Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs and Assistant Director, Arts Management Undergraduate Studies, and Linda Monson, Director of Mason’s School of Music and Distinguished Service Professor, in Mason’s CVPA, along with Tracy Cowden, Michael Dunston, and Brian Thorsett in the music department at VT. On April 24, 2018, UVA will host a concert and symposium in Charlottesville for partners from all three institutions to showcase student work as well as create live musical performances that will be recorded and added to the website. RRCHNM, led by Dr. Kelly Schrum, Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Jessica Dauterive, Digital History Fellow, are coordinating the 4VA collaboration and will build and populate the website. This 4-VA grant will enable students, faculty, and staff to establish relationships across Virginia institutions, leading to new course development as well as opportunities for student work, research, and external funding to expand the project.

03/21/2018: RRCHNM @ European University Institute

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 10:03:33 +0000

Sean Takats will be presenting “Managing research photos and archival images with Tropy” at the European University Institute in Florence, on March 21, 2018

05/07/2018: RRCHNM @ Association of Art Museum Curators Conference

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:30:47 +0000

Sheila Brennan will be participating in the panel “Continuing the Conversation – Curators & Technologists United” at the Association of Art Museum Curators Conference, in Montreal, on May 7, 2018.

03/15/2018: RRCHNM @ Bates College

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:24:07 +0000

Kelly Schrum will be leading a digital storytelling workshop at Bates College on March 15, 2018.

03/09/2018: RRCHNM @ James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:19:49 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be delivering the keynote presentation, “Reimagining Black Urban Space in the 1920s and 1930s: Mapping Places, Events, and Networks with Digital Harlem,” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of History’s James A. Rawley Conference in the Humanities, on March 9, 2018.

02/07/2018: RRCHNM @ The Networked Curator

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:13:01 +0000

Sheila Brennan will be leading The Networked Curator, a digital literacy workshop for curators from February 7 - 9, 2018 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

02/13/2018: RRCHNM @ Code4Lib 2018

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 17:08:35 +0000

Patrick Murray-John will be leading a workshop on Omeka S at the Code4Lib 2018 conference in Washington, D.C., on February 13, from 2.30pm to 5.30pm.

01/27/2018: RRCHNM @ Sources Conference

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 10:18:58 +0000

Sarah Collini will be presenting “Eagle Eye Citizen: Exploring Civics, History, and Primary Sources"at the Sources Conference in Orlando, Florida, on January 27, at 10.00am.

03/17/2018: Current Research in Digital History @ RRCHNM

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 16:01:39 +0000

The Current Research in Digital History 2018 conference will be held in Founders Hall at George Mason University in Arlington, VA, on Saturday, March 17, 2018. CRDH is an annual one-day conference that publishes online, peer-reviewed proceedings. Its primary aim is to encourage and publish scholarship in digital history that offers discipline-specific arguments and interpretations. A format of short presentations provides an opportunity to make an argument on the basis of ongoing research in a larger project. Registration and Program Information is available here

RRCHNM @ ED Games Expo 2018: A Showcase for Education Learning Games and Technologies

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 16:28:44 +0000

Come see RRCHNM showcase Eagle Eye Citizen in the 2018 ED Games Expo at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Monday, January 8 from 10am-8pm! See more than 100 learning games and technologies in action at the 5th annual ED Games Expo. Technologies at the Expo are for children and students age 3 to 18, and cover a range of topics in education and special education across STEM, reading and writing, social studies, and social and behavioral development. The Expo is free and open to the public. Date/Time: Monday, January 8 from 10am-8pm Location: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St. NW, Washington, D.C. Contact Edward.Metz@ed.gov with questions.

And the winner is...

Tue, 19 Dec 2017 16:20:35 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is h

appy to announce that Emily O’Connell from Battle Ground Academy in Franklin, TN is the winner of the Eagle Eye Citizen student challenge making contest. Judges from National History Day reviewed over 200 challenges created during the contest period and selected Emily’s challenge, Becoming Law, as the winning entry. As the winner, Emily received a pizza party for her class, a full set of the Making History series from National History Day, and a prize pack of books from the Library of Congress. Eagle Eye Citizen engages middle and high school students in solving and creating interactive challenges about Congress, American history, civics, and government with Library of Congress primary sources in order to develop students’ civic understanding and historical thinking skills. Though the contest is over, students and teachers can still make and solve challenges on the Eagle Eye Citizen website. Created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Eagle Eye Citizen is a Congress, Civic Participation, and Primary Sources Project and is supported by a grant from the Library of Congress. Congratulations Emily!

Mapping the First Decade of Congressional Elections

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 11:19:28 +0000

Shifting votes for parties in the first three Congressional elections in Maryland.

Districts flip, party affiliations change, and populations and geographies shift. These and other changes are visible in Mapping Early American Election’s first release of over 70 maps visualizing county voting returns by state from the first five U.S. Congressional elections. The project will regularly release additional Congressional maps through the nineteenth Congress in early 2018. The new Maps section invites users to browse by Congress and state. Some states, like Maryland, saw swings in party affiliations, party competition, and regional voting patterns within the first decade of the United States. Others states, like the solidly Federalist Connecticut, did not. Each map page reveals a state map with the results for a specific Congress, with voting districts and counties outlined that are color-coded to represent the margin of victory. For example, looking at the first election in Maryland, the state elected all Federalists (green) to Congress, even with a strong showing of support for Anti-Federalist (orange) candidates in Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties. The darker the color, the more votes received by a party in that district. It is then possible for a user to click through to the next Congress, under “Related Maps,” to compare how voting patterns changed from election to election. Below each map, we provide a table of data that lists election returns by district (or at-large), candidate, party, vote total, percentage of votes earned. To clearly identify the winners, each elected candidate receives a check mark at the end of their row of data. There are cases when a candidate won the election, but did not serve in Congress. For the purposes of this project, we are highlighting who was elected, because our aim is to show what happened in the elections rather than what happened in Congress. For each winner who served in Congress, we provide a link to their entry in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress). While this project is based in large part on A New Nation Votes, from which it draws on Philip Lampi’s work collecting elections returns, it also builds up on it. The data has been changed into a tabular form to allow data analysis; we have created the ability to join the elections data to the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries and the Digital Boundary Definitions of United States Congressional Districts, as well as to the Congressional biographies. We have also added missing electoral data. This site features maps of political parties by counties, and will soon add state maps of town data and national maps of Congressional districts. But the data, which is available as it is being developed, allows for many other kinds of maps. We will highlight some of the decisions that went into shaping the data and the ways in which it can be used on our blog. Making the maps is no easy task. Lincoln Mullen and Jordan Bratt have been working through the data for many months. We are also grateful to project advisors, especially Philip Lampi, who painstakingly reviewed the maps before launch. Mapping Early American Elections project’sGitHub repository includes the data we have released so far, along with the other code produced. If you are interested in thedata repository, you can follow its progress through commits and issues on GitHub. Please take some time browse the maps that represent early American voting returns for Congressional elections. What interesting patterns will you find? {Cross-posted on Mapping Early American Elections)

01/06/2018: RRCHNM @ American Historical Association Annual Meeting

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 16:28:42 +0000

There are four sessions involving RRCHNM on the program at the 132nd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington DC: (1) Teaching Hidden History: Learning by Developing Digital Modules (Saturday, 1/6/2018, 1.30PM-3.00PM) Kelly Schrum & Nate Sleeter (2) Arguing with Digital History: A Roundtable on Using Digital History to Make Arguments for Academic Audiences (Saturday, 1/6/2018, 1.30PM-3.00PM) Stephen Robertson & Lincoln Mullen** The white paper to be discussed in this session can be found here* (3) Diplomacy in Action: Diplomacy Simulations in the Classroom (Sunday, 1/7/2018, 9.00AM-10.30AM) Gwen White (4) Understanding Sacrifice: A Lens for Studying WW2 through Art, Science, Literature & History (Sunday, 1/7/2018, 12.30PM-4.00PM) Jennifer Rosenfeld & Christopher Hamner Also, on Friday, 1/5/2018, from 11.30AM-2.30PM, you can also find an RRCHNM table in the Affiliated Societies Display, in the atrium outside the exhibit hall in the Marriott Wardman Park.

Major Milestones for Omeka

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 11:26:41 +0000

Today, the Omeka team is releasing the first major point release for Omeka S: 1.0. It is available for download today. We are also revealing a redesigned, Omeka.org, which represents a major undertaking of effort that has happened at the edges of all other pressing design, development, and outreach work.

Omeka S 1.0

One year following the Beta, the release of Omeka S 1.0 demonstrates the stability of the platform. Created with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Omeka S is engineered to ease the burdens of administrators who want to make it possible for their users easily build their own sites that showcase digital cultural heritage materials and share those resources as linked open data. If you’re unfamiliar with Omeka S, take a quick tour. Play in the Sandbox to test out the S platform before installing: Get a login, then explore the Sandbox.

Eagle Eye Citizen takes flight!

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 10:31:37 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to announce the launch of Eagle Eye Citizen, a Congress, Civic Participation, and Primary Sources Project supported by a grant from the Library of Congress. Eagle Eye Citizen engages middle and high school students in solving and creating interactive challenges about Congress, American history, civics, and government with Library of Congress primary sources in order to develop students’ civic understanding and historical thinking skills. Engaging Challenges RRCHNM conceptualized three challenge types for students and teachers to solve and create:

New teaching materials on World War II in the Pacific available

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 13:33:05 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to announce the launch of new materials related to World War II in the Pacific on the award-winning website Understanding Sacrifice, created in partnership with National History Day ®(NHD) for the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) and the VA National Cemetery Administration (NCA) . Personal perspective on the war

As part of the summer field study, social studies teacher, Katie Hoerner (above), and her fellow teachers visited the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii. Photo by C. Gorn.

One of the most arresting features of the site is the gallery of Fallen Heroes. This past school year, 18 teachers from around the country each selected a WWII service member or civilian buried or memorialized in an ABMC or NCA cemetery to research. The connection to the teacher might have been geographic, such as the case of social studies teacher Katie Hoerner, who chose to research the life of fellow Illinoisan Bruce Bradley who died on the USS Arizona. For social studies teacher, Matt Poth, the connection to his fallen hero, William Seiverling Jr., came from their shared Marine Corps experience. California special education teacher Jose Cumagun shared a connection to the Philippines with his fallen hero, Teofilo Yldefonzo, an Olympic medalist and Philippine Scout. Several teachers have chosen to include their students in the research process. The teachers find that researching an individual makes the war more personal for their students and they report that their students are engaged in the historical research process. To help other teachers embark on this type of research, the site includes a new section, Researching a Fallen Hero, which provides teachers with lesson plan ideas, tips, handouts and examples of how to conduct this type of research in a classroom. Written by Kevin Wagner, a high school social studies teacher whose students have researched the lives of service members for several years, the section also includes videos from Wagner’s classroom of the process in action. Interdisciplinary Lesson Plans

STEM teacher Whitney Joyner, standing in front of the tower at the Pacific Aviation Museum on Ford Island, prepares to deliver her video introduction about RADAR’s role in the Pearl Harbor attack. Photo by C. Preperato.

This year’s cohort of 18 teachers represented diverse teaching backgrounds in social studies, language arts, visual arts, and performing arts. The lessons, designed for middle and high school classrooms, reflect this diversity. For example:

Scripto Update Funded by NEH

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 10:00:40 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Omeka team has an opportunity to upgrade its popular Scripto tool with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities (NEH-ODH). Scripto is a free, open-source tool used for collaborative online transcriptions of documents and multimedia files, originally funded by the NEH-ODH in 2009, used by many. We are grateful for this opportunity to redesign Scripto as a module for Omeka S, and to generate new documentation and guidance that will assist other cultural heritage organizations in managing their own community transcription projects. This work will coincide with the migration of the Papers of the War Department digital documentary edition to Omeka S with funding from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Digital History PhD Fellowships available for Fall 2018

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 12:26:02 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that the Department of History & Art History at George Mason University has received another round of funding from the Provost’s Ph.D. Award Program to admit two Digital History Fellows to the Ph.D. program in each of the next three years. Fellows enrolling in Fall 2018 will receive stipends of $20,000 for two years, during which time they will take a practicum course each semester here at RRCHNM, and then a further three years of support from the Department of History and Art History. The practicum courses provide an opportunity to be part of a digital history center and to contribute to a range of projects across all three of the Center’s divisions. Syllabi for the practicum courses can be found on the Fellows’ blog, which also includes posts by all six cohorts of fellows reflecting on their experiences at the Center. Students interested in applying to the GMU History PhD program and being a Digital history Fellow should consult the information on the department website or contact the department’s graduate director, Sam Lebovic. Applications close January 15, 2018.

Tropy 1.0 Release

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 13:04:17 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of Tropy version 1.0. Tropy is the software that researchers have long-needed to organize and describe the large numbers of photographs they take in archives and libraries of their sources. Tropy is free and open source, and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Just some of the features Tropy offers:

Attach descriptive metadata – such as title, author, date, archive, collection – to your photos individually or in bulk, using customizable templates
Organize your photos using tags or lists
Merge multiple photos into a single item, to group photos of your multi-page sources
Manipulate your photos so you can read them more easily
Attach notes or transcriptions to your photos, or to a selection from a photo
Create templates that include the information you need to know about your sources
Search the descriptive metadata, tags, and notes to find the sources you need
Export your items in JSON-LD

Visit Tropy’s extensive documentation to learn how to use the software to describe your research. And please feel free to post questions, problems, and feedback to Tropy’s support forums. Our thanks to Tropy’s awesome development team:

Annual Report 2016-2017

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:14:15 +0000

Our second short annual report has recently been mailed out to RRCHNM’s friends and supporters. Produced in collaboration with the Development Office of College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the annual report describes project launches and grants for new projects in the academic year 2016-2016. In it you can find brief descriptions of five of those new projects, and of a busy year of teaching, training, and professional development. A report on the Center’s endowment completes the document. A copy can be downloaded here.

11/14/2017: James Smithies (King's Digital Lab) @ RRCHNM

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:43:14 +0000

On Tuesday, November 14, at 12 noon, James Smithies, Director of King’s Digital Lab (KDL) at King’s College London will be speaking about the work of the KDL.

Amboyna Conspiracy Trial Website Wins NSW Premier’s Multimedia History Prize

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 12:22:24 +0000

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an interactive teaching resource focused on one of the most famous legal cases of the early modern period, won the Australian 2017 NSW Premier’s History Awards Multimedia History Prize. Created by Dr. Adam Clulow (Monash University, Australia) in collaboration with RRCHNM and the design team at Big Yellow Taxi, the Amboyn a Conspiracy Trial is part of RRCHNM’s World History Matters portal offering rich resources for teaching and learning about world history. Judges in the award competition praised the “rich trove of digitised archival material” and the interactivity that turns visitors into “investigators, lawyers and jurors tasked with understanding historical events.” The NSW Premier’s History Awards “assist in establishing values and standards in historical research and publication" encouraging broad audiences to “appreciate and learn from” historians. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS6oyQC9Y4o[/embed]

10/13/2017: RRCHNM @ Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Summit

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 16:17:33 +0000

Stephen Robertson and Abby Mullen are presenting a lunchtime workshop on Tropy at the Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Summit at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on Friday, October 13, 2017.

11/15/2017: Project Workshop @ RRCHNM

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 11:03:36 +0000

The Research Division will be holding a Project Workshop at 12 noon in the lounge at RRCHNM. The Research Division is in the early stages of developing a tool that will allow digital projects to visually represent and give credit for the work that is done by team members over time. During the project workshop, we’ll be discussing what teams would need from such a tool, what we should consider as we get started, and what other tools and resources address this need.

11/17/2017: RRCHNM @ NCSS Annual Conference

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 16:53:34 +0000

Kelly Schrum will be presenting at the Annual Conference of the National Council for the Social Studies, in San Francisco, on November 17, 2017.

10/13/2017: RRCHNM @ ISSOTL Conference

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 16:44:38 +0000

Kelly Schrum will be presenting at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference, in Calgary, Canada, on October 13, 2017

09/22/2017: RRCHNM @ BH & DH Conference

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 16:20:42 +0000

Stephanie Westcott will be presenting “What If the Book In Your History Isn’t One? Book History, Digital Humanities and the Rescue of Difficult Sources,” at BH & DH: Book History and Digital Humanities, a conference at the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at 1.45PM on September 22, 2017

Amboyna Conspiracy Trial Website Named Finalist for NSW Premier’s History Award

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 13:53:43 +0000

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, an interactive teaching resource focused on one of the most famous legal cases of the early modern period, is a finalist for the Australian NSW Premier’s History Awards Multimedia History Prize. Created by Dr. Adam Clulow (Monash University, Australia) in collaboration with RRCHNM and the design team at Big Yellow Taxi, the Amboyn a Conspiracy Trial is part of RRCHNM’s World History Matters portal offering rich resources for teaching and learning about world history. Judges in the award competition praised the “rich trove of digitised archival material” and the interactivity that turns visitors into “investigators, lawyers and jurors tasked with understanding historical events.” The NSW Premier’s History Awards “assist in establishing values and standards in historical research and publication" encouraging broad audiences to “appreciate and learn from” historians. Winners will be announced at the State Library of New South Wales in Australia on September 1, 2017. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS6oyQC9Y4o[/embed]

10/28/17 RRCHNM @ DCMI

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:11:10 +0000

Patrick Murray-John is leading a workshop on “Using Omeka S To Create and Share Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data” at the DCMI Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, in Washington D.C., on Saturday, October 28, 2017, from 1.30 to 5.30 pm.

09/28/2017: RRCHNM @ Marquette University's Digital Scholarship Symposium

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:37:03 +0000

Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon are leading a workshop, “Digital Scholarship and Community Engagement,” at Marquette University’s Digital Scholarship Symposium, on September 29, 9.30-11.30am, at Raynor Memorial Libraries.

09/22/2017: RRCHNM @ Innovations in Teaching & Learning

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 17:29:31 +0000

From 10.30-11.30am on September 22, Kelly Schrum, Beth Dalbec, Matt Boyce, Sara Collini are presenting a teaching demo entitled,Digital Storytelling: Communicating Academic Research Beyond the Academy, focused on using digital storytelling as a tool for communicating academic research

10/26/2017 RRCHNM @ Race, Memory & the Digital Humanities

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 17:32:34 +0000

Stephen Robertson is presenting in the roundtable, “Race, Digital Humanities, and the Region,” at Race, Memory & the Digital Humanities Symposium, at the College of William & Mary, October 28.

11/8/2017 RRCHNM @ MCN

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 17:26:14 +0000

Sheila Brennan is leading an unconference session on “Radicalizing Objects in History Museums” and presenting in the session “Confronting Theories of Museum Greatness” at the MCN conference in Pittsburgh on November 8. On November 9, she is leading the session “Engaging Curators! Inclusivity and Collaboration Across Institutions.”

10/4/2017 RRCHNM @ It Takes a Village: Open Source Software Models of Collaboration and Sustainability

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 17:01:13 +0000

Sheila Brennan is participating in It Takes a Village: Open Source Software Models of Collaboration and Sustainability, a forum organized by LYRASIS, with the support of IMLS, on October 4-5, in Baltimore

08/09/2017 RRCHNM @ DH2017

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 16:48:44 +0000

Stephen Robertson, Sean Takats, and Abby Mullen are presenting “Tropy: A Tool for Research Photo Management” in the Poster Session at DH 2017 in Montreal, on August 9 from 5-7pm

07/25/2017 RRCHNM@ Collections as Data: IMPACT

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 16:32:13 +0000

Stephen Robertson is presenting “Data in Place: Using Digital Harlem to map historical sources,” at Collections as Data: Impact, at the Library of Congress, July 25, 11am.

Doing Digital History 2016 White Paper Summary

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 13:25:17 +0000

During the summer of 2016, Sharon M. Leon and Sheila A. Brennan led a second Doing Digital History institute for advanced topics in digital humanities (IATDH) funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities together with an amazing team of graduate student mentors and visiting scholars. The final report and white paper is available. Doing Digital History 2016 offered 24 mid-career American historians an opportunity to immerse themselves in two intensive weeks of training focusing on the theories and methods of digital history. The results of the institute were impressive, with participants increasing their technical skills, their digital literacy, and their comfort with evaluating digital work. The team was able to rely on the lessons learned from 2014 during the planning and design phases of the curriculum and the evaluation structure for 2016. By the end of the two weeks, everyone left with new skills, new understandings of digital methodologies, and a new appreciation for the work required to build and sustain successful digital humanities projects. A major goal of the Doing Digital History institutes is to make a targeted impact on history faculty, their students and departments, and the field at-large. To measure the overall effectiveness of the institute on changing attitudes and practices we asked four questions related to our goals at the beginning and the end of each institute:

Eagle Eye Citizen takes flight at National History Day

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 11:32:38 +0000

What happens when you combine more than 3,000 students who love history with an online challenge-making contest using primary sources from the Library of Congress and then sweeten the pot with a $50 Amazon gift card? That is what we wanted to find out at the National History Day® (NHD) Contest held June 11-June 15, 2017, at University of Maryland, College Park. During the NHD Contest, RRCHNM held a challenge-making contest for Eagle Eye Citizen, a new interactive website that uses primary sources from the Library of Congress to help develop students’ civic understanding and historical thinking skills. The contest created a buzz among students and teachers who love history and invited students to create challenges before the upcoming project launch. Students from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, China, Korea, and South Asia came to this year’s contest. Each year, more than half a million students create historical research projects in one of five categories: documentaries, exhibits, papers, performances, or websites.

Kyle Nguyen, a rising junior from Palm Harbor University High, Florida won the Eagle Eye Citizen challenge making contest at NHD.

A panel of NHD judges reviewed each Eagle Eye Citizen challenge entry and selected Kyle Nguyen, a rising junior from Palm Harbor University High, Florida, as the winner of the Amazon gift card. Kyle created the challenge, Breaking Free, that invites users to decide whether selected primary sources represent the 1st or the 13th Amendment. Sources included a copy of the Bill of Rights, an 1866 piece of sheet music titled “Protect the Freedman,” an 1840 broadside for “Friends of Harrison and Reform,” and a pie chart showing the composition of church membership from the 1890 census. Kyle’s success stemmed from his reflection on why he selected these sources along with his accompanying hints. He clearly demonstrated his goal of helping users look closely and find clues within each source. Student reflections are built into every Eagle Eye Citizen challenge and are helpful for teachers to assess understanding. Students received limited-edition Eagle Eye Citizen buttons to collect or trade at the NHD Contest.

Students that made Eagle Eye Citizen challenges received this limited edition button to keep or trade during the NHD contest.

The NHD contest also provided the opportunity to share Eagle Eye Citizen with teachers from around the globe. On June 12, Graduate Research Assistant, Sara Collini, and Digital Teaching and Learning Specialist, Nate Sleeter, introduced Eagle Eye Citizen to about 40 teachers during a NHD professional development session. Teachers shared their enthusiasm for the project and appreciated how the site could help differentiate challenges to meet students’ interests and abilities. Eagle Eye Citizen is supported by a grant from the Library of Congress. The full site will launch for the 2017-18 school year. Stay tuned! Save Save Save

ACLS Digital Extension Grant to Migrate Papers of the War Department

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 10:56:33 +0000

We are excited to announce that the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) awarded Sheila Brennan and RRCHNM one of five digital extension grants to migrate the Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, (PWD) an online documentary edition comprising nearly 43,000 digital documents, to Omeka S to revitalize and stabilize this legacy digital humanities project. The migration will allow for an efficient upgrade of the infrastructure and will provide a path for long-term preservation and access, while also allowing the team to redesign the user interface thus enabling greater use and discoverability of these early federal documents. On November 8, 1800, fire destroyed the US War Department office and the records held within. For over 200 years, the records of one of the first federal agencies, representing much of the early government’s work, were unavailable for research and learning. The papers do not merely record military matters, but also how the Department handled Native American affairs, veterans’ pensions, and procurement from merchants across the nation. The War Office was the nation’s largest single consumer of fabric, clothing, shoes, food, medicine, building materials, and weapons of all kinds. Ted Crackel and staff at East Stroudsburg University led a decade-long effort to digitize and unite copies of nearly 43,000 lost documents, and then transferred those assets to RRCHNM in 2006. The Papers of the War Department (PWD) website presents digitized copies and richly-described metadata of the papers, together with community-contributed transcriptions. Once fully migrated to Omeka S, the project’s existing metadata, which includes the names of thousands of individuals and geographic places referenced in correspondence, will be connected across the semantic web as linked open data. Jim Safely, PWD’s original web architect, will lead the migration process, and Kim Nguyen, RRCHNM’s Lead Web Designer, will redesign the PWD user experience. PWD’s Editor-in-Chief, Christopher Hamner will work with Brennan to develop four learning modules for use in upper-level high school and introductory undergraduate courses. Enhanced documentation and outreach combined with a new system will make the Papers of the War Department more intuitive and inviting as it expands the project’s user base of scholars, students and teachers, history enthusiasts, and genealogists, and researchers of all levels. We are extremely grateful to ACLS for this opportunity to extend and sustain access to these important documents from the early American republic.

New IMLS Grant Helps RRCHNM to Train Librarians in Doing Digital Local History

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 09:49:51 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) a three-year grant to develop and run professional development opportunities that train public librarians in facilitating local digital history programs across the country. Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon will lead the Creating Local Linkages project that will introduce approximately 300 public librarians to a range of historical research methods and digital history skills through online courses and in-person workshops. Stephen Robertson and Megan Brett will contribute to course and workshop development, and Kim Nguyen and Jim Safely will design and develop the online course environment in WordPress. In support of those training opportunities, the project will develop and launch a curricula of open educational resources that can be used, reused, and remixed by any other organization or individual. Through this online program, RRCHNM will invite librarians to dive into their primary and secondary collections with the eyes of an historian and to expand their digital skills, at their own pace. By offering different professional development opportunities, Creating Local Linkages will support librarians interested in developing public programming that engages their patrons in creating digital local histories that will benefit their communities at large.

“Arguing with Digital History” Workshop to Address a Central Problem in Digital History

Tue, 02 May 2017 10:00:16 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that it will hold a workshop this fall titled “Arguing with Digital History: A Workshop on Using Digital History to Make Arguments for Academic Audiences.” Generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the workshop will bring twenty-four historians to George Mason University on September 15–16, 2017. Along with the workshop organizers, Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen, these historians will address a pressing problem in digital history. More than twenty years after the earliest work in digital history, there are still only a handful of projects that make explicit arguments in conversation with the scholarly literature for an academic audience. This shortcoming means that while digital history is a vibrant field, it has made only slight contributions to the broader historical discipline. This workshop aims to encourage argument-driven digital history that contributes to disciplinary conversations. The participants will discuss conceptual and structural issues involved in argumentation for academic audiences. The workshop participants have been selected for their expertise in a range of digital history methodologies—including 3D analysis, network analysis, digital collections, and mapping and spatial analysis—as well as the chronological range their historical fields. The workshop aims to identify the reasons that digital historians have been slow to make arguments, and to draw up a set of guidelines to encourage digital historical argumentation. The participants will write a group-authored white paper on general principles for integrating digital tools and methods with the arguments and historical interpretations at the core of academic history. The white paper will also give scholars examples of how to apply those principles using specific digital history methods in specific historical periods. A session discussing the white paper will be part of the program of the American Historical Association annual meeting in Washington D.C. in January 2018. The “Arguing with Digital History” workshop is parallel to another of the Center’s initiatives to encourage digital history argumentation. The Center also recently announced a new annual conference and peer-reviewed publication, Current Research in Digital History, which will provide a venue for presenting and publishing discipline-specific argumentation in digital history. RRCHNM thanks the workshop participants for their willingness to spend time on this important issue to the field. Workshop participants

Mapping Early American Elections Launches!

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 10:00:12 +0000

Election Day in Philadelphia 1815, by John Lewis Krimmel

RRCHNM is pleased to announce the launch of the Mapping Early American Elections project website: http://earlyamericanelections.org/. During this three-year project, funded by the Division of Preservation and Access at the National Endowment for the Humanities, we build on the New Nation Votes (NNV) collection of electoral returns, also funded by the NEH. Mapping Early American Elections is turning those election returns into a dataset which has a spatial component. This extensive dataset will offer researchers new opportunities to visualize and map the changing character of early American democracy as revealed through the country’s earliest elections, 1787 to 1825. By the end of the grant, we will create and publish multiple maps and visualizations representing Congressional and state legislative elections for 24 states. The website will include a map browser inviting users to explore early American political history in exciting new ways. Issues such as changes in voter participation, turnover in Congress and the state legislatures, the growth of party competition, and regional changes in voting patterns will appear with new clarity. We will blog about our process and progress throughout different stages of the project. Follow the latest developments on the project’s blog. Congratulations to the entire project team!

06/28/2017: RRCHNM @ International Society for Technology in Education conference

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 15:29:31 +0000

RRCHNM Graduate Research Assistant, Sara Collini, will present a poster session entitled “Eagle Eye Citizen: Interactive Engagement with Civics and History” at the ISTE 2017 annual conference in San Antonio, TX. Come learn how solving and creating online challenges using Library of Congress primary sources can help students develop historical thinking skills and civic understanding.

03/31/2017: RRCHNM @ National Council for History Education Conference

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 15:26:04 +0000

RRCHNM Graduate Research Assistant, Sara Collini, and Harper Park Middle School Civics teacher (and RRCHNM alum!), Jessica Kilday, will be at the National Council for History Education annual conference in Atlanta from March 30 to April 1 to promote Eagle Eye Citizen, an interactive website that helps students learn about Congress and civic participation through explorations of Library of Congress primary sources.

Stop by booth #25 or plan to attend their conference presentation on Friday, March 31 at 2pm.

04/24/2017: Chad Gaffield (Ottawa) @ RRCHNM

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 13:28:23 +0000

On Monday, April 24, at 12 noon, Chad Gaffield (Distinguished University Professor, Professor of History, and University Research Chair in Digital Scholarship, University of Ottawa), will be presenting a talk entitled “Digital History, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship: A Canadian perspective on possible futures.”

04/17/2017: Ed Summers (MITH) @ RRCHNM

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 13:12:41 +0000

On Monday, April 17, at 12 noon, Ed Summers (Lead Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) will give a talk entitled “Under Surveillance: Power and Empowerment in the Social Media Archive.” Ed Summers is the technical lead of Documenting the Now. This project, undertaken in collaboration with Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, Riverside, “will result in an open-source application for collecting tweets, their associated Web content (text, images, video and audio) and metadata, as well as creating data views and export mechanisms both for use with data visualization platforms and for preservation. It will utilize Ferguson-related tweets and Web content as the subject of application development, delivering a Ferguson social media data set for research and preservation, and build a community of users and advocates around the DocNow application.” This Brown Bag is being organized by the Rosenzweig Center’s 2016-17 Digital History Fellows: Laura Crossley, Jessica Dauterive, and Andrea Odiorne.

RRCHNM Statement on the Executive Order Restricting Access to the US

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 11:09:45 +0000

The Executive Order of January 27, 2017, restricting people’s access to the United States based on their national origins and beliefs, is at odds with the commitment to diversity at the core of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media mission. We stand in opposition to actions that discriminate and divide, and to administration efforts that restrict access to government data, which impede the teaching and collaboration that democratize history and advance research. We have endorsed the American Historical Association statement condemning the executive order. We offer our support to responses to these policies, such as the Trump Protest Archive and Data Refuge. The Rosenzweig Center will continue to seek ways to respond to the ongoing threats to inclusivity and democracy. The mission of the Rosenzweig Center is to use digital media and computer technology to democratize history: to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Our projects encompass a range of American experiences of war, migration, and diplomacy, as well as the perspectives of cultures from around the world on topics including economic change, leadership, reform, revolution, and repression. Our work creating and presenting the past involves collaborations with scholars and communities of diverse backgrounds, countries of origin, and beliefs.

New NEH Planning Grant Explores Transnational Roots of American Popular Music

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 11:17:33 +0000

RRCHNM is pleased to announce we received a National Endowment for the Humanities, Digital Projects for the Public, Discovery grant to plan Hearing the Americas, a digital public humanities project that will increase users’ understanding of the transnational roots of American popular music.Working closely with Mason historians Matthew Karush and Michael O’Malley, Sheila Brennan, Megan Brett, and Kim Nguyen of RRCHNM, will use digitized music collections available in the Library of Congress’s (LC) National Jukebox and the University of California at Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Cylinder Audio Archive to expose the diversity of American popular music before 1925. These songs will provide the building blocks for the team to design a digital public project that will ask users how well they know their music history and invite them to discover a rich contextual network of related historical collections. The grant funds will allow the team to research the audio and archival collections; conduct audience research; test with different user groups; and produce a design document that will lay out how the project will proceed in future phases. Hearing the Americas deals with commercial music from the period immediately before the advent of many of the most iconic American genres. By incorporating the most recent humanities scholarship, this project will expose the origins of jazz, blues, and country as deeply transnational. Even audiences who are already familiar with popular music history will gain a new appreciation for the multicultural roots of American music, and of America’s broader cultural history. RRCHNM is grateful to the NEH for its support of humanities work here and around the country.

03/30/2017: RRCHNM @ University of Louisville

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 11:43:20 +0000

Sharon Leon will be presenting a talk entitled “Open, Engaged, and Humane: The Past and Present of Digital Public History,“on March 30**,**and leading a hackathon on March 31, during Digital Humanities week at the University of Louisville.

03/23/2017: RRCHNM @ ACRL conference

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 11:34:14 +0000

Eric Olson is presenting “PressForward: Research, Collaboration and Publication in Digital Spaces” in the poster session at the Association of College and Research Libraries conference on March 23.

02/28/2017: RRCHNM @ Washington State University

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 10:54:16 +0000

Sharon Leon is leading a workshop on Omeka S on February 28, from 10am-12pm, and delivering a talk entitled “Complicating a “Great Man” Narrative of Digital History,” on February 28, 3.30-5.00pm, at the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University.

Kress and Getty Fund Workshops for Art Curators through the Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 10:49:01 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is thrilled to announce a new program with the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) Foundation to begin The Networked Curator initiative. With funding from the Samuel H. Kress and Getty Foundations, The Networked Curator will connect curators with the digital work currently done in art organization and the broader field of art history by developing two three-day intensive workshops. This initiative is part of a long tradition at RRCHNM to design hands-on training experiences for professionals who are experts in their fields, and who are digital novices. The AAMC Foundation supports the role of the curator within the art community by advancing professional development opportunities through multiple programming formats, advocating for the highest standards of ethics and professional behavior, fostering collaborative efforts, and furthering diversity and inclusion within the field. The Networked Curator is not meant to teach curators how to use their organization’s collections management system, rather, it is meant to boost confidence of art curators and to give them the tools to communicate and collaborate within their own communities so that they may become more integrally involved in planning and implementing digital projects. During these workshops, participants will expand their digital literacy to better understand what is possible on the web and in digital environments. Drawing on their experiences leading the DoingDH series, RRCHNM’s Sheila A. Brennan and Sharon M. Leon will develop and teach sessions designed to empower attendees to actively participate in digital initiatives in their organizations. The program seeks to train a total of 25-30 curators, working at different stages of their careers, representing a diverse group of organizations and locations, including those without a direct or full-time art organization affiliation. The first workshop will be held at Mason in the summer of 2017 and the second will be at the Getty Research Center in the winter of 2018. More information about applications will be available in spring 2017. RRCHNM is pleased to be working again with the Getty and Kress Foundations, as part of their ongoing efforts to offer free digital training in the field. Read the full press release on the AAMC website.

RRCHNM at AHA Annual Meeting

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 07:30:00 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will be well represented at this year’s American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Denver this week. If you are planning to attend, here is where you can find us:

Friday, January 6 (10:30 am - noon) — RRCHNM Director Stephen Robertson is chairing and presenting in the Collaborative Digital History roundtable.
Friday, January 6, 2017 (11:30 am - 2:30 pm) — Stop by the RRCHNM table at the Affiliated Societies Display in the Grand Concourse (Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room Level).

05/05/2017: RRCHNM @ UC Berkeley

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 12:39:50 +0000

Kelly Schrum is delivering the keynote address for the Teaching History in the 21st Century conference at UC Berkeley. The conference is hosted by UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, UC Berkeley Department of History, UC Berkeley History Pedagogy Group, and the D-Lab at UC Berkeley in partnership with the American Historical Association, The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History, Bay Area Council for the Social Studies, California History-Social Science Project, and Facing History and Ourselves.

03/16/2017: RRCHNM @ Wellesley College

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 18:15:21 +0000

Kelly Schrum will be presenting to Wellesley College faculty on “Digital Storytelling in Higher Education.”

04/05/2017: Project Workshop @ RRCHNM

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:54:27 +0000

We are working with the Library of Congress to develop Eagle Eye Citizen, a mobile-friendly interactive that lets students and teachers solve and create civics and history challenges using primary sources. The site uses a game-based design to promote close reading, sourcing, contextualization, and critical thinking for a middle and high school audience. The challenges in Eagle Eye Citizen integrate content on Congress and American history and explore the legislative branch, civil rights, elections, the Constitution, and citizenship. During the workshop, we will be solving and creating Time After Time challenges, which encourage sequencing and periodization. We would appreciate any feedback on design, functionality, and content. Your participation is greatly appreciated! 12.00-1.00pm

03/08/2016: Project Workshop @ RRCHNM

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:52:36 +0000

This project workshop will focus on the new Zotero API. It will place from 12.00-1.o0PM, in the lounge at RRCHNM

02/08/2017: Project Workshop @ RRCHNM

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:50:59 +0000

For this month’s Project Workshop, we are going to take time to talk about what role RRCHNM can play in responding to the current political climate and state of affairs. In the past, RRCHNM has pulled together unfunded projects, or assisted others in doing so, as a reaction to current events. The Omeka team helped VA Tech put together a digital memory bank in 2007. Occupy Archive was an effort driven totally on Center volunteers in 2011. Eric Gonzaba started the TrumpProtestArchive.com on his own in late January. Bring some ideas and a pen. We will be brainstorming on Post Its. Our goal is to discuss and select at least one form of action, and then devise an implementation plan.

04/21/2017: RRCHNM @ What is Digital Humanities? Workshop

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:36:01 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be leading a graduate student seminar entitled “Digital Mapping in Historical Research and Teaching,” and delivering a keynote address entitled “What is Digital Humanities? Trends, Possibilities and Limits,” at the What is Digital Humanities? workshop being held to launch GWonline: The Bibliography, Filmography, and Webography on Gender, War and the Western World since 1600, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2.00-7.00PM.

04/19-04/22/2017: RRCHNM @ the Annual Meeting of the NCPH

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:25:59 +0000

Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan will be at the Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History, in Indianapolis.

04/06/2017: RRCHNM @ OAH Annual Meeting

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:19:07 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be presenting “Tropy: A Digital Image Management Tool for Humanities Researchers,” in the Digital Demonstrations session at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, 5.00-6.00PM.

02/19/2017: RRCHNM @ AAAS Annual Meeting

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:07:18 +0000

Eric Olson is leading a workshop entitled “Tools for Building and Enhancing Scholarly Communities on the Web” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, 10.30-11.30AM

02/17/2017: RRCHNM @ College Art Association Conference

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:01:51 +0000

Sheila Brennan will be chairing and presenting a paper entitled “Joining Forces: The Omeka for Art Historians Working Group*"*in the panel “Using Omeka to Design Digital Art History Projects,” at the College Art Association conference, from 3.30-5.00 PM.

02/03/2017: RRCHNM @ 9th Annual Bridging the Spectrum Symposium

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 13:39:54 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be delivering the keynote at the 9th Annual Bridging the Spectrum Symposium on Scholarship and Practice in Library and Information Science at the Catholic University of America, from 10.00 to 11.00 am

RRCHNM uses State Department grant to create diplomatic simulations for the classroom

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 11:50:46 +0000

Visiting Mongolian students worked to resolve an international HIV/AIDS crisis in the imaginary countries of Daymar and Lateen during a Diplomacy in Action simulation at Mason’s Arlington Campus. Photo courtesy of Chris Preperato.

Reposted article by Jamie Rogers from News at Mason: High school students and college undergraduates will soon be able to build diplomacy skills thanks to a series of diplomatic simulations being developed at George Mason University. A $198,000 grant from the State Department’s U.S. Diplomacy Center is funding the project, “Diplomacy in Action: Diplomatic Simulations in the Classroom,” said grant recipient Kelly Schrum, director of education projects for George Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Mason researchers are creating and revising simulations on multiple topics, including nuclear crises, fresh water, refugees and HIV/AIDS, said Gwen White, the Diplomacy in Action project manager. Most of the simulations will feature fictional countries so students can focus on the process. In November, visiting Mongolian students worked to resolve an international HIV/AIDS crisis in the imaginary countries of Daymar and Lateen during a simulation at the Arlington Campus. The students, who were visiting the United States through a State Department program at the University of Indiana, played the role of stakeholders in a dispute over day laborers. They debated whether or not to allow the workers entry into a country that had recently seen a surge in AIDS cases. The students were able to reach a temporary agreement through both formal and informal negotiations, White said. Schrum and White are working with teachers and students from 10 countries to test the simulations. The tests are recorded on video and analyzed by Mason researchers and instructors. Schrum said students who take part in the simulations “get to experience how diplomacy works and what it means to understand someone else’s point of view.” Students at the high school level are ready for exposure to the complexities of diplomacy and the idea that there is not necessarily one solution to any international crisis, said White. “It has just been really amazing what I’ve seen [and] how quickly the students get into character. It’s a fascinating thing to watch,” White said. During the simulations, students have to negotiate and build alliances with others, she added. Mason freshman Stephanie Galarza is one of the research assistants on the project. Working with diplomacy is a far cry from her biology major, but the research she’s doing now could prepare her to do medical research later, because she’s learning to collect background information on a specific subject, Galarza said. She’s learning to understand the complexity of global issues and the importance of communicating with multiple groups of stakeholders. “I get to work with projects that are going to help people,” she said. “It’s not like my old job at the movie theater—it’s actually helping me get where I want to go.” The diplomatic simulations will be available for free on the U.S. Diplomacy Center website in 2017. The simulations complement the mission of the U.S. Diplomacy Center, scheduled to open in Washington, D.C., in 2018, as an education center and interactive museum for the public. Save Save Save Save Save Save

Eisenhower Memorial

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:32:01 +0000

A single act or character trait may be instrumental in deciding an individual’s future path. In Dwight D. Eisenhower’s case, it was because of his perseverance in requesting a recommendation from his U.S. Senator – twice - that he received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. This is just one of the interesting details of Eisenhower’s life discovered as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) developed lesson plans and timeline content for the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s website . The website provides a preview of the forthcoming physical memorial near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., as well as highlights of Eisenhower’s achievements as Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and as the 34th president of the United States. As part of the site’s educational mission, significant events in Eisenhower’s life are explored through seven Pivotal Moments: West Point, D-Day, NATO, Winning the Presidency, Waging Peace, Little Rock, and Space Race via text, photographs and videos. The videos contain interviews with President William J. Clinton, Secretary of State Colin Powell, astronauts John Glenn and Eileen Collins, and Eisenhower’s grandson David Eisenhower among others. RRCHNM created the content for an interactive timeline that connects viewers with key events in both Eisenhower’s life and in world history during his lifetime. His life spanned an era of great change from the closing of the American frontier in 1890, the year of his birth, to the first landing on the moon in 1969, the year Eisenhower died. The timeline contextualizes Eisenhower’s achievements within other national and world events. RRCHNM worked with secondary school teachers and military historian Christopher Hamner to develop middle and high school curriculum units based on these seven pivotal moments. Teachers can download the freely available units and related materials for classroom use. In “D-Day: Advising Eisenhower,” for example, students explore the complexity of preparing for a massive invasion by acting as advisors to General Eisenhower. They provide him with vital information about geography, weather, German air capabilities, and French Resistance support in the region. In “The 1952 Election: A New Kind of Campaign,” students learn how the introduction of television changed the way presidential campaigns were run and develop a media strategy for Eisenhower on one campaign issue. A wide variety of primary and secondary sources are included in the lesson plans, such as D-Day maps, images from the early years of space exploration, and de-classified government documents. There is also a letter from an advisor recommending that Eisenhower consider George Washington’s Farewell Speech as inspiration for his own final speech to the nation as president. Each plan contains suggestions for differentiation and assessment. These units will be useful for teaching World War II, 20th-century U.S. and world history.

10/26/2016: RRCHNM @ Library of Congress online conference

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 15:01:26 +0000

Kelly Schrum, Nate Sleeter, Sara Collini and Jessica Kilday will be presenting on Eagle Eye Citizen.

10/20/2016: RRCHNM @ Creating Spatial Historical Knowledge

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 11:00:38 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be delivering a keynote address entitled “Toward a Spatial Narrative of the 1935 Harlem Riot: Mapping and Storytelling after the Geospatial Turn” from 6.30pm to 8.30pm at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, as part of the conference Creating Spatial Historical Knowledge: New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Mapping History Digitally, October 20-22..

12/02/2016: RRCHNM @ NCSS Conference

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:56:57 +0000

Kelly Schrum and Jennifer Rosenfeld will be presenting a poster at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference, in Washington, DC.

10/17/2016: RRCHNM @ History Relevance Campaign meeting

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:56:09 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be at the meeting of the History Relevance Campaign, from 9am to 3pm, at National Archives in Washington, DC.

10/27/2016: RRCHNM @ ASLH Digital Legal History Workshop

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:55:16 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be coordinating an all-day pre-conference Digital Legal History Workshop for the American Society for Legal History, and presenting on Digital Harlem, in Toronto.

11/09/2016: Project Workshop @ RRCHNM

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:55:06 +0000

A project workshop on the alpha version of Tropy will be held in the Center lounge from 12.00pm to 1.30pm.

12/01/2016: RRCHNM @ NSSSA Conference

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:52:39 +0000

Kelly Schrum will be presenting at the National Social Studies Supervisors Association Conference, in Washington, DC.

10/26/2016: RRCHNM @ McMaster University

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:52:37 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be leading a workshop on Omeka for history research and teaching, and presenting a talk entitled “Mapping the 1935 Harlem Riot: Visualization and Narrative after the Geospatial Turn,” in the Department of History at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario.

11/05/2016 RRCHNM @ MARAC

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:52:36 +0000

Sheila Brennan will be presenting in the session “Crowd Archiving: Working with the Public to Capture Event-Based Social Media Materials” from 9.45am to 11.15am, at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, in Annapolis.

10/18/2016: Project Workshop @ RRCHNM

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:49:27 +0000

A project workshop on Eagle Eye Citizen will be held in the Center lounge from 12.00pm to 1.30pm.

01/07/2017: RRCHNM @ AHA Annual Meeting

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:49:19 +0000

Stephen Robertson will be presenting a poster entitled “Tropy: Software to Organize the Digital Photographs You Take in Your Research” at the poster session from 3.30pm to 5.30pm, at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Denver.

10/19-10/21/2016: RRCHNM @ Art History in a Digital Dimension

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:47:03 +0000

Sheila Brennan will be attending Art History in a Digital Dimension at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Annual Report 2015-2016

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 10:45:37 +0000

To keep friends and supporters of RRCHNM better informed about our ongoing work, this year we inaugurated a short annual report. Produced in collaboration with the Development Office of College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the report was mailed out in late October. The annual report describes project launches and grants for new projects in the academic year 2015-2016. In it you can find brief descriptions of five of those new projects, and of a busy year of teaching, training, and professional development. The last year also saw a new website, new servers, and a new postdoctoral fellowship. A report on the Center’s endowment completes the document. A copy can be downloaded here.

Our New Digital History Fellows & Their Work on RRCHNM's History

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 10:00:12 +0000

Laura Crossley

Jessica Dauterive

This semester RRCHNM welcomes two new DH Fellows, Laura Crossley and Jessica Dauterive. This year the Fellows practicum at the Center began with a seminar with Stephen Robertson, the director. The goal was to explore the role of centres in digital humanities, put RRCHNM in the context of other centres, and explore the 22 years of work the Center has done in the context of the development of digital history and DH. As part of the seminar, the Fellows each created an exhibit telling the story of an RRCHNM project using material on the site created for our 20th anniversary. Laura’s exhibit explored the Object of History; you can find her reflections on the project on the Fellows blog. Jessica’s exhibit explored The Lost Museum; her reflections can be found here. In recent weeks the Fellows have been working in the Education division. Look out for their blog posts on their work there early in the New Year. The Department of History & Art History at George Mason University is offering two Digital History Fellowships to support students beginning a Ph.D. in Fall 2017. As this is the final year of the funding from the Provost that supports the award, this cohort of Fellows will each receive only one year of funding at $20,000, in addition to three years of funding from the History Department, and undertake a one year practicum course for credit at RRCHNM. Students interested in applying to the GMU History PhD program and being a Digital History Fellow, should consult the information on the department website or contact the department’s graduate director, Professor Cindy Kierner. Applications close January 15, 2017

Omeka S 1.0 Beta Release

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 11:00:59 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is pleased to announce the public beta release of Omeka S (1.0), the next-generation, open source web-publishing platform that is fully integrated into the scholarly communications ecosystem and designed to serve the needs of medium to large institutional users who wish to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a single installation. Though Omeka S is a completely new software package, it shares the same goals and principles of Omeka Classic that users have come to love: a commitment to cost-effective deployment and design, an intuitive user interface, open access to data and resources, and interoperability through standardized data. Created with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Omeka S is engineered to ease the burdens of administrators who want to make it possible for their end-user communities to easily build their own sites that showcase digital cultural heritage materials.

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial Website

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 08:01:19 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to introduce The Amboyna Conspiracy Trialwebsite*,* an interactive teaching resource focused on one of the most famous legal cases of the early modern period. The Amboyna trial took place on a remote island in Southeast Asia where Dutch authorities accused a group of English merchants and Japanese mercenaries of plotting to seize control of a Dutch East India Company fort. The trial, which culminated in a mass execution in the public square in front of Amboyna castle, poisoned relations between two emerging European superpowers, the Dutch Republic and England, and changed the course of the spice race in Asia. The site explores the events on Amboyna, the race for spices, and the politics of torture and waterboarding.

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial is the product of a long-term collaboration between Dr. Adam Clulow (Monash University, Australia) and RRCHNM. It was funded by the Research Accelerator Program at Monash University. There are several ways to navigate The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial. Exhibits offer a curated path through the case, key participants, controversy over torture, and the long aftermath of the trial. A timeline allows visitors to explore how the trial played out day by day. The Archive provides access to relevant primary sources, including official documents, legal sources, and images. Teaching presents strategies for using Amboyna in the classroom, modeling ways to build on student fascination with trials and forensic investigation to explore the past. The heart of the site is Your Verdict, an interactive trial engine that places students in the role of juror. For close to four hundred years, the debate over what actually happened on Amboyna in 1623 has continued. English scholars have insisted that there was no plot and that the trial constituted nothing more than the judicial murder of innocents, while Dutch historians argue that a conspiracy existed and hence that the legal proceedings were justified. Your Verdict draws website visitors into the heart of the case, offering evidence and the responsibility of weighing that evidence to determine guilt or innocence. Watch students who pilot tested the site discuss their deliberations. The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial is part of RRCHNM’s World History Matters portal offering rich resources for teaching and learning about world history.

Meet the Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow for Digital History

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 10:46:36 +0000

In early September, the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media welcomed Gabor M. Toth, Assistant Professor at the University of Passau, as the first Gerda Henkel postdoctoral fellow in digital history. This fellowship is intended to support junior scholars working in the field of digital history. Prior to arriving in the US, Toth was a visiting fellow of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. He completed his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2014 specializing in the history of the Italian Renaissance. During this academic year, Toth will be using computational linguistics and text mining techniques to analyze oral history transcriptions of Holocaust survivors. He wants to explore the memory of the Holocaust by investigating heterogeneity and homogeneity in the interview data, while attempting to answer questions about the ways memory changes over time, and how gender and age shapes recollections in oral histories. Importantly, he will look for recurrent linguistic patterns in the ways people remember and speak about trauma and persecution. For those interested in applying for a Henkel Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2016-17, applications are now open: http://www.ghi-dc.org/fellowships-programs/fellowships-grants/gerda-henkel-postdoctoral-fellowship-for-digital-history.html.

Teachers Selected for Understanding Sacrifice: WWII in the Pacific

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 16:05:24 +0000

RRCHNM, in partnership with National History Day, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and the National Cemetery Administration, is pleased to announce the selection of 18 teachers to study World War II in the Pacific. This year’s cohort represents social studies, English, JROTC, theater, visual arts, special education and STEM teachers who come from 12 states. This highly competitive program brings together middle and high school teachers for an 18-month professional development program that includes monthly webinars with George Mason University Associate Professor and RRCHNM affiliated faculty member, Christopher Hamner. The program culminates with a field study in summer 2017 to San Francisco, Honolulu, and Manila to see first-hand the places that influenced the outcome of the war. As a part of the program, each teacher selects an individual to research who is buried or memorialized in an ABMC or NCA cemetery the teachers will visit. Some teachers involve their class in this research. In addition, each teacher creates a lesson plan that incorporates ABMC and NCA resources to teach about an aspect of the war. These materials are then made available on the award-winning Understanding Sacrifice website, developed by RRCHNM. The cohort will meet for the first time in November in Washington, DC. During the two-day meeting, teachers are introduced to ABMC and NCA resources, learn techniques for researching their service member, tour the National WWII Memorial, and explore the Smithsonian’s Price of Freedom exhibit. RRCHNM staff will lead workshops on writing for the web, photography, and videography. The goal of the workshops is to give teachers the tools they need to help capture their research and share it effectively online. This is the third year of the Understanding Sacrifice program. The first two years focused on World War II in Europe. Save Save Save

Diplomacy in Action

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 14:17:38 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is delighted to announce a new project with the State Department’s U.S. Diplomacy Center to create diplomatic simulations for a global audience of students and educators. The project, entitled “Diplomacy in Action: Diplomatic Simulations in the Classroom,” includes simulation writing, curriculum design, and video production. RRCHNM has assembled a team of national and international educators to advise on the project, write content, and pilot test the simulations in classrooms around the world. Diplomatic simulations immerse secondary and university students in the tools of diplomacy through problem solving, communication, alliance building, and compromise. Students role play diplomatic representatives from multiple stakeholders, negotiating international disputes and working together to find solutions. The U.S. Diplomacy Center, scheduled to open to the public in 2018 in the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, D.C., will be an education center and interactive museum dedicated to telling the story, teaching the lessons, and preserving the legacy of American diplomacy.

01/06/2017: RRCHNM @ AHA Annual Meeting

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 12:23:31 +0000

At the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Denver: Stephen Robertson will be part of the panel on “Collaborative Digital History,” from 10.30am to 12.00pm. Kelly Schrum will be chairing the session ““This Class Was Crazy”: Digital Liberal Arts and the Power of a Consortium” from 3.30pm to 5.00pm.

Through the Doors of Stratford

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 06:10:16 +0000

Arlington Public Schools and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University are proud to announce a collaborative project called Through the Doors of Stratford. This series of online modules will allow Arlington government and history students to explore their community’s role in the complex history of school desegregation.

On February 2, 1959, four African American students entered Stratford Junior High School in Arlington, Virginia. On this exceptional day, Gloria Thompson, Michael Jones, Lance Newman, andRonald Deskins became the first African American students to attend Stratford and the first to attend an all-white public school in the Commonwealth of Virginia. These 7th-grade students made history despite the determined opposition of the state government of Virginia which threatened to close all schools that attempted to desegregate — a policy known as Massive Resistance.

Collections Continue to Grow in September 11th Digital Archive

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 11:04:17 +0000

The fifteenth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001 is upon us. We see that the legacy of those events continues to live on in current political debates, foreign and domestic policy-making, as well as for the families who lost loved ones on that day and in the conflicts that followed. We at RRCHNM continue to expand the resources in the September 11 Digital Archive (911DA) as individuals and institutions want to share their collections with us. For example, retired Federal Aviation Administration employee Brian Sullivan donated a collection that offers insight into passenger safety prior to and on September 11, 2001 in the form of reports, guides, testimonies of Federal Aviation Administration employees and airport workers, meeting minutes, memos, transcripts, and affidavits. Graduate student Alyssa Fahringer scanned and described the items in the Boston Federal Aviation Administration Filings collection. The Center also recently received digital scans of visitor comment cards contributed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in 2011. Alyssa is adding those items this fall. As RRCHNM continues to maintain and add collections, we are also working to improve computational access to these 150,000 digital items. With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Omeka team is developing plugins that will help users to mine the texts available in the site, and others like it build in Omeka. Individual items contributed to 911DA have rich personal stories to tell that call for a close reading of the text or examination of contributed images. In some cases, a more powerful story emerges by examining the aggregate, with the promise of surfacing larger insights through “distant reading,” an analytical procedure by which researchers evaluate large bodies of text in the aggregate as a way to discern otherwise opaque patterns and meanings. To enable both close and distant reading, simple annotation and word analysis plugins are in development. The Omeka team will use the vast collections of 911DA as a case study to demonstrate the benefits of using the new plugins and to publish new insights found in this corpus of materials. Anniversaries offer time for us to reflect and think back on events from the past, and we again ask for you, your family members, your students to share how your life has changed since September 11, 2001. If you recently visited the September 11th Memorials in New York, the Pentagon, or Shanksville we want to hear about your experiences. By collecting reflections at this commemorative moment, we hope to further the life of the September 11th Digital Archive as one that not only includes the most immediate reactions to the attacks, but also shows change over time as individuals reflect at different points in the post-9/11 world.

A New Website for RRCHNM

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 11:15:04 +0000

Today we’re officially launching a redesigned website for RRCHNM. We’re also taking the opportunity to move it to an updated url: igorj2.sg-host.com. The site’s last major redesign was in 2008. As Dan Cohen noted at that time, a website redesign is “is a painful and long process, full of compromises.” This time around we did not attempt a full reimagining of the site, but rather the key focus was on presenting a clearer picture of the Center’s organization, staff, and how to work with us. Visitors can now employ faceted search to explore our projects and get to know our staff, and use a form to contact us about collaborations and contract work. There is also a social media Hub that captures activity from across the Center’s projects. The new site was designed by Kim Nguyen, building on initial work by Chris Raymond. If you’re interested in how the Center’s site design has evolved, there is an exhibit of the Center’s previous websites at RRCHNM20

Mapping Early American Elections Begins with NEH Funding

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 13:59:25 +0000

The National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Preservation and Access, announced in March 2016, that it had awarded a three-year grant of $200,000 to support a new project to be housed at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Mapping Early American Elections will offer enhanced access to the early American election returns that are currently contained in the New Nation Votes database. The project will create new interactive maps of selected local, state, and national elections from 1788 to 1825 as well as produce materials that will allow individual researchers to generate their own maps. The New Nation Votes dataset is the only comprehensive record of elections in existence for the early American republic. Scattered in newspapers, state archives, and local repositories around the country, the elections returns have been painstakingly gathered over the past forty-five years by Philip J. Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society. A succession of NEH grants over the past decade has allowed the AAS, in conjunction with Tufts University, to create an online database containing the results for over 23,600 local, state, and national elections. In these elections, over 44,000 candidates participated in contests for offices ranging from town council, to county coroner, to state assembly, to US Congress, to presidential elector. The next phase of the project entails moving the raw data into a format that will make the election returns more accessible to broader audiences. The project will be led by Sheila Brennan and Lincoln Mullen, together with Professor Rosemarie Zagarri as the project’s lead historian. The project will produce a series of interactive maps for selected congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative elections. Explanatory essays will describe the historical context in which the maps should be understood. The team will also prepare the entire election dataset for translation into a mapping program and provide online tutorials that teach users—including journalists, teachers, and researchers–how to map the data for particular elections for themselves. Early American elections offer a window into the formative era of American politics. The era from the time of the federal Constitutional Convention to the election of John Quincy Adams witnessed the emergence of the perennial questions of American political life: Who could vote, and at what rates would they turn out at the polls? Which parties and candidates would they support? How did various states and different regions vote in the same election? Maps provide the most vivid, visually appealing, and immediate answers to such questions. The Mapping Early American Elections project will enable a variety of users to ask questions about past elections. By allowing users to trace the evolution of American democracy, the project hopes to encourage Americans to become more actively engaged in current-day elections in their hometowns, counties, and the nation.

Understanding Sacrifice Wins National Award

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 14:47:44 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), National History Day (NHD), and the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) are pleased to announce that the web project, Understanding Sacrifice, won first place in the Digital Media category for the National Association for Interpretation (NAI) 2016 Interpretative Media Awards. Understanding Sacrifice is an 18-month professional development program for middle- and high-school teachers. Working with the team from NHD and CHNM, 18 teachers create free, interdisciplinary lessons to share with other educators each year. The goal is to bring ABMC resources into classrooms to help students better understand the service, experience, and sacrifice of American service members during World War II. To help meet this goal, the Understanding Sacrifice website provides access to lesson plans, primary source materials, videos, and stories of fallen service members who are buried or memorialized at ABMC cemeteries. The intended audience is teachers, students, and others interested in military history. Professionals in the field of interpretation and media development judged the entries according to the following criteria:

Doing Digital History 2016 is a Wrap

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 10:56:30 +0000

In July, RRCHNM welcomed 24 American historians to Mason’s Arlington campus for two intensive weeks of the National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored summer institute, Doing Digital History 2016. Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon led the group through a course designed to introduce historians, experts in their own subject areas, to digital history scholarship, methods, and tools relevant to their own research and teaching in American history.

Doing DH 2016 Participants and Team

Participants began as self-identified digital novices unsure of their abilities to keep up with the workload and left with their own web domains, experience working in the statistical programming language R, and many ideas for new teaching assignments, research projects, and digital publications. Most important, each participant became more confident engaging with and reviewing digital scholarship, advising students wishing to do digital projects, and in learning to tinker with and ask questions of digital methodologies. Throughout the two weeks, readings and discussions were coupled with demonstrations and hands-on work. Each participant established their own web domain, installed open source software (WordPress, Omeka, R, Audacity); implemented best practices for managing their research; made visualizations; built simple maps; learned how to plan a digital project; edited sound files, planned digitally-inflected lessons for their classes; and considered the implications of the changing field of scholarly communications. Doing DH benefited from an enthusiastic corps of RRCHNM graduate students, Alyssa Fahringer, Eric Gonzaba, Jannelle Legg, and Spencer Roberts, who developed tutorials and use cases for incorporating different digital tools into teaching and research. They also provided moral and technical support to the participants, and managed the Twitter backchannel conversations under #doingdh16. Doing DH also featured guest instructors from Mason’s History and Art History Department, Mason Library, and neighboring institutions. Lincoln Mullen shared his extensive expertise doing computational research over three days and Michael O’Malley led a day on sound studies. Jeri Wieringa of the Mason Publishing Group shared trends in scholarly communications and digital publishing initiatives. Denise Meringolo, a participant in Doing DH 2014, returned to discuss how her public history work at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, became digital. And, Jeff McClurken visited from University of Mary Washington to lead a day on digitally-inflected pedagogy. By the end of Doing DH 2016, participants were tired, but also invigorated with ideas and three action items to implement over the next six months.

In Memory of Lt. Col. Ronald J. Martin, USMC, Retired

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:27:46 +0000

On July 14, 2016, the Rosenzweig Center lost Ronald J. Martin, a longtime and valuable member of our team, to his struggle with cancer. Ron came to the Center in 2008 to serve join the team of scholars editing the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800, and was integral to our work with the National Park Service on the history of the War of 1812. He was an enthusiastic partner in our work to share early American history with the public, and we mourn his passing. Serving as PWD’s only full time staff person, Ron began as an assistant editor, but soon he moved into the role of Associate Editor. From that position, he worked with the assistant editors to complete the basic description (author, recipient, and date) of the full collection, more than 18,000 of the total 42,800 documents. Then, in 2010 he and the staff turned their attention to offering a more full description of a key subset of the collection. During the next three years, Ron shepherded the process of creating enhanced description, including people, places, and items mentioned and a general description of the document, for more than 27,000 items. Ron alone completed the description for more than 5,000 documents annually. In the end, the team exceed their description goals by 3,000 documents. As a result of this work, researchers, students, teachers, and members of the interested public have vastly improved access to the inner-workings of the early national federal government, to day-to-day correspondence on issues related to Native Americans, active military, veterans, and their families. Beginning in 2010, Ron started to share his unparalleled knowledge of the PWD collections with the public through a series of blog posts. In the end, these short pieces covered the range of historical issues and events contained with in the collections. Ron wrote biographical sketches of key individuals, including Andrew Pickens, William Blount, Tobias Lear, and George Izard. He offered explanations for different kinds of documents, outlined important events in early national military history, and provided insight into the development of the Navy. Once RRCHNM began work on community sourcing the transcription of the Papers in March 2011, Ron carefully selected a set of documents that would be interesting candidates for public work. These documents included letters from Judith Sargent Murray, the Jay Treaty, materials on the beginning of the Quasi War, and orders for supplies related to muskets being manufactured by Eli Whitney—each one fascinating in its own way, and all reflective of different elements of the early national experience. Upon the completion of the description for PWD, in 2013, Ron turned his attention to the War of 1812. Working with Christopher Hamner and Spencer Roberts, he created a significant amount of the historical content on the National Park Service’s website dedicated to the war’s bicentennial. The team for the 1812 work decided on content strategy that was more suited to the digital engagement habits of contemporary users, that stressed the cultural and social context of the war along with the more traditional materials on major military events, and that highlighted both contingency and diversity. Rather than presenting a series of longer essays that focus on key themes, the team developed 70 modules that users could explore by following their own interests and questions. “Voices” modules began with a quotation from a specific individual to offer users many human experiences and perspectives. “Moments” modules focused on a specific event to give users a sense of the key milestones of the conflict.”Perspectives” modules targeted the experiences of and impacts on the many diverse communities touched by the war. This approach allowed the team to present the history of the War of 1812 in new way while working within the constraints of the National Park Service’s technological infrastructure. It was while he was finishing up his work on the War of 1812 that Ron fell ill. We at the Center have missed his kindness and generosity over the past year and a half, and we are deeply saddened at his death. Ron was so much more than a good historian—a Marine, a husband, a father, a champion hockey and football player—but, we knew him best through his hard work and his dedication to early American history. Given that commitment, Ron’s family has requested that memorial donations be made to RRCHNM. We will use those contributions to sustain our digital collections, including the Papers of the War Department project.

A Liberian Journey Launches

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 09:03:01 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of A Liberian Journey: History, Memory, and the Making of a Nation <liberianhistory.org>, developed in partnership with the Liberian Center for National Documents and Records Agency (CNDRA), the Indiana University Liberian Collections, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with generous support from the National Science Foundation.

Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, attends launch ceremony at CNDRA.

The project officially launched in Monrovia at a ceremony on Monday, March 21 with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in attendance, together with members of her cabinet and the Liberian legislature. This new digital public history site is meant to inform, raise questions, and invite stories about a transformational moment in Liberia’s past by making historical sources available for the first time in one place related to a 1926 Harvard scientific expedition to Liberia. The website features an exhibit on Chief Suah Koko, a noted woman leader in Liberia’s history; digital collections containing nearly 600 photographs, more than two hours of motion picture footage, oral histories, and documents linked to an interactive map. This effort marks the beginning of a recollection of Liberia’s lost history and for CNDRA represents a very important step in reawakening the Liberia national consciousness. In 1926, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company secured a ninety-nine year lease for nearly one million acres of land from the Liberian government to establish one of the world’s largest rubber plantations. To help the company understand the conditions and challenges it faced, Firestone sponsored a team of Harvard University scientists and physicians to conduct a four-month-long biological and medical survey. Loring Whitman, a Harvard medical student, served as the expedition’s official photographer, and his work includes the earliest known surviving motion picture footage of Liberia. The moving images and still photographs offer a perspective shaped by the early-twentieth-century, “Western,” world-view of the American scientists. At the same time, the footage and photographs offer a valuable historical record of the peoples, cultural traditions, and landscapes of Liberia at a time of rapid economic, cultural, and environmental change.

RRCHNM’s Sheila Brennan and Ken Albers collaborated with the team for nearly three years to develop this digital public history and community-sourcing site. The site is designed minimally for mobile devices first, in the Omeka platform, to ensure that anyone can access the site especially in areas with limited internet connectivity. A Liberian Journey adds to the Center’s portfolio of global digital humanities projects. In the coming months, CNDRA will invite individuals to share meaningful stories and images about Liberia’s past. Additional online exhibits will combine community contributions with the Firestone expedition sources to give voice, meaning, and historical context to the lives, cultures, and histories of the Liberian people.

Apply now for the online Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 10:08:14 +0000

Digital tools and resources are transforming the ways in which we research, interpret, and communicate. Be part of this change by enrolling in the graduate online Digital Public Humanities Certificate created by the Department of History and Art History and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in partnership with Smithsonian Associates. Because it is both online and part-time, students can pursue the certificate while working or attending another graduate program. The certificate can also be combined with GMU’s own History M.A. program. This one-year, 15-credit certificate program includes three online courses:

Apply Now for Doing Digital History 2016

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 10:00:54 +0000

Are you a mid-career American historian interested in digital history training for novices? Apply now for one of 25 available spots for the Doing Digital History: 2016 summer institute to be held July 11- 22, 2016 at George Mason University. The institute is organized by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History in New Media and generously sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities. Doing Digital History: 2016 is designed to address the existing gap in digital history training for established scholars who need instruction and a professional learning community to explore digital methodologies and theories applicable to their historical research and teaching. During the summer of 2014, RRCHNM ran the first Doing Digital History institute also sponsored by the NEH. Institute Directors Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan will be joined by experts in the digital history and humanities fields who will guest lecture throughout the institute. We seek applications from established faculty, public historians, archivists, librarians, museum professionals, and independent scholars specializing in US history, who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions. Applications will be open until March 15, 2016: http://history2016.doingdh.org/apply/

Digital History Fellowships for Fall 2016

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 11:33:28 +0000

A reminder that the Department of History & Art History at George Mason University is offering two Digital History Fellowships to support students undertaking a Ph.D. Fellows enrolling in Fall 2016 will receive stipends of $20,000 for two years, during which time they will take a practicum course each semester here at RRCHNM, and then a further three years of support from the Department of History and Art History. The practicum courses provide an opportunity to be part of a digital history center and to contribute to a range of projects across all three of the Center’s divisions. Syllabi for the practicum courses can be found on the Fellows’ blog, which also includes posts by all four cohorts of fellows reflecting on their experiences at the Center. Students interested in applying to the GMU History PhD program and being a Digital history Fellow, should consult the information on the department website or contact the department’s graduate director, Professor Cindy Kierner. Applications close January 15, 2016

RRCHNM Wins Mason Distance Education Award

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 07:00:02 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media received a Distance Education Award for its work conceptualizing and creating a new online course, “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Steve Nodine, Director of Distance Education, presented the award at the Mason Outstanding Achievement Awards on November 3, 2015.

The RRCHNM team was recognized for working collaboratively to establish “a new model that can inspire all of Mason.” This innovative course includes synchronous online class sessions, synchronous individual meetings between student and instructor, and asynchronous modules. There are no textbooks, video lectures, or multiple-choice quizzes. Content consists of readings, short videos, interactive activities, and a culminating digital project. “Introduction to Digital Humanities” is the first course in a 15-credit online certificate program in Digital Public Humanities. The team is currently developing two additional certificate with instructors Sharon Leon and Mills Kelly. The certificate includes a 6-credit digital internship with the Smithsonian Institution, the first of its kind at Mason. Award recipients: Kelly Schrum (Project Director); Stephen Robertson (Course Professor); Jennifer Rosenfeld (Project Manager); James McCartney (Senior Developer); Chris Preperato (Interactive & Multimedia Developer); Joo-Ah Lee (Junior Developer); and Caroline Kelly (Undergraduate OSCAR Research Assistant). Congratulations all!

Building Histories of the National Mall

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 10:05:09 +0000

We are pleased to announce the publication of Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project (http://mallhistory.org/Guide), a comprehensive guide that details each phase of creating the award-winning website, Histories of the National Mall. The text showcases the voices of project team members, who authored specific sections that demonstrate the range and breadth of the collaboration and cooperation that produced mallhistory.org. This guide goes beyond a traditional case study by sharing the project’s rationale; the interpretative approach; the specifics of the design, development, and outreach–including our social media strategy–; and the research that drove these different stages of development. For example, our decision to build for the mobile web and not a single-use, platform-specific native app was based in research begun by Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan in 2009 with funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to review and experiment with mobile formats pertinent for art and cultural heritage collections. Additionally, readers will learn how the team’s user testing regiment greatly influenced the final site structure, design, and content of Histories of the National Mall. For someone eager to begin developing her own version of Histories using Omeka, the technical specifications and code are available now. For organizations in the early planning stages of a project, this guide offers an open source and replicable example for history and cultural heritage professionals wanting a cost-effective solution for developing and delivering mobile content. The guide offers lessons learned and challenges we faced throughout the project’s development, and we discuss how we measured success for this specific project. Building Histories of the National Mall belongs to the long tradition of knowledge sharing at RRCHNM that encourages history and humanities professionals to be active designers and builders of their own digital projects. This guide and the website, mallhistory.org, were generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

RRCHNM to build software to help researchers organize digital photographs

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 10:00:44 +0000

We are pleased to announce funding for a new project to develop a freely licensed and open-source software tool, called Tropy, which will allow archival researchers to collect and organize the digital photographs that they take in their research, associate metadata with those images, and export both photographs and metadata to other platforms. Generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tropy will be led by Stephen Robertson and Sean Takats over the next two years. The affordability of powerful digital cameras and the increasing willingness of libraries and archives to allow their use have produced a widespread need for this software. The difficulties of organizing and managing large collections of digital images familiar to us from our own experiences as researchers are well-documented in surveys of humanities research practices, blog posts and comments, and appeals on Twitter. In addressing this need, Tropy represents an extension of RRCHNM’s work building an infrastructure for digital scholarship, joining Zotero, Omeka, and PressForward. Now under development, Tropy will ultimately let you import photographs, adjust them to ensure they are of adequate quality for your purposes, and attach metadata to those images, using a template. After import, you will also be able to batch-edit the metadata across multiple images, as well as edit individual images. In Tropy, images will be able to be organized via collections and/or tags, and accessed in a variety of ways: by browsing image collections and tags via list and thumbnail modes; by sorting these views using all available metadata, such as date, source archive, and title; and by searching across all available metadata, including notes. All images stored in Tropy will be exportable to other applications on your computer and to external, web-based services (such as RRCHNM’s Omeka). We are particularly excited about the prospects that this offers for collaborations between researchers and the libraries and archives whose collections they are photographing. Institutions could provide metadata templates customized to their specific holdings. Researchers using those templates could share both images and item-level descriptions of collections, which institutions could then use in a variety of ways to enrich their catalogs, finding aids and digital collections. We’ll be looking for input from both researchers and libraries and archives as we develop Tropy in the coming months. More news soon!

Scholars as Students: Outcomes from Doing Digital History 2014

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 01:00:04 +0000

During the summer of 2014, Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan, joined by a team of graduate assistants and expert scholars, oversaw one of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s most recent efforts to offer professional development for mid-career scholars: the Doing Digital History (DoingDH) summer institute. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, the institute offered 23 American Historians an opportunity to undertake a two-week immersion in the theories and methods of digital history. The results of the institute were impressive, with participants increasing their technical skills, their digital literacy, and their comfort with evaluating digital work:

As a follow-up to the face-to-face institute experience, we are now publishing a whitepaper that lays out the pedagogical approach to DoingDH, evaluates the experience, and includes the detailed curriculum employed during the institute: Scholars as Students: Introductory Digital History Training for Mid-Career Historians (PDF). This work builds upon over a decade of innovation and experimentation with professional development at RRCHNM. Just as our workshop sessions at disciplinary conferences, bootcamp sessions at THATCamp unconferences, and a range of longer training experiences have been designed to offer replicable models, we hope that DoingDH will be a jumping-off point for those working to build the digital capacities of our communities of practice. We invite you to review the work and outcomes of the institute and consider the ways that you might put these materials to good use in creating training opportunities for mid-career faculty, curators, librarians, archivists, and staff in your own institutions. Finally, based on the success and lessons learned in the 2014 DoingDH institute, RRCHNM is offering another DoingDH institute in the summer of 2016, again with the generous support of NEH-ODH. Soon, we will post a form for anyone interested in being notified when applications open for the 2016 institute. We will announce it on the RRCHNM blog and tweet it from @chnm.

Library of Congress Selects the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for K-12 Interactive Development

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 16:44:09 +0000

We are proud to announce that the Library of Congress has selected the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University to develop Eagle Eye Citizen — an engaging, online and mobile-friendly interactive for K-12 students focused on Congress and civic participation. Working in collaboration with National History Day and educational media designer Big Yellow Taxi, we will develop a project that draws students into careful analysis of Library of Congress resources, including Congress.gov and Chronicling America. The project team will work with the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources program to develop the project. “We are delighted to have this opportunity to create interactives for a range of K-12 learning environments with the goal of cultivating and promoting civic education and civic participation in the twenty-first century,” said Kelly Schrum, Director of Educational Projects at RRCHNM and an Associate Professor at George Mason University. RRCHNM was one of three groups selected out of 33 applications. “We are excited to work with all three of the organizations selected to develop the online interactives and mobile apps,” said Lee Ann Potter, Director of Educational Outreach for the Library of Congress. “The proposals they submitted reflected both creativity and enthusiasm for providing students with engaging tools to learn about Congress and civic participation.” In addition to developing online interactives, the project includes outreach to teachers and students, a national contest, and teacher professional development opportunities in partnership with National History Day. “Engaging students in historical research is an important part of developing the skills necessary for civic participation,” said National History Day Executive Director Cathy Gorn. “National History Day is excited to bring our expertise in history education to this project.” For more information about the Library of Congress educational initiative on Congress and civic participation, please visit http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2015/15-158.html.

10 Years After Katrina, the Enduring Value of the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 11:02:26 +0000

Home in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward

Ten years ago, we knew as historians that we couldn’t assess fully the social, cultural, economic, and political implications of the devastating hurricanes in the summer of 2005. We did know that previous natural disasters had profound consequences. The 1927 Mississippi River Flood, for example, further fueled African American migration to northern industrial cities, and paved the way for federal intervention in southern states during the New Deal. Documenting the reactions and memories of individuals affected by Katrina, and then Rita, along the Gulf Coast, took on an urgency soon after the storms hit. Michael Mizell-Nelson, the late-public historian from the University of New Orleans, reached out to CHNM’s late-director Roy Rosenzweig to discuss the possibilities of creating a community-sourced digital project to document the aftermath and recovery of Hurricane Katrina. With so many residents relocating, collecting online gave anyone who had been displaced an opportunity to share their reflections and document their stories. This became even more important following Hurricane Rita three weeks later, when some Gulf Coast residents evacuated a second time, some never returning home. The Center collaborated with the University of New Orleans to form a team that built and promoted the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank <hurricanearchive.org> (HDMB) in the fall of 2005. HDMB played an important role in documenting the stories of individuals, and offered a non-commercial digital space to collect photographs, audio diaries, or digital video that would be cared for as a digital collection. The team hoped that the process of telling one’s personal story could help in the healing process of individuals, families, and communities, while also expanding the voices documented and accessible in the historical record. When we began collecting, we wanted HDMB to complement, not replicate other documentary efforts. HDMB was designed in the tradition of the September 11 Digital Archive, and intentionally different than a traditional oral history project. An online collecting project offered some important advantages. First, we collected all of our materials in a single digital platform accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. All submissions were vetted and available within 48-36 hours. Second, we reached a wider audience by permitting contributions from anyone and at any time—this was especially important in documenting a storm that has dispersed Gulf residents across the United States. Third, contributors decided what they wanted to share and in what format: a personal reflection in the form of a poem, digital photographs, or emails. Fourth, an online project allowed us to reach more people, more economically. Finally, the materials collected were in a digital form, making this content data available for future computational analysis. Some scholars remained skeptical of our open-door collecting policies that allowed anyone to contribute to a historical collection. Skeptics wished the project’s creators controlled the quality of the submissions by carefully selecting participants and the voices saved and accessible. When carefully planned, a community-based approach to collecting can allow for a more diverse sampling. Projects like HMDB or the September 11 Digital Archive offer a unique raw archive of sources. The team did not alter or correct metadata received with items. Online contributions are representative of the individuals who submitted them. In the collections section, we asked those submitting large numbers of files to describe what they gave us–at the collection or item level.

Late-Smithsonian curator, David Shayt, inspecting a house in New Orleans’s Lakeview District

The project’s ability to make sources available quickly online for researchers caught the attention of individuals who turned to the project to care for their memories and collections. As a result, we became the place where an individual could share her story as she moved across the country, like the late-Courtney Giarrusso, and where historians who lacked resources at their home institutions shared their own photographs, video diaries, and oral histories, such as the curators at the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. Institutions that invested in large-scale oral history projects also deposited copies of their collections with HDMB, such as the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, to increase their use. We received over 900 photographs taken by staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History during a collecting trip that haven’t been accessible through Smithsonian online collections. The volunteer organization, Katrina’s Kids Project, brought art supplies to children living in the Reliant Astrodome shelter in Houston, Texas, and wanted the art work saved for the historical record. These items now only live inside HDMB. As a result of our open-door policy, HDMB holds unique collections. RRCHNM remains committed to preserving these individual contributions and collections, keeping them accessible online. A preservation copy of all items in HDMB will be deposited in George Mason University’s MARS digital repository. Digging Deeper As mentioned above, one of the advantages of collecting online first, is that we have content ready for computational analysis. Researchers can always discover online holdings by browsing or searching through the collections, but also through analyzing the digital content at scale. Searching through collections of primary source may identify a few key sources worthy of a closer reading, while text analysis of the entire site can offer a researcher a greater sense of the entire holdings and the themes represented within.

Voyant analysis of word frequencies and keywords in context.

Easy-to-use text analysis programs, such as the Voyant Tools help researchers cull through the bulk of the collections by surfacing word patterns and trends that might trigger further investigation. It is possible to see word frequencies and view relationships of terms in context with others. Not surprisingly, place names featured prominently in individual contributions. To look beyond the names of cities, parishes, or states, a researcher can create a list of “stop words” that removes those terms from the analysis. Without place names, it is possible to see that HDMB’s contributors frequently mentioned “people,” “home,” “house,” and “family.” By examining those keywords in context, one can see how mentions of “house” relate to the descriptions of physical damage and destruction. While usages of “home” often discuss the emotions of leaving or returning to a damaged house or city. It is possible to identify other emotional terms, such as “loss” and “angry,” and see that “hope” is invoked as a verb and a noun more often than both loss and angry. In thinking through what other patterns might become visible, topic modeling can be applied to the same texts. It is possible to then run that corpus through a light-weight topic modeling tool. All item descriptions can be extracted and analyzed or it is possible to focus on the writing within the online stories. The text can be run through the topic modeling tool multiple times to refine the stop word list, while also seeing how the software makes connections across this corpus. It is possible to see that this digital collection would be useful for someone interested in reading first-hand accounts about evacuations, life in shelters, volunteerism, the challenges of returning home to deal with damages, the emotional challenges faced in the recovery process, financial burdens faced by storm survivors, and the impact of local, state, and federal government in a disaster. With such topic strings identified, the tool then allows the researcher to drill down and read the individual texts that were grouped together. Researchers do not need to read all online story contributions to find the larger themes. They can carefully dip into these collections, from the topics discovered, and pull back as more questions surface. We welcome this type of analysis of the content inside HDMB. Legacies Since HDMB launched, it has been used by scholars, students, and journalists as a valuable research collection. Scholars writing about the short-term political, social, and cultural effects of Katrina and Rita published articles in Southern Spaces, the Journal of American History, and other edited collections with HDMB in their bibliographies. Doctoral students interested in learning about disaster recovery and relief efforts turned to HDMB to read individual accounts. The format and structure of HDMB and other digital-first collections have been written about by archivists and oral historians. This month, the Odgen Museum of Art has asked their visitors to contribute HDMB as part of their temporary exhibition about remembering Katrina. We hope that researchers will continue to turn to HDMB, particularly as we move farther away from these events and begin to gain a wider historical perspective. This week as the nation remembers the impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on communities and individuals, and on the larger national memory of the American people, RRCHNM also remembers two of HDMB’s creators, Roy Rosenzweig and Michael Mizell-Nelson, as well as collaborator David Shayt, who are no longer with us to remember and reflect. If you wish to reflect on the anniversary, the collecting portal remains open. Ten years later, HDMB honors all of their legacies by remaining a freely accessible unique digital collection of historical sources will be sustained for historians and researchers in the years to come.

Are You Interested in, Inspired by, or Curious about Digital Humanities?

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 16:51:23 +0000

Or perhaps a little of all three! To help you figure it out, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is offering Introduction to Digital Humanities, a new online course taught by RRCHNM Director Dr. Stephen Robertson. The course provides an introduction to the field of digital humanities, and to digital tools for text analysis, mapping, network graphing, and presenting material online. Explore blogs, wikis, and social media and how these platforms have been used for publication, communication and collaboration. The course emphasizes hands-on work, including creating an individual digital project. This fully online course includes synchronous online meetings and asynchronous modules. A great opportunity for those in museums, libraries, archives, public history, and education to explore new approaches and learn new skills. Please visit Mason Online to apply and learn more.

Building a Digital Portfolio with Art History Graduate Students

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 10:51:20 +0000

For two weeks in July, RRCHNM hosted an enthusiastic group of 20 art history graduate students for an intensive digital humanities training institute funded by the Getty Foundation. Students were selected for Building a Digital Portfolio from a competitive pool of international applicants. The cohort of participants represented many sub-fields and were each working at different stages of their academic careers in universities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and the UK.

Small groups work together on a day learning about models and modeling.

Co-Directors, Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon, structured the institute to introduce participants to the digital humanities and digital art history communities and the most current digital scholarship, methodologies, and projects. Assigned readings informed each day’s discussions, and tutorials led to hands-on experience with different tools and techniques and opportunities for students to apply these to their own research. Topics covered included metadata basics, collection building, modeling, mapping, data visualization, network graphing, community-sourcing, and digital publishing.

Participants in Building a Digital Portfolio, July 2015

The institute team included faculty, staff, and graduate student mentors from RRCHNM and Mason’s History and Art History Department. Mentors Gretchen Burgess, Jannelle Legg, and Spencer Roberts shared the responsibility for preparing for the institute, and also each led tutorials as well as offering one-on-one assistance to participants. RRCHNM Digital History Associate Megan Brett taught students how to use Omeka. Faculty members Michele Greet, Lincoln Mullen, Lisa Rhody, and Stephanie Westcott each shared their areas of expertise throughout Building a Digital Portfolio. Each participant left with their own web domain and a new suite of digital methods and platforms for experimenting with their own research. Participants blogged about their experiences, which we collected on the institute’s website using the PressForward plugin for Wordpress. This is the second Getty Foundation-supported institute on digital art history organized by RRCHNM, and was one of three Getty-funded summer institutes that tweeted with the #doingdah15 hashtag.

RRCHNM Goes to Europe for WWII Field Study

Tue, 11 Aug 2015 10:36:40 +0000

Last month, staff from National History Day and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media led 18 middle and high school teachers on a two-week field study of WWII in Northern Europe. This trip is part of Understanding Sacrifice, an 18-month program of study, research, and lesson plan development for the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC).

Visiting the ABMC Utah Beach Memorial.

Beginning in London and ending in Amsterdam, the group visited six ABMC WWII cemeteries in England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In preparation, each teacher researched the life of an individual buried in one of the ABMC cemeteries. At each site, teachers presented short eulogies to share with their fellow teachers and cemetery visitors. The research led teachers to military records, local newspapers, and sometimes even to contact with family members who shared letters, photographs, and diaries. During the trip, several teachers also met with the Dutch citizens who had “adopted” the grave of their fallen service member. To provide further context, the group visited museums and historic sites related to military history. For a British perspective on the war, the teachers visited the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Churchill War Rooms. A ferry ride crossing the English Channel traced the path of U.S. forces on D-Day. Standing on Utah and Omaha Beaches in Normandy provided a geographic perspective on what the U.S. forces faced on D-Day, and the Utah Beach Museum offered additional perspectives on the battle from air, land, and sea. For teachers studying the war after D-Day, the French hedgerow country offered a sobering perspective on the challenges of fighting in that terrain. The Mardasson Monument and the Bastogne War Museum provided an opportunity to explore the Battle of the Bulge. Visits to a German and a British WWII cemetery provided teachers with a comparative study of how nations memorialize war.

Teacher Brian Weaver applies sand from the beaches of Normandy to the headstone of the serviceman he had researched.

The challenge for participating teachers was to find ways to bring these experiences as well as the knowledge gained throughout the yearlong study back to classrooms for other teachers and students. To do so, the teachers took pictures, made sketches, created videos, and spoke with cemetery staff. These materials will be incorporated into peer-reviewed lessons. Historian Christopher Hamner, NHD Executive Director Cathy Gorn, NHD Director of Programs Lynne O’Hara, and RRCHNM’s Jennifer Rosenfeld also met individually with each of the teachers to provide feedback and guidance on their materials. RRCHNM multi-media developer Chris Preperato documented the trip for the project website, abmceducation.org, and for evaluative purposes. RRCHNM is now working with the teachers to turn their service member profiles and lesson plans into interdisciplinary online resources for teaching about World War II in Europe. These materials will be available in November 2015. To follow along the trip, please visit the NHD blog for daily guest posts from participating teachers. If you or a teacher you know would like to participate in next year’s program focused on WWII in the Mediterranean, please visit http://www.nhd.org/classroom-connection/american-battle-monuments-commission. The application deadline is September 4, 2015.

RRCHNM Receives 2 NEH Grants to Offer Summer Institutes in 2016

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 13:34:36 +0000

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded two grants to the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to fund professional development opportunities next summer. With this generous support, Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan will organize and host, “Doing Digital History 2016,” an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Designed for novices, the team will invite applications from mid-career American historians who have limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions. After an intensive two-week institute in summer 2016, the 25 participating scholars will leave with the confidence, skills, and abilities to develop digital history scholarship, to evaluate digital projects, and to instruct students in digital methods. This institute is part of a larger effort at RRCHNM to grow the field of practicing digital history and digital art history scholars. The second award is a Landmarks in American History grant for “Graffiti Houses: The Civil War from the Perspective of Individual Soldiers.” This project, led by Stephen Robertson and Jennifer Rosenfeld, will develop two week-long summer teacher institutes that focus on the Civil War through the lives of soldiers who left their mark in Northern Virginia landmarks now known as “Civil War Graffiti Houses.” Workshop participants will select a piece of graffiti from these locations and begin to piece together the story of the individual who created it. Through research trips to the National Archives and to Gettysburg (where many of the soldiers eventually fought and are memorialized), as well as lectures, discussions, and hands-on workshops in photography, digital mapping, and online exhibit building, participating teachers will experience “doing history” and develop strategies based on those experiences to use in their own classrooms. Planning for both projects will begin in the fall.

Applications Open for Understanding Sacrifice WWII Teacher Institute

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 09:00:27 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that applications are open for the 2015-2016 Understanding Sacrifice WWII Teacher Institute held in partnership with National History Day (NHD) and the American Battle Monument Commission (ABMC). Teachers from all disciplines who teach middle and high school are welcome to apply. The application period closes on September 4, 2015. The focus of the 2015-2016 institute is WWII in the Mediterranean. Participating teachers will engage in a year-long study through webinars, readings, and discussion groups. They will research an individual service member buried in one of the ABMC cemeteries and create an interdisciplinary lesson inspired by topics drawn from ABMC resources and materials. In July 2016, teachers will follow the path of the U.S. armed forces in Italy and Southern France through a two-week field study. The resulting research and lesson plans will be made available at abmceducation.org. Learn more about the project or apply here.

Getty Foundation Funds Omeka for Art Historians

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 10:20:46 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (RRCHNM) is pleased to announce the development of Omeka for Art Historians, supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of its Digital Art History initiative. Drawing heavily upon the needs articulated by art historians at last summer’s Rebuilding the Portfolio summer institute held at RRCHNM, also funded by the Getty, we identified some key shortcomings of existing Omeka themes and plugins to serve the needs of this audience. To address these needs, we want to offer art historians a new way to challenge their students and to engage online audiences with art collections by designing Omeka themes and plugins, and writing workflow case studies. To prioritize these needs, RRCHNM will convene a working group of art historians to shape theme development, paying particular attention to building templates that enable analysis and comparison of objects, contextualization of objects alongside historical materials. Project Director Sheila Brennan will work closely with Kimon Keramidas of New York University, Michele Greet of Mason, and the Getty Foundation staff to select a working group that will convene at the College Art Association Conference in 2016. This project builds on the successful Omeka software, an easy-to-use, open-source, web-publishing suite. Omeka has been widely adopted by institutions in the cultural heritage sector and university libraries. Hundreds of museums, libraries, and archives use the program as a content management system and web publishing platform to display standards-based collections data and online exhibits. An increasing number of upper-level and graduate courses in literature and history incorporate Omeka in student assignments, yet its use in art history and material cultural courses is far less common. We look forward to starting the project in October 2015.

Earn a Graduate Certificate in Digital Public Humanities Online

Mon, 11 May 2015 16:57:18 +0000

Digital tools and resources are transforming the ways in which we research, interpret, and communicate. Be part of this change by enrolling in the new graduate online Digital Public Humanities Certificate created by the Department of History and Art History and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in partnership with Smithsonian Associates. This one-year, 15-credit certificate program includes 3 online courses:

Introduction to Digital Humanities (Fall 2015; 3 credits)
Digital Public History (Spring 2016; 3 credits)
Teaching Humanities in the Digital Age (Spring 2016; 3 credits)

Courses will introduce students interested in public history, museums, libraries, archives, education, and communications to ways in which they can incorporate digital public humanities skills and tools into their current or future practice. Students will learn research and presentation skills, including text mining, topic modeling, data visualization, and mapping. They will explore innovative ways to advance teaching and learning through digital tools while developing skills in digital curation, writing, and content strategy. The program includes a 6-credit “virtual” summer internship with the Smithsonian Institution. The internship can be completed remotely. Learn more here or apply today!

WWII Teacher Professional Development Website Goes Live

Mon, 04 May 2015 10:48:16 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is proud to announce the launch of Understanding Sacrifice (abmceducation.org/understandingsacrifice). Sponsored by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), this website is part of an 18-month professional development program for middle- and high-school teachers. Working with National History Day and RRCHNM, 18 teachers are developing interdisciplinary lessons about WWII in Northern Europe. They are also researching the life of a service member buried or memorialized at an ABMC cemetery. The resulting profiles will be incorporated into the lessons. The goal is to bring ABMC resources into classrooms to help students better understand the service, experience, and sacrifice of American service members who served and died during World War II. Visit the site to:

Will this be on the Test?

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 20:51:10 +0000

In online courses, as with face-to-face courses, assessing learning is a central issue. In a recently published book chapter, CHNM staff contributed to this discussion based on their experiences developing and teaching online courses for practicing teachers. In “How We Learned to Drop the Quiz: Writing in Online Asynchronous Courses,” graduate research assistants Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe and Nate Sleeter and education division director Kelly Schrum, talk about eliminating multiple-choice quizzes from online courses, an experience that enabled both instructors and participants to focus on providing meaningful feedback. Without the quiz, instructors were better able to emphasize iterative writing and its relationship to historical thinking. As the authors write, “The opportunities for course participants to revisit and revise their interpretations over the span of a module and the course as a whole allowed for a stronger focus on the process of historical thinking over rote memorization.” Online humanities education represents an opportunity to reach new students. In order to best serve students, especially given the rapid growth of online courses, the scholarship teaching and learning online is vitally important. Teaching and learning, the authors believe, must prioritize providing students with meaningful feedback. How to best to incorporate this feedback will remain a central focus going forward. The chapter is part of Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, a volume dedicated to teaching writing across disciplines with an emphasis on the unique nature of writing online. This is the product of an innovative, open, peer review process overseen by editors Jack Dougherty and Tennyson O’Donnell of Trinity College. The book is available online for free or by order from the University of Michigan Press.

RRCHNM to Create Educational Materials for Eisenhower E-Memorial

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:51:56 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is proud to announce its selection by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission to create educational materials for the Eisenhower E-Memorial. RRCHNM will create seven curriculum units focused on Pivotal Moments from Eisenhower’s life: West Point, D-Day, NATO, The Presidency, Waging Peace, Little Rock, and NASA. Each unit will contain lesson plans for middle and high school classrooms, as well as related primary sources and activities. Additionally, RRCHNM will develop content for an interactive timeline of Eisenhower’s life and relevant moments in history. “Our partnership with the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University will develop engaging teacher resource materials for the state of the art Eisenhower E-Memorial. We believe that today’s students will greatly benefit from learning about how President Eisenhower helped shape the world in which we live today,” commented Brigadier General Carl Reddel (Ret.), Executive Director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission in Washington, DC. RRCHNM has 20 years of experience developing free educational resources and working with teachers through professional development workshops both in-person and online. Last year, RRCHNM projects received over 24 million visits. Recent education projects include Teachinghistory.org, Sea of Liberty, and 100 Leaders in World History. Our team of educators, historians, developers, and designers work together to share the stories of the past with teachers, students, and the interested public.

Growing the Fields

Thu, 02 Apr 2015 09:40:47 +0000

Last summer, Sharon Leon and I (Sheila Brennan) led a team at RRCHNM with the challenging goal of increasing capacity within the fields of history and art history for doing digital work. We started with novices and invited them to learn with us for two weeks last summer. At the end, those digital novices transformed into ambassadors who are engaging with the growing community of digital humanities practitioners and who serve as advocates supporting digital history and digital art history work at their institutions and in the fields at large.

Teaching Hidden History

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 14:45:24 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is developing a new course, Teaching Hidden History,

with funding from 4-VA, an initiative dedicated to expanding educational opportunities and increasing collaborative research among Virginia universities. A hybrid course, Teaching Hidden History features online components and in-person meetings utilizing the 4-VA Telepresence rooms on the Mason and Virginia Tech campuses. Students from both institutions will participate simultaneously. The course integrates digital history, history education, and best practices in teaching and learning history. Students will conduct research using primary and secondary sources to develop online history modules using an open-source platform. The first iteration of Teaching Hidden History will run in summer 2015. In the changing higher education landscape, distance education has become increasingly common and attractive to institutions and students. Models for online education, however, have been dominated by science, math, and technology. Humanities disciplines have been slow to develop online educational opportunities, but they have the potential to incorporate and model best practices for inquiry-based, active learning. Teaching Hidden History provides a unique opportunity for graduate students in history and social studies education to strengthen historical research and historical thinking skills while utilizing digital tools and exploring history education in an online environment.

Histories of the National Mall Wins Outstanding Public History Award

Thu, 12 Feb 2015 10:00:37 +0000

The National Council on Public History selected Histories of the National Mall as the winner of the 2015 Outstanding Public History Award. The award is presented each year for work that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. The selection committee commended Histories for its clean design, and concluded “the site stands as an excellent destination for anyone interested in our nation’s Front Yard and as an outstanding example of how public historians can harness mobile technology to forge place-based historical connections.” Histories is a place-based public history mobile website developed by RRCHNM with support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Designed primarily for tourists in Washington, DC, mallhistory.org reveals that the National Mall has a history of its own that is invisible when walking along its paths and lawns. There are four different entry points– place-based, thematic, chronological, and biographical–allowing users to connect the physical space and its development, together with the social, cultural, and political events that have transpired there. The project’s co-directors, Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon will accept the award at the NCPH conference in April on behalf of the Center and the project team. Read about all of the NCPH award winners and their achievements. (PDF) The Histories project is successful because of the exemplary contributions from an enthusiastic team of faculty, staff, and graduate students who have been collaborating since 2012.

Getty Foundation Funds Institute for Art History Graduate Students at RRCHNM

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 10:29:27 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that the Getty Foundation awarded a second grant to the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to organize and run another summer institute in digital art history. This year, the Getty Foundation asked us to focus on graduate students in Masters and Doctoral programs. Participants will learn from experienced RRCHNM and GMU faculty whose expertise span a range of digital humanities methodologies. Together with returning Project Co-Directors, Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon, are Lisa Rhody, Stephanie Westcott, Lincoln Mullen, and Michele Greet. “Building a Digital Portfolio” will run from July 13 to July 24, 2015 at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus. This institute is part of an ongoing initiative from the Getty Foundation to increase adoption of digital methodologies and use of digital tools across the fields of art history. During the summer of 2014, RRCHNM ran a Getty-sponsored institute for established faculty, librarians, and museum professionals. Learn more about their experiences on the ReBuilding the Portfolio: DH for Art Historians website. Applications will open Monday, February 9, 2015. If you wish to receive an email indicating applications have opened, leave your name and contact information on the form available on the “Building a Digital Portfolio” homepage.

Digital History Fellowships available for Fall 2015

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:40:20 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that the Department of History & Art History at George Mason University has received another round of funding from the Provost’s PhD Award Program to admit two Digital History Fellows in each of the next three years. Fellows enrolling in Fall 2015 will receive stipends of $20,000 for two years, during which time they will take a practicum course each semester here at RRCHNM, and then a further three years of support from the Department of History and Art History. The practicum courses provide an opportunity to be part of a digital history center and to contribute to a range of projects across all three of the Center’s divisions. Syllabi for the practicum courses can be found on the Fellows’ blog, which also includes posts by all three cohorts of fellows reflecting on their experiences at the Center. Students interested in applying to the GMU History PhD program and being a Digital history Fellow, should consult the information on the department website or contact the department’s graduate director, Professor Cindy Kierner. Applications close January 15, 2015

In Memory of Michael Mizell-Nelson

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 12:20:21 +0000

The Center recently learned that a long-time collaborator and friend, Michael Mizell-Nelson, passed away after a battle with cancer. He was a driving force behind the success of the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB), and was a public historian committed to his hometown of New Orleans and to teaching and fostering civic activism in his students. Two weeks after evacuating from New Orleans, a young Assistant Professor at the University of New Orleans (UNO) contacted Roy seeking advice for developing a documentary on Hurricane Katrina: the destruction, the responses (and lack thereof), and recovery. Roy discussed Michael’s ideas and the possibility of creating an online collecting project modeled after the September 11 Digital Archive with Center staff. Thankfully, the Sloan Foundation wanted to support an electronic collecting project. As Roy began to assemble a project team, he asked Michael to take the lead at UNO and to serve as the project’s Outreach Lead for what would become the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: http://hurricanearchive.org/. Michael and his community of colleagues, friends, and neighbors were profoundly affected by Hurricane Katrina and the second hit from Hurricane Rita a few weeks later. They struggled not only with physical destruction of place, but also with emotional trauma and cultural displacement. He worked hard to preserve and document those struggles and to highlight the small triumphs in HDMB as a way to foster some positive legacies. Michael wanted all individuals affected by the storms to feel comfortable telling their stories in their own words online. We worked hard to create a user-friendly website, and ensured that anyone who submitted a story or photograph never relinquished ownership over their contributions. All contributors also decided how they wanted their materials shared on the site itself.

Photo taken by Michael Mizell-Nelson, “The intersection of Mirabeau Avenue and the London Avenue Canal offers one of the most subtle critiques of the response of the local, state, and federal government to our continuing crisis.”

Michael spearheaded outreach efforts in the greater New Orleans area, first through his students and colleagues at the University of New Orleans, and then with community non-profits, other local colleges and universities, artists, and local media. We decided to officially launch the project during the 2006 Mardi Gras celebrations, which occur all along the Gulf Coast. Michael and his students distributed nearly ten thousand Mardi Gras-style cups and bumper stickers emblazoned with the project logo and URL during numerous parades and celebrations, and left them in coffeehouses and libraries with wireless Internet access. He also asked that we design and distribute pre-paid reply cards with space for writing a short personal reflection (that were scanned into HDMB), so that those without web-enabled devices could still share their stories. Michael also worked to bridge language barriers with students in the English as a Second Language program at Delgado Community College to compose and contribute their stories. A consummate public historian, Michael worked tirelessly to include the largest number of individuals in this community-sourced archive. During the three years of the Sloan grant, we collected over 25,000 digital items in HDMB. Michael continued with the project by working closely with his students to create special Katrina-related collections. All of these items are part of the historical record will remain accessible to a wide audience. We encourage you to read Michael’s own words about his experiences of pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans:

The Future of RRCHNM

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 15:10:08 +0000

This is the text of my presentation in the session on the future of digital humanities centers, on day two of RRCHNM20. November 15, 2014. I wasn’t originally slated to be one of the speakers, but by the time it became clear that one person we had invited could not attend, I realized that I should be speaking, that people wanted to hear from me about the future of RRCHNM. Accordingly, I departed from the brief and spoke not about DH centers in general, but instead about the future of the center whose anniversary we marked that day. We will soon be posting video recordings of both this session, and the afternoon session on the future of digital history. In the meantime, Bethany Nowviskie, one of the other speakers has also posted her talk online: “speculative computing and the centers to come.” —Stephen Robertson The twentieth anniversary of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media finds it in a period of transition. A little more than a year ago, both Dan Cohen, the director, and Tom Scheinfeldt, the managing director, whose names appear in the credits of at least twenty-six Center projects, left to pursue new opportunities. The departure of visionary leaders has generally been fatal for digital humanities centers. But not so CHNM. The Center has already been through one such transition, the death of its founder, Roy Rosenzweig in 2007, whose loss in such tragic circumstances posed emotional as well as practical challenges. Then, Dan and Tom, with Kelly Schrum, Sean Takats and Sharon Leon, the three divisional directors, took on the leadership of the Center, and its staff rose to those challenges. Again now, the talent and experience of the Center’s staff, and the leadership of Kelly, Sean and Sharon, are providing continuity as the Center makes the transition to a new director. With a current staff of forty, a combination of tenure-line faculty, research faculty, designers, developers, administrative staff, and graduate research assistants, RRCHNM remains the largest digital center in the US, and positioned to pursue large-scale projects, including software development, that push the boundaries of digital humanities. Although the Center is part of the Department of History and Art History, most of those staff are neither on the tenure track nor within the administrative work structures that shape the careers of their departmental colleagues. The future of RRCHNM must and will include continued efforts to find ways to recognize, sustain and promote staff who pursue alternative academic careers. Now, as in 2007, projects as well as people are crucial to the Center’s continuity and future. In the months surrounding Roy’s death, CHNM secured second round funding for Zotero and the Papers of the War Department, the first funding for Omeka, and the five-year grant for Teachinghistory.org, a project that represented the peak of a decade of professional development work with K-12 teachers. Roy had a hand in all of those grants, but so too did many other staff. As iterative, generative projects rather than prototypes or one-off efforts, they have spanned successive cohorts of staff in the years after 2007 – in fact, two of those projects are providing direction for RRCHNM in the current transition just as they did in 2007. Almost ten years after its initial funding, earlier this year Zotero was at the center of grants from the Sloan and Mellon Foundations for research into altmetrics using Zotero datasets, and to develop feeds and integration with institutional repositories. Just over a month ago, Omekadevelopment expanded in new directions with funding from the Institute of Library and Museum Services for projects to connect Omeka collections to in-gallery experiences, and to build plugins for text mining and text and image annotation. And extending this pattern, less than two weeks ago, the Center received funding for the next iteration of the PressForward project that Dan, Tom and Joan Troyano launched and shaped, and that Sean, Lisa Rhody and Stephanie Westcott now lead. Generative projects such as these provide the spine that gives shape to a soft money institution like RRCHNM, that hold it together in a way that short-term projects tied to specific staff and faculty simply could not. Looking to the future, we need to sustain this spine – and we do have an idea that we’re excited about, software to fill a gap in the digital research workflow, but as we’re still in the process of preparing to seek funding for it, I’m not going to announce it publicly. Linking both people and projects, Roy’s vision remains at the core of the Center’s future: we aim to use “digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” The twining of opportunities to democratize history and efforts to control access to digital content and platforms is as much a defining feature of the digital age as it was in 1994, when Roy founded the Center. As much as this dynamic means that Roy’s vision remains current, specific features of the current landscape point to a changing context that necessarily separates RRCHNM’s future from its past. One striking discontinuity is the lack of opportunities to create the resources and professional development for K-12 history teachers that occupied the Center’s early years, and formed the largest part of its work over the last twenty years. Funding for those projects overwhelmingly came from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Education Programs’ Teaching and Learning Resources and Curriculum Development grants and US Department of Education’s Teaching American History Program; both no longer exist. At the same time, as digital technology and methodologies become more mainstream, new needs and opportunities are emerging for training university faculty and students. That RRCHNM has none of the institutional service obligations that characterize most other Centers gives it scope to think about training more broadly, to contribute to the variety of strategies and approaches needed to scale up the engagement with the digital of humanities faculty and students. It’s clear to me that our strengths lend themselves to a disciplinary approach to expanding training, to working with historians and art historians, and to integrating the digital into department curriculums. After all, we are located in a Department of History and Art History, and have six staff with PhDs in history and a dozen GRAs from the department’s PhD program. Anchoring digital methods and approaches in the courses, sources and questions with which historians and art historians work, and the digital elements of their existing practices, such as the use of digitized sources and full-text search, is one strategy for making the digital easier to understand and credible, and encouraging the participation of those with limited skills, confidence and time – a group that crucially includes many of the tenured and senior faculty who shape curriculum and the training of graduate students. That approach is not a retreat from digital humanities; rather, it builds a bridge to communities around digital approaches and methods, creating digital historians who can participate in digital humanities. RRCHNM has already begun this work. Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan led two two-week summer institutes this year, one supported by the Getty Foundation for art historians, one supported by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, for mid-career American historians. Sharon and I travelled to Millsaps College in Jackson, MI, to run a three-day workshop for their History Department. In the future, we want to build on this work to develop formats that are more scalable – regional weekend workshops & online resources, such as novice-focused documentation for open source tools, to allow individuals who don’t have time or money for institutes to learn on their own. Being part of the Department of History and Art History also gives RRCHNM an opportunity to help shape the future of graduate education. This fall, with the support of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, we’re collaborating with the department to develop three online courses for a new graduate certificate in public digital humanities (which also requires an internship in addition to the online coursework). This project, which draws on the experience of Kelly Schrum and her team in developing and teaching Hidden in Plain Sight, an online professional development for Virginia high school teachers, aims to get beyond Blackboard to develop models of online learning suited to the digital – and to make digital coursework accessible to the still large number of students and professionals whose programs do not offer it. The graduate certificate will be offered for the first time in Fall 2015. RRCHNM’s role in the department’s own PhD program is also moving in new directions. Center staff have long been involved in teaching the two digital history courses that are a requirement for students in the program; and many students have also had the experience working in CHNM as a graduate research assistant. In the last three years funding from the Provost has more directly connected the program and the Center, supporting three cohorts of Digital History Fellows, who take a series of practicum classes in the Center. Even more so than the experience of being a GRA, the practicums acquaint students with the audiences beyond the academy with which the Center works, and with the different forms of work involved in digital projects – in other words, they offer an introduction to the alt-ac world that complements their training as digital historians. We learned last week that the department had received funding from the Provost to support three more cohorts of Digital History Fellows. This will give us the opportunity to further explore how hands-on work in a center might fit with disciplinary digital coursework in a graduate education that equips students from academic and alt-ac jobs – that provides a formal training akin to the experiences of many of the people currently on the Center’s staff. A team of people with a variety of skills, roles, and careers, large enough to produce and sustain generative projects, concerned with training faculty and graduate students in disciplinary contexts and developing alt-ac careers, with the mission of using digital media and computer technology to democratize history, art history, and the humanities: that is my vision for the future of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

RRCHNM20 Site Live

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 16:14:47 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that the RRCHNM20 site is now live. This site is a collection of material about projects created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in the first twenty years of its existence, 1994–2014. This material has been gathered and made public to mark the Center’s anniversary, and to provide resources for the first day of the RRCHNM 20th Anniversary Conference (#igorj2.sg-host20), on November 14, 2014, which is devoted to hands-on work with Center projects—past and present. Our aim in sharing this material is to provide insight on the process of creating digital history, and to highlight the roles of a range of staff and collaborators, across twenty years of changing structures, practices, concerns, hardware, and software.

The collection encompasses more than 60 of the 149 projects undertaken by the Center, as of November 2014. Not included are twelve current projects, as well as small contract and web design projects. Most of the documents are grant proposals and reports. We have removed the detailed budgets from these proposals, as well as letters of support and CVs; they are otherwise complete. The site also includes information on most of the just over 150 people who worked at the Center during its first twenty years. The site is open to contributions of material from staff and collaborators, as well as from users and audiences of the Center’s projects. We’d love you to share images of the Center’s staff and locations, and experiences using Center projects or collaborating with Center staff. At the end of this week, we’ll open a Google Doc for participants in day one of the 20th anniversary conference to propose sessions working with RRCHNM’s projects, past and present. We look forward to seeing the ways that the conference participants and the larger community make use of this material. The site was created by Digital History Fellows Jannelle Legg, Anne McDivitt, and Amanda Regan, with guidance from Sheila Brennan. Additional content was added by Jannelle Legg, Debra Kathman and Lara Harmon.

100 Leaders Opens for Voting!

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:35:20 +0000

National History Day (NHD) and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) announce the launch of the voting platform for 100 Leaders in World History (100leaders.org), a project sponsored by Kenneth E. Behring. The site includes profiles of 100 leaders in world history selected by a panel of historians, teachers, and students in May 2014. Rate leaders on five qualities of leadership and compare your ratings with the panel and other voters. The challenge for NHD and the RRCHNM team: How to invite people to think about different qualities of leadership in a meaningful way and explore the legacy of significant leaders? The solution: a custom Drupal website with a jQuery slider for the rating interface. You decide whether each leader:

CHNM‘s Histories: Digital History and Teaching History

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 17:35:12 +0000

Cross-posted from Stephen Robertson’s blog. This is the second in a series of posts about aspects of RRCHNM’s history written to mark the Center’s 20th anniversary. No sooner had I published my blog post on the differences between digital history and digital humanities than I realized that I had blurred a crucial difference between digital history and digital humanities: digital history has been far more focused on teaching than digital humanities. In my earlier post I collapsed teaching projects into the broader category of presenting material online; doing so masked a sharper distinction in activity around teaching. Digital humanities, while not unconcerned with teaching, has given it far less attention relative to research than digital history, and, that attention has focused on teaching digital approaches, methods and tools. By contrast, digital history has focused on teaching history, has been “engaged in the project of improving the quality of classroom teaching practices and learning outcomes,” as Steve Brier put it, by using digital media to develop resources and professional development for teachers of K-12 and undergraduate students. The scale and reach of these projects warrants far greater attention to them than they have received in discussions of digital humanities. RRCHNM’s earliest teaching project, History Matters, a resource for undergraduate US history survey courses launched long ago in 1998, continues to attract more visitors each year despite its age: 2 million visitors in 2013, and 2.25 million so far this year. The much newer Teachinghistory, which builds on the US Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) program to offer a wide range of resources for K-12 teachers of US history, drew 1.8 million visitors in 2013, and has drawn 2.42 million to date in 2014.

Those projects represent the two threads of teaching projects that are prominent in the pattern of RRCHNM’s twenty years of work. The first thread is focused on undergraduate and upper secondary courses, and on providing digital resources. The Center’s initial two collaborations with the American Social History Project, History Matters and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, addressed core areas of the undergraduate curriculum, the US history survey and the French Revolution. Later projects undertaken by the Center, and like their predecessors largely funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), highlighted the new fields of world history and the history of childhood and youth, and recent history, the events of 1989. In the late 1990s, when there was still relatively little historical content available on the web, a major impetus for these projects was the need to get primary sources online. In that respect, early digital history teaching projects seem to have more in common with contemporaneous online archives such as the Valley of the Shadow than I at least recognized at the time. History Matters includes over 1000 primary sources, a fraction of the 12,000 files that make up the Valley of the Shadow, but nonetheless content on a sufficient scale to be considered more than just a teaching resource. Reflecting on why I didn’t think of sites like History Matters as archives, it was because, moreso than projects conceived as archives, teaching sites surrounded their collections with guides to how to make meaning from them - with precisely the kind of context that I and others often found wanting in sites conceived as archives. Historical documents in History Matters, and other RRCHNM projects in this thread, are accompanied by annotations. Children and Youth in History also provides case studies of how to read and teach primary sources, and World History Matters and 1989 include scholar interviews that discuss how to interpret primary sources. A second strand of teaching projects at RRCHNM focused on K-12 teachers, and on providing professional development. Funded by the US Department of Education, through the TAH program, these projects involved RRCHNM partnering with local school districts. Beginning in 2002, the Center’s partners were Fairfax County (twice), Alexandria City, Fauquier County, Loudon County (twice), and Montgomery County (twice). The projects centered on workshops, summer institutes designed to connect teachers with the most recent historiography and pedagogy, supported by websites containing transcripts and videos of those events, platforms to help teachers collaborate with each other, lessons plans, source analysis modules, guides to online resources. The proliferation of local projects, many of which lacked the online presence of those in which RRCHNM was involved, led the US Department of Education to decide that an online National History Education Clearinghouse was needed to broaden access and serve the needs of all teachers, and to shape a larger conversation about history education. In 2007, they selected RRCHNM working in partnership with Stanford University’s History Education Group, to create that clearinghouse, awarding the Center the largest single sum that it has received in its twenty year existence. The contract from the US Department of Education provided a guiding set of parameters for the project, including a plethora of offline activities such as an annual conference, print publications, policy analysis, and extensive face-to-face outreach.

Teachinghistory itself includes material that spans the resources, reviews and examples of historical thinking found in our earlier projects, as well as the teaching materials, standards, lesson plans, and teaching guides of the TAH projects — but on a greater scale, and with more extensive use of video and multimedia, and with the addition of an extensive guide to digital tools for use in the classroom. The wealth of material in the sites themselves, as well as related material we’ll be making available before the conference, offer rich sources for examining the intersection of digital history and history teaching, and the changing technologies and approaches used to improve teaching practices and learning outcomes — a possible project for day one of RRCHNM’s 20th Anniversary conference, on November 14. (See a detailed case study of TeachingHistory here.) Teaching projects form a smaller part of the Center’s work at present than they have in the past - perhaps signaling some diminishing of the extent to which a focus on teaching distinguishes digital history from digital humanities. The TAH program has not been funded since 2011, and the NEH Division of Education Programs ended its grants for Teaching and Learning Resources and Curriculum Development, which had supported many RRCHNM teaching projects, in 2008. Kelly Schrum and her team in the Education Division at RRCHNM have taken their expertise in using digital media to develop resources for teachers and long experience working with teachers in new directions - education projects for Monticello, Ford’s Theater, National History Day, online professional development courses for teachers, and online digital history courses for higher education. Nonetheless, the steadily growing numbers of visitors to History Matters and Teachinghistory suggest no drop off in demand despite the shrinking resources for developing them.

One month until RRCHNM's 20th Anniversary Conference

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 14:25:17 +0000

RRCHNM’s 20th anniversary is now only one month away. Over 100 people have registered to attend the free, two-day event on November 14 and 15. There is still time to join us - details and the registration form can be found here. More details of the schedule will be released soon. As part of lead-up to the conference, RRCHNM’s director, Stephen Robertson, is writing a series of blog posts highlighting different aspects of the Center’s history. The first, CHNM’s Histories: Collaboration in Digital History, explores the Center’s early collaborations with the American Social History Project.

RRCHNM Partners with National History Day for WWII Teacher Institute

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 13:10:42 +0000

National History Day (NHD) announced the 18 middle and high school teachers selected to participate in the American Battle Monuments Commission’s (ABMC) Understanding Sacrifice program. The selected teachers will conduct an in-depth study of World War II in northern Europe and create teaching activities using ABMC resources. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is partnering with NHD in this year-long program and will design the companion website to share the classroom activities developed through the teacher institute. The goal of the project is to provide classroom activities that are:

IMLS funds Opening Omeka for Close and Distant Reading

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 12:11:36 +0000

RRCHNM is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund Opening Omeka for Close and Distant Reading [LG-05-14-00125-14]. Over the course of the two decades since the invention of the web browser, the world’s libraries have provided digital access to a torrent of cultural heritage materials. For many libraries and special collections, Omeka has been the route to providing this kind of unprecedented public access to their holdings. While access to digitized materials is better than ever, average users do not have adequate tools to help them gain intellectual control over these materials—up close and at scale. Libraries and archives with diverse collections need a new set of easy-to-use tools to enable visitors to engage in both distant and close reading, without requiring users to have knowledge of sophisticated programming languages. In some collections, an individual item may appear trivial and anecdotal. But, examining all items as a coherent corpus holds the promise of surfacing larger insights by evaluating large bodies of text in the aggregate. While some researchers interested in examining large-scale collections, researchers often also need to closely examine individual elements. This practice requires another set of tools, operating where the collections live, so that once the relevant sources have been identified and isolated, they are available for focused explication by a knowledgeable hand by highlighting, isolating, and annotating important elements within particular digital objects. Opening Omeka for Distant and Close Reading (Oct. 2014-Sept. 2017) will produce four plugins for Omeka that will facilitate both the computational analysis of large collections of materials and their metadata, and the close reading and annotation of individual digitized sources: Distant Reading

IMLS Funds Omeka Everywhere

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 10:46:55 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, in partnership with Ideum and the University of Connecticut’s Digital Media Center, is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a National Leadership Grant for Museums from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences to create Omeka Everywhere. Dramatically increasing the possibilities for visitor access to collections, Omeka Everywhere will offer a simple, cost-effective solution for connecting onsite web content and in-gallery multi-sensory experiences, affordable to museums of all sizes and missions, by capitalizing on the strengths of two successful collections-based open-source software projects: Omeka and Open Exhibits. Currently, museums are expected to engage with visitors, share content, and offer digitally-enabled experiences everywhere: in the museum, on the Web, and on social media networks. These ever-increasing expectations, from visitors to museum administrators, place a heavy burden on the individuals creating and maintaining these digital experiences. Content experts and museum technologists often become responsible for multiple systems that do not integrate with one another. Within the bounds of tight budget, it is increasingly difficult for institutions to meet visitors’ expectations and to establish a cohesive digital strategy. Omeka Everywhere will provide a solution to these difficulties by developing a set of software packages—including Collections Viewer templates, mobile and touch tablet applications, and the Heist application—that bring digital collections hosted in Omeka into new spaces, enabling new kinds of visitor interactions. Omeka Everywhere will expand audiences for museum-focused publicly-funded open source software projects by demonstrating how institutions of all sizes and budgets can implement next-generation computer exhibit elements into current and new exhibition spaces. Streamlining the workflows for creating and sharing digital content with online and onsite visitors, the project will empower smaller museums to rethink what is possible to implement on a shoestring budget. By enabling multi-touch and 3D interactive technologies on the museum floor, museums will reinvigorate interest in their exhibitions by offering on-site visitors unique experiences that connect them with the heart of the institution—their collections.

A New Look, and Improved Access and Stability for the September 11 Digital Archive

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 10:15:40 +0000

On this the 13th anniversary of the September 11th tragedy, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to launch a newly upgraded and redesigned site for the September 11 Digital Archive (911DA). The new site boasts improved access to the archive’s collections and, more importantly, increased stability for the materials. A National Park Services’ Saving America’s Treasures grant has made it possible to migrate the materials from their original digital repository to the most recent version of Omeka. The result is that the materials are significantly easier to navigate, browse, and search. Additionally, a range of video collections are available that were not being served previously. The site offers range of data feeds (RSS, ATOM, XML, JSON), and eventually we will be offering API access for researchers and developers who would like to explore the collections in new applications and interfaces. For the past three years, Jim Safley has painstakingly engineered and executed the complex work of this data migration. As a veteran of the project, no one knows the collections the way that Jim does, and his careful attention to detail has assured the integrity of this data as it has made its journey from a labyrinthine hand-coded database to the standardized home in Omeka. Then, Sheila Brennan guided Ben Schneider and Jeri Wieringa as they added additional collection description, massaged the collections into their current organizational structure, and themed the site with the current design. These members of the 911DA team are only the most recent additions to a staff list that stretches back a dozen years and includes Dan Cohen, Tom Scheinfeldt, Marty Andolino, Joan Troyano, Rikk Mulligan, and our many collaborators at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center (ASHP/CML) including Fritz Umback and Pennee Bender, under the direction of Joshua Brown and Steve Brier, who were RRCHNM’s partners on this work from the earliest days. The September 11 Digital Archive originated as an off-shoot of ECHO: Exploring and Collecting the History Online project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which experimented with new means to collect and preserve the recent history of science, technology, and industry. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, RRCHNM, again with support from the Sloan Foundation, partnered with our colleagues at ASHP/CML to turn the emerging techniques toward the effort to preserve the collect, preserve, and present the wide range of primary source materials generated by and in response to the events of that morning, especially born digital materials. In February 2002, the first iteration of the 911DA launched with a web portal that made it possible for ordinary people to contribute their stories, upload digital materials, and explore other people’s stories. The site drew in essential contributions channeled through our partners at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, The American Red Cross, The American Association of Museums, The Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The New-York Historical Society, The Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at CUNY, Columbia University, New York University, The Museum of Chinese in America, and many others. In September 2003, the Library of Congress accepted a copy of the collection as it stood at that point as its first major digital accession. In the intervening years, the archive has amassed 150,000 digital files: stories, photographs, digital art images, emails, voicemails, videos, animations, official documents, and oral histories. Together these materials offer a deep record of the immediate aftermath of the events in New York, Arlington, and Shanksville, and their subsequent shifting historical memory, and have been at the heart of much of the existing scholarship on September 11th. At the 10th anniversary of the attacks, RRCHNM reopened the collecting portal and it will remain open to capture public reflections into the future. For RRCHNM, the 911DA is a marquee project that is at the root of much of our subsequent work in digital public history and software development. As our first major collecting project, the archive directly lead to our work around hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, and the eventual development of Omeka as a software platform that could offer libraries, archives, museums, and humanities scholars an easy way to collect, preserve, and present evidence of the recent past. As we mark this next phase in the life of the 911DA, we hope that you’ll revisit the collections to explore what they have to tell us about the events of that September morning, but also with an eye to how important this archive has been to the development of digital history more generally.

Virginia Child Custody Project

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:55:05 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of the Virginia Child Custody Project. This freely available website explores child custody in Virginia and nationally within a broad historical and legal context with the goal of providing an impartial, interdisciplinary resource grounded in humanities scholarship. With funding from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University, the website presents framing essays by leading scholars and practitioners on key issues in the complex field of child custody. Essays address topics such as the history of child custody in Virginia, the definition of family and child custody issues, child custody in the media, alternative dispute resolution, and the “best interests of the child” standard. Authors include:

Doing Digital History in August

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 10:19:05 +0000

RRCHNM continued its summer of institutes in early August when 23 mid-career American historians arrived in Northern Virginia for “Doing Digital History.” Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, the institute began on August 4 and ran for two weeks. Few of the participants expected to keep up with the workload of the intensive curriculum, but everyone left with new skills, new understandings of digital methodologies, and a new appreciation for the work required to build and sustain successful digital humanities projects.

The “Doing Digital History” Cohort (Photo courtesy of Karen Kossie-Chernyshev) Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon led the group through a course designed to introduce historians, already established in their subject areas, to digital humanities scholarship, methods, and tools relevant to their own research and teaching in American history. Readings and discussions were coupled with demonstrations and hands-on work. Our participants created their own web domain, installed WordPress, and started blogging on Day 1. Megan Brett, Stephanie Grimes, Celeste Sharpe, and Spencer Roberts assisted throughout the institute by leading tutorials and supporting the participants. For example, Roberts created the “Historian’s Spreadsheet,” a guide to using simple functions in Excel for tidying data that was then widely circulated on Twitter and highlighted as a resource in the National Council on Public History’s weekly newsletter to its members. “Doing Digital History” also featured instructors from RRCHNM and Mason’s History and Art History department who shared their digital humanities expertise with participants, including, Mike O’Malley, Lisa Rhody, Lincoln Mullen, and Joan Troyano. Fred Gibbs, formerly of Mason, returned from New Mexico to teach a day on text mining and Jeff McClurken visited from University of Mary Washington to lead a day on digitally-inflected pedagogy. If you are interested in seeing how we crafted this curriculum, we invite you to review our schedule, read participants’ posts written during the institute, or browse the #doingdh14 tweetstream. “Doing Digital History” was one of three institutes for advanced topics in the digital humanities funded by NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities to be run in 2014. Learn more about other grant programs at ODH, http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh.

Art Historians, Rebuilding their Portfolios

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 12:19:25 +0000

RRCNHM hosted an enthusiastic group of 22 art historians, librarians, and museum professionals for “Rebuilding the Portfolio,” a digital art history institute sponsored by the Getty Foundation. The self-identified novice participants began the institute on July 8, 2014 nervous and worried about the workload, but emerged two weeks later as confident, digital ambassadors. During the institute, nicknamed “bootcamp” by some of the participants, Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon led the cohort through an intense course designed to introduce art historians to digital humanities scholarship, methods, and tools, while also directly connecting with their own work in art history. Readings and discussions were coupled with demonstrations and hands-on work. Megan Brett, Stephanie Grimes, Celeste Sharpe, and Spencer Roberts drew on their own digital work as graduate students in the history and art history program by leading demonstrations and supporting the participants in countless ways.

Inside Higher Ed Blog Post on Online Education

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 10:11:38 +0000

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media graduate research assistants, Nate Sleeter and Celeste Sharpe, and education division director Kelly Schrum will collaborate on a series of blog posts for Inside Higher Ed on the possibilities for student-centered online learning in the humanities. Drawing on experiences from RRCHNM-developed online courses for teachers including Hidden in Plain Sight http://edchnm.gmu.edu/hidden/, the series of three posts will explore the possibilities of online courses in the humanities. As the authors write: “We will share lessons learned about what online learning environments can offer students. Thinking beyond the MOOC-related hype, what opportunities exist in online education? Does online education push us to rethink and re-envision our approach to teaching and learning? How do we take advantage of online classes for teaching history?” Given that these courses are increasingly offered by universities as options for students whose schedules might not permit weekly attendance in a traditional course the authors believe it is vitally important to move beyond notions like “flipping the classroom” and the often acrimonious debate over MOOCs to serious discussions over online pedagogy in the humanities. Read the first post of the series here: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/beyond-flipping-classrooms.

Come work with us! RRCHNM is hiring a Linux Systems Administrator

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 15:38:04 +0000

RRCHNM is seeking a full-time Systems Administrator to maintain and grow the technical infrastructure of the center that includes 23 servers and a complex set of networked connections, storage, databases, software, programming languages, and operating systems. The Systems Administrator must also be able to support dozens of computers used by the center’s staff, and ensure the security and uptime of a major technical operation. Details can be found here.

Announcing the PressForward Plugin

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:42:24 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), the team that brought you Zotero and Omeka, announces the release of its newest open source digital tool, the PressForward Plugin. A tool for aggregating, curating and publishing content from the web, PressForward integrates an RSS / Atom feed reader and editorial workflow directly into the WordPress dashboard. By innovating the use of both web feeds and the WordPress dashboard, PressForward will change the way individuals and online communities collect, discuss, and share open access content they discover on the web. Available for download from WordPress.org or installation via your site’s Plugins menu, PressForward facilitates collecting content published elsewhere on the web, discussing it with collaborators, and formatting and publishing that content without ever leaving the WordPress dashboard. Through its streamlined editorial process, PressForward increases the capacity for individuals and communities to create sustainable, curated publications and develop engaged audiences for their work. PressForward improves upon existing feed reader applications by providing a flexible and integrated editorial interface. With PressForward, web feeds bring content directly to your dashboard, where you can review an item, mark it for further consideration, and publish it for others to read. For those who want to share individual works as they discover them, PressForward’s bookmarklet captures content with simply a button that can be added to any browser’s toolbar. Unlike other comparable plugins, PressForward emphasizes community and collaboration by including a discussion feature that allows team members to comment on each item brought in via RSS feed or the bookmarklet. PressForward also enables responsible attribution by retaining original source information and providing an automatic redirect. Powering the popular site Digital Humanities Now, an online publication with more than fourteen thousand readers, PressForward has made it possible for a small editorial group to sift through the material produced by more than 700 RSS feeds, discuss it with teams of volunteers, and format and distribute features, news, and announcements twice a week. According to project director Joan Fragaszy Troyano, “scholars and professionals stay current with their field by monitoring the web as much as they do by reading formal publications. PressForward enables a community to build a lightweight, collaboratively-edited publication both sourced from, and published on, the open web.” The PressForward Plugin is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as one part of a research project aimed at helping researchers discover and share valuable, informal scholarship – often called gray literature – that is published on the web. In the coming months, the PressForward team will support new users of the plugin by hosting workshops, providing a support forum on wordpress.org, and delivering presentations to groups of academics and publishing and library professionals. For more information about the PressForward Project, plugin, and affiliated publications, please contact Stephanie Westcott at info@pressforward.org.

Congratulations Celeste Sharpe!

Wed, 07 May 2014 17:35:10 +0000

The Department of History and Art History at George Mason University has named Celeste Sharpe as the inaugural recipient of the Joseph and Dorothy Censer Fellowship. The fellowship was established by Drs. Jack and Jane Censer, longtime faculty members in the department, to recognize an outstanding graduate student who has made valuable contributions to the work of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Ms. Sharpe is a third-year Ph.D. student specializing in twentieth-century U.S. cultural history. Her dissertation, which will include a digital component, is titled “They Need You!: Disability, Visual Culture, and the Poster Child, 1945-1980.” She has worked at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as a graduate research assistant and has contributed to several projects, including the website for the Society for the History of Children and Youth and the online courses Hidden in Plain Sight and Virginia Studies. When informed that Ms. Sharpe had been named as the recipient, Jack Censer remarked, “Believing deeply in higher education and in history, the late Joseph and Dorothy Censer would be elated to know that they are assisting a young historian in studying and producing history in the intellectually sophisticated environment of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.” (Cross-posted from the Department of History and Art History)

Register now for the RRCHNM 20th Anniversary Conference

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:18:01 +0000

You can now register for the RRCHNM 20th Anniversary Conference at http://chnm.gmu.edu/20th/ The conference is a free two-day event on November 14 and 15, 2014, at George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus, that combines collaborative work, presentations and discussions, and unconference sessions. The first day will be spent hacking the history of RRCHNM, working collectively to tell the story of how projects were created and what they tell us about digital history’s past. The second day will feature short talks by invited guests, each followed by extended discussion, and unconference-style breakout sessions. Edward Ayers, Brett Bobley, and Bethany Nowviskie will share their thoughts on the future of digital humanities centers, while Tim Hitchcock, William Thomas, Kathryn Tomasek and a collective of GMU graduate students will offer visions of the future of digital history. Please register to reserve your spot at the RRCHNM 20th

Introducing the Proceedings of THATCamp!

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 14:51:23 +0000

THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, is an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels meet to learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot: it is a well-known and popular global unconference. The Proceedings of THATCamp is a wholly automatic collection of and portal to blog posts from around the THATCamp website network.

Proceedings of THATCamp

Because each THATCamp is organized independently and has an individual site on the THATCamp network, the Proceedings offers an easy way to view all the activity happening at THATCamps around the world. Posts are viewable by date, by topic, or by how often they have been “favorited” by THATCamp participants across the network. Tweets and pictures from the Flickr User Group also are aggregated in the Proceedings. The launch of the Proceedings features the most favorited posts since April 2008. The time will be updated periodically, to feature the most favorited posts in the last quarter or trimester. The Proceedings utilizes the features of both WordPress Multisite and a customized version of BuddyPress on the THATCamp.org site. Aggregation for the Proceedings is made possible by the WordPress MU Sitewide Tags plugin, the FeedWordPress plugin, and a custom plugin that relies on BuddyPress’s favoriting features. The web developers for the Proceedings were Boone Gorges and Aram Zucker-Scharff, while Kim Nguyen designed the theme. Amanda French, the THATCamp coordinator, served as chief editor and project manager. Congratulations to the whole team!

Discover the Histories of the National Mall

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 10:45:13 +0000

Why is this space called a “Mall?” Did cattle ever roam the Mall? How have protests changed over time?

Visitors will find answers to those questions, and more, in the new website, Histories of the National Mall mallhistory.org, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media with funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities. Access mallhistory.org from a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop and begin discovering the rich history that shaped the National Mall. The National Mall has a history of its own that is invisible when walking its paths. Most visitors see what appears to be a finished product: a deliberately planned landscape with memorials, monuments, and museums symbolizing the history and values of the United States. Designed at George Washington’s request by Pierre L’Enfant in 1790, the Mall in its earliest days was a messy place where transportation arteries and commercial markets existed. Lively neighborhoods bordered the Mall. Near the Capitol, pens held enslaved people and captured freemen like Solomon Northrup, awaiting sale to traders. Only after the 1880s did the Mall begin to transform into a place for commemoration and memorialization. Now known as a place of protest and political expression, the Mall also has a long tradition as a public park and place of leisure for Washingtonians and tourists who strolled winding pathways in gardens and learned from collections in the Smithsonian’s galleries. Citizens, government officials, and local businesspeople have shaped the history of this well-known public space—and very few know its history. Mallhistory.org offers 4 major sections to help visitors learn more about their National Mall:

Welcome, Wikipedia Affiliate

Wed, 05 Mar 2014 23:54:58 +0000

We are very pleased indeed to announce the appointment of Gary M. Greenbaum as Wikipedia Affiliate at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Mr. Greenbaum is an experienced Wikipedia editor and administrator who, under the username “Wehwalt,” has taken over a hundred Wikipedia articles to Featured Article status. Mr. Greenbaum has frequently contributed significantly to history-related Wikipedia articles on such topics as President Nixon’s Checkers speech, William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech during the 1896 presidential election, and the life and career of the Civil War abolitionist congressional representative Thaddeus Stevens. During his one-year affiliation with RRCHNM, Mr. Greenbaum will conduct scholarly research using the library resources of George Mason University in order to improve the accuracy and reliability at least 25 Wikipedia articles on historical topics, especially articles on historical figures with a Virginia connection such as Harry F. Byrd. Mr. Greenbaum will work in consultation with Professor Mills Kelly during his affiliate year. The Wikipedia Affiliate position at RRCHNM has been created in partnership with The Wikipedia Library project, whose mission is to help active Wikipedia editors gain access to the vital reliable sources that they need to do their work. The University of California at Riverside is also planning to host a “Wikipedia Visiting Scholar,” and we hope that other universities will join this effort to improve Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy by helping to provide Wikipedia editors with access to scholarly resources.

Join the Digital Humanities Now FeedFest, and help us keep our RSS feeds up to date!

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 12:00:17 +0000

Amanda Morton

Using the Pressforward plugin, DHNow pulls content from a collection of RSS feeds and allows Editors-at-Large to preview, sort, and nominate content for the editorial staff to review. In order to keep DHNow as current and as involved in conversations within the DH community as possible, we rely on readers to nominate RSS feeds to add to the plugin via a link on DHNow.

In the wake of the redesign and reorganization of digitalhumanitiesnow.org, however, we have the opportunity to more directly engage with DHNow’s community of readers and twitter followers. This week, beginning on February 24, we are calling for blog and resource submissions via twitter (@dhnow), as well as through the submission form on the DHNow homepage. We’re all hands on deck to take your suggestions, put them into the plugin, and make DHNow more current and more reflective of our readership’s interests.

New Online Resource: Sea of Liberty

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 12:00:13 +0000

From the Magna Carta to the Arab Spring, the quest for greater liberty and self-government has shaped history. Through a partnership between the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, educators and students now have access to liberty-related resources through the Sea of Liberty — an interactive online tool for teaching, exploring, and sharing the power of Jefferson’s ideas.

Visitors to Sea of Liberty can explore documents, letters, artwork, photographs, and videos related to the ideas of liberty, freedom, and self-governance. The core of the collection includes images and quotes from the Monticello exhibit, The Boisterous Sea of Liberty. The exhibit traces the development and ongoing influence of Jefferson’s transformational ideas about liberty, particularly those expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Sea of Liberty expands on the exhibit, providing new relevant content and tools to explore it. Registered users can build their own collections and then use the items to create activities and projects. A special teacher dashboard allows educators to create and assign activities, or “challenges,” that focus students on specific themes or objects in the collection. Students and the public respond to challenges by using items from their collection to create digital posters, word clouds, timelines, and digital stories. The projects can be shared to inspire others and promote dialogue. In addition, educators have access to resources related to teaching with primary sources, teaching historical thinking, and encouraging digital literacy. Teachers contributed to the website’s development as part of Monticello’s Liberty Today Initiative, a series of summer institutes with educators from across the U.S. and beyond. Generous support of this project was provided by The Coca-Cola Foundation.

Applications Open for Doing Digital History, NEH Summer Institute

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 11:00:18 +0000

Join us August 4-15, 2014 for Doing Digital History, a summer institute for mid-career American historians, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, run by RRCHNM faculty and visiting instructors. Doing Digital History is designed to fill a much-needed gap for 25 established historians who need instruction and a professional learning community to engage with new media methods and tools. We seek applications from a diverse pool of faculty, public historians, archivists, librarians, museum professionals, and independent scholars specializing in US history, who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions. Take a peek at our proposed schedule, and apply today. Applications will be open until March 15, 2014.

Applications Open for "Rebuilding the Portfolio: DH for Art Historians"

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:00:12 +0000

Join us July 7-18, 2014 for Rebuilding the Portfolio: DH for Art Historians, a summer institute at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History in New Media,supported by the Getty Foundation. Rebuilding the Portfolio: DH for Art Historians is designed for 20 art historians, from different stages of their careers and from varied backgrounds, including faculty, curators, art librarians, and archivists who are eager to explore the digital turn in the humanities. We seek applications from individuals who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing. Take a peek at our proposed schedule, and apply today. Applications will be open until March 15, 2014.

Position announcement: Wikipedia Affiliate, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 13:00:27 +0000

Position announcement: Wikipedia Affiliate, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

In conjunction with The Wikipedia Library project, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University is seeking applicants for a “Wikipedia Affiliate.” This is an unpaid, year-long, remote research position beginning March 1, 2014 and ending February 28, 2015 that entitles the affiliate to full library privileges at George Mason University, including proxied access to all online materials to which the GMU Libraries subscribe: more than 400 databases, thousands of scholarly journals and mainstream periodicals, and hundreds of ebooks. The position is designed to give research library access to a Wikipedia editor who does not currently have such access or who has only limited access to scholarly resources: the purpose of the position is to help improve Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy by providing Wikipedia editors with access to the best scholarly information resources while providing a model for other universities to do likewise.

Celebrate 20 Years of RRCHNM in November 2014

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 15:21:00 +0000

Plans are taking shape for the upcoming conference to mark the 20th anniversary of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, November 14-15, 2014. The conference will reflect the spirit of THATCamp: the first day will be spent hacking the history of RRCHNM, working collectively to tell the story of how projects were created and what they tell us about digital history’s past. The second day will feature short talks by invited guests, each followed by extended discussion, and unconference-style breakout sessions.

Happy Anniversary, PressForward!

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 13:30:48 +0000

Happy Anniversary, PressForward! Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and based at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the PressForward project was born two years ago with a mission to showcase the varied, dynamic, and provocative digital humanities scholarship published on the open web. To do this, the project has developed and nurtured two publications: Digital Humanities Now (DHNow) and the Journal of Digital Humanities (JDH). Those periodicals work hand in hand to surface gray literature and, at the same time, act as an experiment in open access publication. DHNow, developed four years ago and then relaunched as part of the PressForward initiative,is now published twice a week. Three times a year, JDH publishes a volume of articles culled from the material surfaced through DHNow, conferences, and other little-noticed online sources. In addition, PressForward has been working to develop the tools necessary to disseminate literature that benefits digital humanities communities. We’ve worked to put those tools in the hands of groups like dh+lib, and watched with excitement as their publications grew. The result of these efforts is a community of participants and practitioners that offer their time and talents each and every week. JDH and DHNow represent the labors of 175 editors, 100 authors, and ten faculty and graduate student staff members. But this anniversary, we also want to celebrate the readers that come to our sites each and every day. In 2013 alone, DHNow has seen more than 320,00 visits and 834,000 page views. During the month of October, more than ten thousand unique visitors came to that site. Though it is published far less frequently, JDH has seen more than 127,000 visits this year, with more than 414,00 page views. In September, it was able to keep pace with DHNow, welcoming nearly ten thousand unique visitors. If our research reveals anything, it’s the vibrancy and generosity of digital humanities communities. In celebration of those communities, this second anniversary will see the launch of an outreach campaign that will bring you more detail about our methods. We’ve already redesigned the DHNow website for easier reading and participation, particularly with a new Editors-at-Large Corner. Through blog posts like this one, we’ll be sharing our research and conclusions. And this spring, we’ll roll out the PressForward WordPress plugin, a tool designed to make the task of curating and aggregating gray literature easier and more accessible, in hopes that this is only the beginning of the projects and publications that PressForward makes possible. Be sure to watch @pressfwd for project updates and check out @dhnow and @journalofdh to follow digital humanities scholarship!

THATCamp Leadership & participad | DH Fellow's Blog

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 11:17:58 +0000

Ben Hurwitz (2nd year Digital History Fellow) On Thursday October 10, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and George Mason University welcomed DH’ers from around the globe to THATCamp Leadership 2013. For those of you who don’t know, THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) is an unconference series which was first held at George Mason in 2008. Since then, regional THATCamps have sprung up across the country and across several continents as well, hosted by universities or local DH communities. THATCamp Leadership, generously sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was quite different from a typical THATCamp. The invitation-only event partnered experienced THATCamp facilitators with academic and institutional leaders to discuss the future of THATCamp and the Digital Humanities generally. As a result, there were very few tech-centered sessions. Instead, broader session titles like “Building DH Locally,” “Sustaining and Altering THATCamp,” and “Digital Humanities and Online Education” predominated. In the spirit of collaboration, THATCamp Leadership 2013 debuted a cooperative “notepad” space for recording discussions. Using participad, a WordPress plugin, the DH fellows at CHNM created notepads for each sessions and served as dedicated note-takers. Participants could view and edit their sessions notepads, or view another session’s notepad in order to follow discussions elsewhere in the conference. While some participants preferred to tweet, take notes on paper, or just focus on listening, we did have some encouraging contributions which added to the richness of the record. To view our notes from all of the sessions, look here, and feel free to comment as well.

George Mason University is Hiring a Digital Historian

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 09:36:34 +0000

The George Mason University, Department of History and Art History invites applications for a tenure-track position in Digital History at the rank of Assistant Professor. While the historical field is open, candidates must have the ability to teach digital theory and methods at the undergraduate and graduate level, including a graduate course in programming (PHP, Python, Perl, Javascript, XML, for example). The teaching load is 2-2. Ph.D. must be in hand by August 2014. George Mason University is a public research university located 14 miles from Washington, D.C., with approximately 30,000 students. The Department of History and Art History has a strong record of scholarly research and is home to the award-winning Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The department also has the largest M.A. program in the country and a nationally ranked Ph.D. program. Special Instructions to Applicants For full consideration, please apply for position number F5343z at http://jobs.gmu.edu/. Complete the online faculty application and upload a letter of interest, CV, and a writing sample and/or a link to a digital project. Letters of reference should be sent separately to Professor Paula Petrik, Chair, Digital History Search, Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, MSN 3G1, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030. Review of applications will begin on November 15, 2013, and continue until the position is filled.

PressForward Editors-at-Large | DH Fellow's Blog

Mon, 14 Oct 2013 09:16:15 +0000

Amanda Morton (2nd year Digital History Fellow)

This semester the second year Digital History Fellows are sticking with one of the three divisions at RRCHNM (Research, Education, Public Projects) and participating in selected projects within those divisions. Some of us are coming in at the start of a new set of projects, while others are joining projects already in progress. There’s a certain benefit, I think, to being able to join a project in mid-flow and provide both an extra pair of hands and the type of feedback that comes from a fresh look at ongoing processes. By essentially acting as full-time floaters, we can also lend work hours and a different set of opinions to changes already set in motion,

How can technology help teachers to teach historical and critical thinking? | DH Fellow's Blogpost

Mon, 07 Oct 2013 09:00:59 +0000

Amanda Regan (1st Year Digital history Fellow) How can technology help teachers to teach historical and critical thinking? Getting students to think critically about historical events rather than just memorizing the facts is challenging, but digital technology can help. With so many new digital tools being developed each year, teachers are eager for resources to help locate free, quality tools that can help students become better critical thinkers and historians.

One of the RRCHNM’s projects, Teachinghistory.org, has a section called Digital Classroom devoted to providing tips and resources for incorporating digital tools into the classroom. The introductory video for Digital Classroom explains how digital tools can engage students and help them to think critically about the past. The goal of Digital Classroom is to provide teachers with resources to help them incorporate digital technology in their classroom and to provide examples of how to enhance learning by using technology in the classroom. To help teachers find free, digital tools for use in social studies classrooms, Digital Classroom includes a collection of digital tool reviews, called Tech for Teachers. Over the last week the Digital History Fellows have been researching and writing reviews for this section and we’ve been thinking a lot about what kinds of digital tools are useful for teaching historical thinking skills in the classroom. Tech for Teachers aims to provide detailed reviews of tools to help teachers evaluate ways in which it might be useful. Each review provides an overview of what users will experience when they use the tool as well as what the most important or useful features might be. Reviews generally include some examples or suggestions of ways that the tool is being used and may include examples of student work. The goal of these reviews is not only to help teachers find digital tools but also to help them evaluate what the tool offers that makes it unique and useful for learning. My Tech for Teacher’s review looked at a tool called myHistrowhich allows users to create “geolocated maps with a social twist.” Timelines and maps are two tools that are commonly used to teach history. However, now these tools have gone digital and several sites have created platforms that combine the two. They allow users to create interactive stories that utilize timelines, maps, and multimedia such as videos and photos to tell a story. Using these tools encourages students to think critically about historical events, their causes and effects, and how individual events culminate into a larger movement.

To help teachers see how students and teachers are using myHistro, I provided several examples and discussed how teachers might use this tool as either a presentation or as an assignment for students. Many teachers are using myHistro as an assignment for group projects in which students create a story about the development of a historical event or movement. One example is the student project, Road to the Civil War, where students created a story composed of the events that they thought led to the Civil War. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase and ending with the election of Lincoln in 1860, the students reflected on each event and wrote a synopsis about why each event led to the Civil War. Another example is a collaborative AP U.S. History project where each student added an event related to their curriculum. The story was then a review source that included all the major events the class had discussed and could be used to help study for the AP exam. While researching and writing my Tech for Teachers review, I learned a lot about how K-12 teachers are using technology to teach historical thinking in the classroom. One thing that I took away is that integrating technology into the classroom is a complicated process. Guiding students to use a digital tool in a way that will improve upon traditional ways of teaching history requires a great deal of planning. I came to appreciate how much thought and critical evaluation is necessary for digital tools to be used effectively in a classroom setting. Good history teaching is first and foremost based on good historical thinking skills. Digital tools and technology help to guide, challenge, and engage students but they don’t do that on their own. The technology must be paired with teaching skills to critically engage history.

How It's Made: Public History Projects | DH Fellow's Blogpost

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 17:10:58 +0000

Spencer Roberts (2nd Year Digital history Fellow) In a recent conversation, a friend inquired about the projects on which I am working here at the RRCHNM. I explained that I am currently assigned to a project about the War of 1812 on behalf of the National Park Service, and described the basic elements of the project. “I understand the project,” she replied, “but what do you actually do?” Our exchange illuminated an issue that seems obvious but is rarely addressed: the average American is told little about the work that goes into producing public history or heritage projects. Although such projects and exhibits dot the social landscape in parks, museums, galleries, libraries, books, and the web, the processes of preserving, interpreting, and presenting the past are largely hidden from users. In response to these observations, I’d like to describe some of work done by researchers to produce public history projects. Each project taken on by the RRCHNM staff has unique characteristics that shape the processes by which it is built, but some projects inevitably require similar constructions. The September 11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and other projects all required a platform to host large collections of digital materials; as a result, development staff spent time designing databases, interfaces, and processes that ensure effective and efficient preservation and presentation of archived material. The results of that work are usually invisible to the user, hidden in the background or simply presented without loud attribution. A project without visible seams will cause fewer inquiries about its design. One answer to these recurring needs is Omeka, a “free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.” Many projects are built upon the foundations provided by the Omeka platform, and staff now spend more time customizing the visual, functional, and historical components of these sites. Additionally, researchers spend some of their time testing the updates for upcoming versions of Omeka, which improves subsequent projects at the center, but also supports users of Omeka who build projects at other institutions and centers. The work of the public projects division at RRCHNM has increasingly been expanded to include both production of projects and resources for building. Another major task for public projects is historical interpretation and representation. For the War of 1812 project, for instance, our research team is not designing a new site for hosting a collection; we are, instead, designing historical content and packages that fit into the existing NPS structures. Given specific functional and presentational limitations, we brainstormed ways in which we could shape the experience of users and best represent the complexities of a little-known war. In some ways, this project is a sober reminder of the restrictions often placed on researchers in a field with limited funding, few resources, and overextended staff. Not every project can afford to build a new site, create a new archive, or even redesign the look of existing sites. In these cases, researchers must be innovative within constraints. The specific tasks for researchers vary across different projects. In some cases, they must double-check the transcriptions provided by volunteers, ensuring accuracy despite limited resources. At times, they might write brief historical summaries for virtual exhibits, enabling tourists to glimpse the unknown past of a battlefield or National Mall. Recently, I have been finding evidence about individuals who lived during the War of 1812 and whose stories will illustrate some of the historical arguments we have chosen to present. We believe that the stories of a war widow, a deserter, a politician, a nurse, a soldier, a surgeon, or a traitor can help illuminate the past, and provide a basis from which to build an interpretation of the events and decisions of that time. To return to our question at the outset, researchers on public history projects (and in many areas) might easily have a different task each day and may never repeat those tasks. Describing what researchers do is difficult because it changes regularly; describing what researchers have done provides typical examples and possibilities. More important than asking what, however, is asking how. In all tasks, researchers use critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and other scholarly skills to ensure that their product meets the standards expected by their peers and the public. For graduate students, observing how research is conducted in each task is the most important lesson.

Getty Foundation Funds a Digital Humanities Summer Institute for Art Historians at RRCHNM

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 10:00:50 +0000

The Getty Foundation recently awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media a grant to organize and run a digital humanities summer institute for art historians in 2014. “Digital Humanities for Art Historians” will target art historians, from graduate students, to mid-career and senior scholars, from varied backgrounds, including faculty, curators, and established art librarians and archivists who are eager to move more deeply into the digital turn in the humanities. Recognizing a significant need in this area, the Getty Foundation is sponsoring this project as part of a pilot initiative to support training workshops in digital art history. The Getty Foundation fulfills the philanthropic mission of the Getty Trust by supporting individuals and institutions committed to advancing the greater understanding and preservation of the visual arts in Los Angeles and throughout the world. Project Co-Directors, Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon are thrilled to be working with the Getty Foundation for the first time through this initiative and to be addressing issues specific to art historians together with fellow members of GMU’s History and Art History Department. Applications for this summer institute will be announced in early 2014. Watch the RRCHNM blog, @chnm on Twitter, and major art history-related listservs for the call.

Track our latest code commits

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 15:55:22 +0000

To see the ongoing work on RRCHNM’s software development projects, you can visit their GitHub repositories:

The Challenges of Making a Challenge | DH Fellow's Blogpost

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 09:00:31 +0000

Anne McDivitt (1st year Digital History Fellow) For the past few weeks at the Center for History and New Media, my fellow first year Digital History Fellows and myself were assigned to work in the Education division, which produces projects that are designed to teach history to a wide scope of people through various educational resources. While in the Education division, we have been working with a new web project meant to engage and educate the audience by allowing them to examine liberty in the United States in a new and interesting way. This is achieved by incorporating age and ability-appropriate “challenges” and access to primary documents and images. This project seeks an audience of teachers, K-12 students, as well as the general public. There are intriguing methods in creating a challenge for students. While creating our own challenge for the project, there were multiple questions that we had to ask ourselves. First, what was the goal of the project? What did we want the students to achieve from doing the challenge? What skills would they use? In terms of examining the sources, we attempted to view them in an analytic manner, but with a basic guided direction so that the students do not get overwhelmed. We wanted the students to come away with an understanding of the importance of understanding not only the document itself, but also their context. By giving the students a choice of what documents they could utilize for their own project, it allows them to view our examples and use the skills they gained to create an interesting project from their understanding. Although this project has yet to publicly launch, I have been testing the website from multiple angles to ensure that it will work properly for the end users. This has certainly been a fun process for me, as I have had to work as both a teacher and a student! This meant that I had to get myself into a mindset of, “if I were in tenth grade, how would I have completed this assignment? What did I know? What did I not know?” It was also quite engaging to utilize the primary documents and photographs in conjunction with the provided tools to create interesting projects with the website. I would imagine that K-12 aged students would also find this to be quite exciting, but I also think that it would be a fun experience for teachers who are designing challenges for their students, as well. I know all of the DH Fellows that worked on this project took our assignments very seriously beyond just the testing phase, as we worked for hours to perfect our challenge assignments!

RRCHNM Welcomes Stephanie Westcott

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:27:13 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are very happy to welcome Stephanie Westcott to our ranks as a Research Assistant Professor. Stephanie is a historian of U.S. popular culture, with a recent dissertation from University of Wisconsin, Madison titled “Producing Panic: Media, Morality, and American Sexuality, 1945–1970.” She spent last year teaching in the Democracy and justice Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. In addition to her research and teaching background, Westcott brings to RRCHNM her extensive and impressive professional experience working in the publishing industry at a small independent press and in public history. She will serve as a new project director on PressForward, working with Joan Troyano and Lisa Rhody. Welcome Stephanie!

Readings Course in Digital History | DH Fellow's blogpost

Fri, 20 Sep 2013 10:00:01 +0000

Ben Hurwitz (2nd year Digital History Fellow) Since its inception, the George Mason history PhD program has emphasized exposure to the Digital Humanities (DH). The program requires completion of two courses that introduce students to digital tools and developments in the DH community. In addition to these courses and others, the department also allows students to pursue a minor field in Digital History. This summer, seven graduate students, including four graduate research assistants at RRCHNM, participated in a readings course to complete the Digital History minor. Working with Dr. Kelly Schrum, our class explored creative uses for social media, games, digital maps, and data visualizations. This readings course was atypical in that the students were expected to demonstrate mastery through frequent creative assignments in addition to discussing influential publications and debates within the field. The products of these assignments demonstrate the wide-ranging applications of digital technology for teaching, learning, research, and presentation of scholarship. For example, in one assignment I used Google Art Project to create a gallery of artwork depicting sheep and shepherds. Using this gallery, I showed that sheep are often associated with specific concepts, such as solitude, religious devotion, or an idyllic landscape. Within minutes, I was able to gather and organize sources in order to visually support an argument about popular perceptions of sheep farming (you can see the gallery and a fuller explanation here). Here we had an exercise that was quick and low-tech, yet could create a meaningful product. It was easy to see how this same exercise could be formatted into a valuable learning assignment for history students. At the other end of the spectrum, David Mackenzie’s interactive map, Santa Anna Goes to Washington, resulted from very detailed original research. The map retraces Santa Anna’s 1836 journey, providing precise locations where the general’s party is known to have stopped. These locations are annotated with valuable primary and secondary source material. David’s project provides the user with a rich understanding of a strange and fascinating journey. Furthermore, the process of compiling the map was in itself a fruitful exercise that furthered his understanding of Santa Anna and his research more broadly. That leads me to the most important lesson learned in this course – that people learn more by doing, by interacting, and by creating. This simple rule applies equally to students in a classroom, to visitors in a museum, and to readers of scholarship. The Internet has made a vast amount of historical source material available to a wide audience, but it has also opened the door for greater engagement with that same material. As teachers, we have the opportunity to create more interactive classrooms where students are able to explore sources and create products independently. As scholars, we have the opportunity to improve our research while drawing our audience toward a closer reading of our work. It is lamentable that in many ways our discipline is dominated by final products, from the way students are graded to the way academic scholarship is judged. In this course, we privileged process over product; methodologies were always shared and creative failures were accepted, even celebrated. If we can imagine for one minute that the Internet had never existed, it would still be in our interest, from a pedagogical perspective, to place more emphasis on the process of doing history. Given the reality of our digital environment, more interactive forms of teaching and scholarship are steadily gaining appeal. This course, and the minor field more generally, have helped me to anticipate changes in a field where students and other audience members will be increasingly involved in the process.

RRCHNM Graduate Students Organize Inaugural Rails Girls DH

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 10:10:22 +0000

Guest post by RRCHNM Graduate Research Assistants, Jeri Wieringa and Celeste Sharpe As women graduate students working in digital humanities, we know first-hand the gender gap in our field. With few women programmers working in the digital humanities, and a lack of opportunities generally for women learning to code, there is a serious need for creative solutions to these systemic problems. Building on current conversations about the cultural and structural obstacles that make it difficult for women to learn to code, we decided to organize a workshop where women interested in programming could come together and learn.

On September 7, forty-five people came together and participated in Rails Girls Digital Humanities at George Mason University. This one-day, intensive workshop combined the intellectual pursuits of humanities scholars with the structure of Rails Girls, an international movement of free workshops that introduce women to technology and programming through Ruby on Rails. This combination offers both an entry point for understanding the technology behind web applications as well as an opportunity to grow a community of academic women interested in the code that powers digital humanities scholarship. Thirty women–undergraduate and graduate students, librarians and archivists, scholars and professors–from the DC metro area, Virginia, Boston, and California comprised our inaugural group. Nine coaches guided the participants throughout the workshop: Annie Swafford, Brandon Walsh, Jeremy Boggs, and Wayne Graham from the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab; Jim Smith from University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; and Patrick Murray-John from Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media along with local professional developers Jason Wieringa, Karen Gillison, and Sean Marcia. Together, the participants and coaches hacked their way through a day of talks and coding sprints, building a mapping application and discussing various way to incorporate code with humanities scholarship. We are very grateful for the enthusiastic support we received from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the Association for Computers in the Humanities, George Mason’s History and Art History Department and Provost’s Office, the American Association of University Women, and GitHub. Their support, as well as the positive responses from both participants and coaches, has reinforced our commitment to this approach for creating coding opportunities for women in the humanities. Building on this experience, we will further refine the model of Rails Girls and plan to offer additional workshops to continue to expand the opportunities for academic women interested in code.

The Impact of Education Projects | DH Fellow's blogpost

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 13:55:46 +0000

As fellows in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, my cohort and I will spend the better part of this year working within the three divisions, engaged in hands-on work with the tools and projects CHNM produces. We’ve begun our foray in the educational projects division of CHNM and as I described in my introductory blog, the content and materials created and maintained in this area are expansive. Projects like Children and Youth in History, Popular Romance, History Matters, and others, are built with commitment to open access content and resources in history education. And these efforts consistently earn awards. The American Association for State and Local History recently recognized CHNM’s Teachinghistory.org with a 2013 Leadership in History Award of Merit. But how do we evaluate the impact of the work that we do? As we assess the resources required, apply for funding, and think about site maintenance, this is a question that we frequently revisit in the digital humanities. I took the opportunity to sit down with Kelly Schrum, director of educational projects at CHNM and director of Teachinghistory.org, and Jennifer Rosenfeld, associate director of educational projects at CHNM, to discuss impact and their vision of work within the Center. As they explained, impact may be measured in terms of reach: How many people utilize the resources CHNM provides? Who are they? Teachinghistory.org (launched in 2007 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education), for instance, is a free, online resource for K-12 teachers. The site receives more than a million unique visitors and 100 million hits each year. According to an independent evaluation, the majority of visitors to the site are K-12 teachers, but its resources are also accessed by librarians, homeschoolers, public historians, curriculum coordinators, administrators, and teacher educators. The growth of Teachinghistory.org, as Rosenfeld described, relied on a combination of substantive, relevant content and a commitment to building an audience. What CHNM has found is that when one teacher finds the content useful, they share it. And in turn those educators recommend it to others. In fact, of those surveyed, 88% of respondants indicated that they were very or extremely likely to recommend it to a friend and over a third learned about the site from a colleague. 98% of users said they found what they were looking for and more than 40% found more than expected. Impact can also be described in terms of scope. Teachinghistory.org provides a wealth of primary and secondary source materials as well as multimedia content (averaging 5 terabytes of bandwidth usage annually). These are not merely databases of digitized sources, however. The site also provides guides on how to use primary sources, lesson plans, instructional videos, history quizzes, teaching strategies, and examples of best practices. An important aspect of this content is that it allows for many ways of teaching history. Teachers are able to utilize these resources in part or whole as they structure their teaching. CHNM is committed to creating resources that teachers can share and integrate into their classrooms in multiple ways. As Schrum and Rosenfeld shared with me, we create digital content with many audiences in mind. For example, the Teachinghistory.org homepage features a video called “What is Historical Thinking?” Interestingly, Dr. Schrum and Rosenfeld have noted that not only do teachers use it, but also professional development coordinators and museum educators conducting teacher workshops. The Center endeavors to craft content in a way that shapes the experience of users and lends itself to flexibility of application. To this end, emphasis has been placed on producing resources that connect teachers to digital tools, website reviews, and strategies for effective teaching in history classrooms. Impact may also be assessed by the degree to which the content shapes and promotes new teaching strategies. CHNM demonstrates a commitment to promoting professional development for educators. For example, CHNM created a guide for developing successful professional development partnerships with museums, historic sites, and libraries. Further, the Center offers two online, asynchronous professional development courses for teachers – Virginia Studies in the fall and Hidden in Plain Sight in the spring. Not only do these courses engage teachers with content in new ways, but teaching practices and tools are also addressed. Dr. Schrum and CHNM Graduate Research Assistant Nate Sleeter described the impact of this type of teaching programming in a recent article in OAH Magazine of History [extract available here]. As a CHNM fellow, a key aspect of my experience here has been learning about the behind-the-scenes work that is required to develop and maintain the range of projects at CHNM. As someone new to the field of digital history, I was curious about key differences between analog and digital teaching with no real idea of the varied tools and resources available here. What I’ve learned from this exercise is just how much reflecting and revising is required in order to maintain a responsive, living resource, and how broad the impact of these resources has been.

Remembering with the September 11 Digital Archive

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 08:50:02 +0000

During this day of remembrance, we urge you to browse through some of the materials collected by the September 11th Digital Archive, a collaborative effort between RRCNHM and the American Social History Project at the City University of New York to preserve and present the history of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath.

Officially launched in 2002, the Archive is among the earliest online collecting projects that championed the crowdsourcing of materials from anyone effected by September 11 and interested in sharing their stories, photographs, digital art, audio recordings, documents, or videos. The site’s blog is highlighting special collections within the digital archive, groups like the Madison Area Peace Coalition that organized soon after September 11 and collaborated with other groups with similar objectives. These source materials offer researchers an opportunity to trace the organization and growth of one post-911 political movement. With over 150,000 digital items, the Archive is large and has become increasingly challenging to manage. To help preserve this valuable collection of unique user-generated content and specialized collections, the project team is working with a Saving America’s Treasures grant to stabilize the current infrastructure and move all of the collections to the Omeka platform. Digital Archivist Jim Safely, is spearheading those efforts and is making progress by carefully and slowly transferring and testing the migration of every item in the project to ensure that it will be preserved and more accessible for years to come. Stay tuned to the September 11 Digital Archive blog for additional collection highlights and updates on the migration process.

Digital History Fellows At RRCHNM

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 14:08:14 +0000

The first Monday all-staff meeting of the year at RRCHNM was devoted to an orientation for the fourteen Graduate Research Assistants (GRAs) who will be working at the Center in 2013-14. GRAs are a key part of the Center’s staff, working in a range of capacities on projects in all three divisions – Education, Public Projects, and Research – and in some cases on multiple projects in different divisions (watch for future posts describing exactly what they are doing).

RRCHNM Welcomes Lisa Rhody

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 14:12:00 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are happy to welcome Lisa Rhody to our ranks as a Research Assistant Professor. Lisa comes to us having completed a doctorate in English at the University of Maryland at the end of 2012. Her dissertation made use of computational analysis to explore the ekphrastic work of twentieth-century female poets to challenge widely held critical assumptions about the genre. At RRCHNM, Rhody will be engaged on several different projects. First, in the Public Projects Division, she continues the work she began on a part time basis several months ago, guiding the programming for the Institute of Museum and Library Service’s annual WebWise meeting. This conference brings together cutting edge digital work from the nation’s libraries, archives, museums, and science centers. Second, in conjunction with the year-long planning that goes into making WebWise a success, Rhody is also contributing to a number of institutional planning and digital strategy projects. Together this work places her at the heart of the Center’s efforts to encourage innovative digital cultural heritage work. Third, Rhody will serve as the co-editor of the Journal of Digital Humanities, the flagship publication of the PressForward project. This work will bring Rhody’s insights to the Research Division and will capitalize on her years of experience with digital editing projects. Finally, Rhody will join a host of other faculty and staff in the ongoing efforts to share and support our digital tools. In sum, Rhody will be at the forefront of the Center’s efforts to interface with digital humanities scholars and the larger cultural heritage community. Welcome, Lisa! Lisa Rhody blogs at http://www.lisarhody.com

One Week | One Tool Team Launches Serendip-o-matic

Fri, 02 Aug 2013 15:15:15 +0000

After five days and nights of intense collaboration, the One Week | One Tool digital humanities team has unveiled its web application: Serendip-o-matic «http://serendipomatic.org». Unlike conventional search tools, this “serendipity engine” takes in any text, such as an article, song lyrics, or a bibliography. It then extracts key terms, delivering similar results from the vast online collections of the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and Flickr Commons. Because Serendip-o-matic asks sources to speak for themselves, users can step back and discover connections they never knew existed. The team worked to re-create that moment when a friend recommends an amazing book, or a librarian suggests a new source. It’s not search, it’s serendipity.

Serendip-o-matic works for many different users. Students looking for inspiration can use one source as a springboard to a variety of others. Scholars can pump in their bibliographies to help enliven their current research or to get ideas for a new project. Bloggers can find open access images to illustrate their posts. Librarians and museum professionals can discover a wide range of items from other institutions and build bridges that make their collections more accessible. In addition, millions of users of RRCHNM’s Zotero can easily run their personal libraries through Serendip-o-matic. Serendip-o-matic is easy to use and freely available to the public. Software developers may expand and improve the open-source code, available on GitHub. The One Week | One Tool team has also prepared ways for additional archives, libraries, and museums to make their collections available to Serendip-o-matic. A team of twelve dynamic scholars, librarians, and students conceived and built Serendip-o-matic during the One Week | One Tool Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Twelve strangers worked toward a common goal and stepped into unfamiliar roles. “The intense process isn’t just about rapid prototyping – it’s about building rapid trust,” reflected Mia Ridge, the lead of the design/development team. The group members learned new skills that they will take home and share with their colleagues around the world. To learn more about Serendip-o-matic, visit, «http://serendiptomatic.org». For more information about the process and the team, see «http://www.oneweekonetool.org/>>, or follow #owot on Twitter.

Another Week | Another Tool Begins

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 16:11:01 +0000

This week, RRCHNM is once again hosting the One Week | One Tool Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The big question for this week is can a dozen scholars, students, and librarians build a digital humanities tool in one week? And if so, what will they learn in the process? Participants were selected in a competitive process from an international pool of over thirty applicants. While the tool remains under wraps until Friday, August 2nd, the team is sharing details about their collaborative work process.

Photo, Brian Croxall

To decide what to build, the team engaged in an open brainstorming process and nominated software application ideas to meet the needs of humanities researchers and educators. They then invited public feedback to inform their decision-making. Nearly one hundred people posted comments and voted for their favorite ideas. (Although the poll has closed, see results at http://oneweekonetool.ideascale.com). “I was surprised by the number of engaged commentators actively watching what we build,” explains Meghan Frazer, a digital resources curator from Ohio State University whom the group selected to be their project co-manager. Tom Scheinfeldt, the RRCHNM director-at-large who organized OWOT, describes it as “a generative event: it’s live, public, and involves the creativity of people both inside and outside the room” through the power of social media. The group divided themselves into smaller work teams to focus on design, development, and outreach. Mia Ridge, the OWOT lead developer and a doctoral candidate at the U.K.’s Open University, led the participants in sketching out the software architecture. “Sketching out an idea,” she observes, “is a great way to make sure everyone has a more concrete picture of what the group is talking about, and for me, it’s also a quick test of the technical viability of the idea.” While the outreach team collaboratively wrote a vision for the tool, members of the design and development team identified a common software language for this highly agile development project. “Getting 12 strangers to remember each others’ names—let alone blend skills across teams to make something entirely new—means we hardly have time to eat, let alone sleep,” remarks Brian Croxall, another OWOT project co-manager and a digital strategist and lecturer at Emory University.

Photo, Brian Croxall

As the team scrambles to finish their code and outreach preparations for the Friday August 2nd launch, follow their progress via the Twitter hashtag #owot.

NEH Funds RRCHNM's "Doing Digital History" Summer Institute

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 06:36:55 +0000

The National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media one of three grants in their Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program. With this generous support, the Public Projects division will organize and host, “Doing Digital History: An Institute for Mid-Career American Historians” during the summer of 2014. “Doing Digital History” begins to fill a much-needed gap for established historians who need instruction and a professional learning community to engage with new media methods and tools. We will seek applications from historians who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions. NEH IADTH grants support a wide range of training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through these programs, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities. Planning for “Doing Digital History” will commence this fall, and a call for applications will be announced in early 2014. Watch the RRCHNM blog, @chnm Twitter account, and major H-Net listservs for the call for applications. In the meantime, don’t forget to follow along with the progress of this week’s One Week | One Tool IADTH on twittter (#owot).

Teachinghistory.org Wins 2013 AASLH Award of Merit

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 11:04:02 +0000

Teachinghistory.org is honored to receive an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH).

The AASLH Leadership in History Award, now in its 68th year, is the most prestigious recognition for achievement in the preservation and interpretation of state and local history. Teachinghistory.org is a free online resource for K-12 teachers that has been called “a ‘non-negotiable’ — a tool so valuable no history teacher should try teaching without it” (History Tech Blog). Originally funded by a 2007 U.S. Department of Education contract, the website welcomes over 1.7 million visitors annually from all 50 states and more than 150 countries. While the majority of users are K-12 teachers, the site is also a favorite of librarians, social studies methods instructors, homeschoolers, and public historians.

Presentation of the awards will be made during the 2013 AASLH Annual Meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 20. The AASLH awards program was initiated in 1945 to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history throughout the United States. The AASLH Leadership in History Awards not only honor significant achievement in the field of state and local history, but also bring public recognition of the opportunities for small and large organizations, institutions, and programs to make contributions in this arena.

Post-Doc Opportunity with PressForward

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 12:07:58 +0000

The PressForward project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) now invites applications for a one-year position (with the possibility of renewal) at the rank of Research Assistant Professor. The successful candidate will work with the project directors to manage the publication of Digital Humanities Now and the Journal of Digital Humanities, as well as to perform project outreach and to experiment with new forms of open-access digital publishing. A Ph.D. in history or a closely related field is required. The ideal candidate will also possess some or all of the following qualities:

RRCHNM Announces Stephen Robertson As Its New Director

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:28:14 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University is delighted to announce that Stephen Robertson will become the new director of the center. Robertson joins RRCHNM and Mason from the History Department at the University of Sydney, where he has been since 2000. Prior to the University of Sydney, Robertson completed his PhD at Rutgers University and was a post-doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago (1997-98). He also taught for a semester at Massey University in New Zealand. Stephen has won a number of teaching awards, including a Carrick Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2006 and a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008. At Sydney, he also served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Matters, and coordinator of the American Studies Program. Robertson is well known in digital history for his work on Digital Harlem, which he created with his collaborators in the Black Metropolis project. Digital Harlem won the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the ABC-CLIO Online History Award of the American Library Association in 2010. Robertson’s personal history with George Mason University and Roy Rosenzweig go further back: from 1998-99, he was the JNG Finley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Art History at Mason. “It is wonderful to be able to pass the baton to Stephen, who shares with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media a profound interest in the democratization of history through digital media and technology, and whose scholarship and digital work aligns so well with that vision,” said Dan Cohen, the outgoing director of RRCHNM. Department Chair Brian Platt added, “Stephen brings an impressive set of strengths to this position. He is perfectly suited to work with the staff at the center to push it in new directions while remaining true to its founding principles and goals.” “My introduction to digital history came during my fellowship at George Mason and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to return and help the Center continue to pursue the vision, so powerfully elaborated by Roy and Dan, of working with educators, libraries and museums, and scholars to develop new ways to preserve and present history online, to reach broad audiences, and to encourage popular participation in efforts to understand the past,” Robertson said. Stephen Robertson will join the center and the department in July.

Wikimédia France Research Award 2013

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:15:08 +0000

The first winner of the Wikimedia France Research Award is… Can history be open source ? Wikipedia and the future of the past by Roy Rosenzweig, published in The Journal of American History in 2006. This choice was made from thirty scientific publications on Wikimedia projects and free knowledge, directly submitted by the Wikimedia community. Among these publications, a jury of researchers working on these topics selected 5 finalists. Each Wikimedian, along with the jury members, was encouraged to give their opinion and vote among these five finalists to determine the most relevant. Jury members and wikimedians for this publication described Roy’s article as a “very stimulating read” and Roy as " a pioneer in digital history, incorporating new digital media and technology with history to explore new possibilities to reach a larger and diverse public audience.", with significant impact in the field of digital history, almost 160 citations in other scientific publications, according to Google Scholar. You can view the full publication here : http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42 and the dedicated website : http://researchaward.wikimedia.fr/en Wikimédia France has decided to award the price of € 2,500 to the Center for History and New Media, founded in 1994 by Roy Rosenzweig. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is honored to receive the award on behalf of Roy Rosenzweig.

THATCamp CHNM 2013

Thu, 02 May 2013 14:59:15 +0000

The Humanities and Technology Camp is a free, open unconference where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot. Since its founding at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008, more than 105 THATCamps have been held in places all around the world, helping more than 6000 students, scholars, and professionals improve their skills in the digital humanities while meeting terrific, smart people from all kinds of fields and professions. The sixth annual THATCamp CHNM will take place June 7-8, 2013 at the Roy Center for History and New Media in Fairfax, VA. Spots are still available, and the whole event is free. At an unconference, the program is mostly created on the first day by the participants themselves, but pre-scheduled events include a Wikipedia “editathon” where participants edit Wikipedia, a manuscript “transcribathon” where participants transcribe and tag digital historical documents, and workshops on topics such as how to use JSTOR Data for Research to analyze a massive archive of scholarly journal articles. A “Maker Challenge” will offer THATCamp CHNM participants prizes such as an iPad Mini for any original project begun that weekend. Register now while space is still available. Everyone is welcome, and THATCamp is notoriously fun, productive, and collegial.

Popular Romance Project Receives NEH Funding

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:37:15 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that the Popular Romance Project has received an America’s Media Makers Production Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Public Programs.

This collaborative, multimedia, cross-platform project—including a documentary film, a symposium, and a national library program—is designed to explore popular romance broadly, examining change over time in the content, art, business, and reception of romance novels. Taking love and its stories seriously, wherever they may be found, the Popular Romance Project will spark a lively, thoughtful conversation between fans, authors, scholars, and the general public about the writing, production, and consumption of popular romance, including its history and transformation in the digital age. The project blog, launched in February 2012, receives more than 125,000 visitors and 500,000 page views annually from across the U.S. and from more than 140 countries. The blog features video interviews and essays by scholars, authors, readers, librarians, and industry insiders. With this funding, we will develop an expanded website—including hundreds of new video interviews and blog posts, games that explore branding and marketing, and archival materials—as well as a mobile version. The project aims to bring relevant scholarship from a wide range of disciplines, including English, history, popular culture, folklore, digital humanities, communication, media studies, business, marketing, psychology, anthropology, and sociology to a mass audience in an engaging, accessible way and to bring new audiences into the conversation about the nature of love, romance, and their expression in novels and popular culture more broadly.

In partnership with filmmaker Laurie Kahn (Blueberry Hill Productions), the Library of Congress Center for the Book, and the American Library Association Public Programs Office, the project has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mass Humanities, Romance Writers of America, and the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University as well as donations from individuals around the world. Learn more.

Another Successful WebWise Conference

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:16:45 +0000

Once again this year, RRCHNM collaborated with the Institute of Museum and Library Services to plan and produce the agency’s signature WebWise conference, http://imlswebwise.org/, held March 6-8, 2013 in Baltimore, Maryland. Due to the Center’s experience with unconference formats, RRCHNM’s WebWise team— Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon, Lisa Rhody, and Tom Scheinfeldt— was asked to reorient WebWise toward a more participatory format, one that allowed conference participants more opportunities to ask questions, to engage with potential collaborators, to learn new skills, and to develop more fully early-stage project ideas. To meet the challenge, WebWise2013 modeled in its format the conference’s theme: “Putting the Learner at the Center” by engaging conference participants at every planning stage. The WebWise 2013 committee eliminated traditional plenary sessions in favor of more workshops; expanded upon the exchange of new ideas through project demonstrations; and facilitated working groups where participants could develop new collaborations and initiatives, and revise existing ones. To bring the conference theme full circle, RRCHNM recruited keynote speaker Audrey Watters, who asked the crowd: “Whose learning is it anyway?” The more hands-on format of WebWise 2013 is most evident in the number of opportunities this year’s participants had to learn a new skill, to connect with other IMLS grantees, to share their ongoing work, and to receive feedback and constructive comments on new project ideas. For example, WebWise offered:

Director Call for Applications Now Open

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:31:45 +0000

The official job ad for our new director is now up on our university’s HR site. Please encourage great people to apply!

George Mason University invites applications for the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is approaching its 20th anniversary as a leading digital humanities institution that seeks to democratize access to history, educate using digital media and technology, and transform research methods for 21st century. Responsibilities The Director’s responsibilities include: providing an overall vision of innovation for RRCHNM; articulating this vision to multiple audiences; raising substantial project funds and for RRCHNM’s endowment; handling administrative duties related to budgeting and personnel; and launching major new initiatives. The Director will work closely with RRCHNM senior staff in three divisions: Education, Public Projects, and Research. Qualifications Candidates should have a strong record of digital innovation, managerial experience, and grant-getting. It is expected that this hire will be made at the senior-level (i.e., full or advanced associate). This position will start in the fall of 2013. George Mason University is a public research university located approximately 14 miles from Washington, D.C., with over 30,000 students. Global education and research are a fundamental part of the university’s mission to serve its diverse and international student body. RRCHNM is part of the Department of History and Art History, which has the largest M.A. program in the country and a nationally ranked Ph.D. program.

Dan Cohen Selected as Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:18:24 +0000

For over twelve years, with the last five as director, Dan Cohen has offered the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) the benefit of his vision, strong leadership, and dedication. Now Dan will be departing to bring his energy and creativity to the Digital Public Library of America. Congratulations, Dan! George Mason University’s Department of History and Art History and RRCHNM are preparing to launch a comprehensive search to fill Dan’s position, and we will post the job ad here shortly. As always, the work of RRCHNM continues under the guidance of its senior directors and drawing on the rich experience of the staff who have sustained its innovation for nearly twenty years. We look forward to advancing our mission to use technology to preserve and present history digitally, transform scholarship across the humanities, and improve historical education and understanding. There are many exciting ventures to come, and we are eager to share them with the digital humanities communities, as well as to continue our collaborations with Dan even if it’s across institutions!

http://dp.la/2013/03/05/dan-cohen-named-founding-executive-director-of-the-digital-public-library-of-america/

Online U.S. History Course: Hidden in Plain Sight (Sp 2013)

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:08:49 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is pleased to announce Hidden in Plain Sight, an online U.S. history course created for teachers with funding from the Virginia Department of Education. This Spring 2013 course may be taken for recertification points or for graduate credit.

http://edchnm.gmu.edu/hidden

45 Recertification Points Participants work through eight modules. In each module, requirements include writing a hypothesis, exploring historical context, completing a quiz, and reflecting on classroom applications. The cost is $40. Register by January 16, 2013. 3 Graduate Credits For graduate credit, teachers participate in a related course with eight modules. In each module, requirements include writing a hypothesis, exploring historical context, reading scholarly articles, completing a quiz, and reflecting on classroom applications. Participants will design and produce a lesson on the hidden history of a historical object as the final project. The cost is $800 for Virginia residents ($875 out-of-state). Pre-register by January 16, 2013. Visit the course website for more information.

THATCamp Website Redesign-Live Q & A

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:46:46 +0000

We are coming to the end of our public beta period for the redesigned thatcamp.org, and to celebrate, we’re going to host a live question and answer session on Twitter. On Friday, December 7th at 10am Eastern, we’ll take half an hour to answer your questions about the process and product of our redesign. If you’re interested in either THATCamp or website redesign in general, keep an eye on the #thatcamp hashtag and/or the @thatcamp Twitter account at 10am Eastern on 12/7 to participate. All the members of the team will be available to talk about the project:

Participad: A New Wordpress Plugin

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:42:13 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to announce the release of Participad, a WordPress plugin for real-time collaborative editing. Participad was developed for THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) to help participants take notes on unconference sessions, but we anticipate that it will be broadly useful for anyone who wants to co-author a blog post. If one historian in Canada and another in Australia are watching a U.S. presidential debate, for example, they can use Participad to live-blog their reactions. Participad runs on Etherpad Lite and is open source software released under the GNU General Public License. Participad was built by Boone Gorges, the lead developer for CUNY Academic Commons and Anthologize. You can try the demo and download Participad at participad.org. For more information, write Amanda French at info@thatcamp.org.

Second Year of Mason's Digital History Doctoral Research Award

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:34:02 +0000

A reminder to potential doctoral students in history that George Mason University and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media have Digital History Research Awards for students entering the History and Art History doctoral program. Students receiving these awards will get five years of fully funded studies, as follows: $20,000 research stipends in years 1 and 2; research assistantships at RRCHNM in years 3, 4, and 5. Awards include fulltime tuition waivers and student health insurance. For more information, contact Professor Cynthia A. Kierner (Director of the Ph.D. Program) at ckierner@gmu.edu, or yours truly at dcohen@gmu.edu. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2013.

Donor Wall Display

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 16:08:28 +0000

Donors now have their name in lights in the new display at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Remembering the Hurricanes of 2005

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 08:58:55 +0000

As weather forecasters show Tropical Storm Issac heading directly towards the Louisiana coast on August 29, we are all reminded of another storm that came ashore on the Gulf Coast on the same day in 2005. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 5 storm that wiped out towns in Louisiana and Mississippi; caused the levee system in New Orleans to fail bringing about massive flooding that destroyed large parts of the city; forced thousands of residents to evacuate; and brought cultural, economic, and political changes to the region. During the 2005 hurricane season, three Category 5 storms entered the Gulf of Mexico, with Katrina and Rita causing the most damage leaving a path of destruction and broken lives from the Florida Panhandle to Southeast Texas. We knew we were witnessing something significant and we wanted to document and collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In partnership with the University of New Orleans, RRCHNM built the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank in late 2005. Following a model for online collecting established by the September 11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank sought to help historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts. Our target audience was anyone who was affected by the 2005 hurricanes: survivors, volunteers, concerned citizens.

In effort to keep this digital archive accessible and the collecting portion active, we recently upgraded HDMB to the newest version of Omeka and refreshed the site’s design. The HDMB project helped RRCHNM test the software that would become Omeka. This project also heavily influenced our decision to release a contribution plugin for Omeka in its early development, enabling anyone to quickly launch a digital memory bank to document or commemorate events deemed significant. As we remember Katrina and its legacy, we encourage you to browse through HDMB where you will find a collection of photographs taken by Smithsonian staff in September 2005; a series of videos capturing Greta Gadney giving walking tours of the historic Ninth Ward, and hundreds of personal accounts detailing evacuation, displacement, and rebuilding. We are still actively collecting, so if you have a story related to the 2005 storms, please take a few minutes to share a remembrance with the memory bank.

Introducing Scripto: a Tool for Community Transcription

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:47:19 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University is pleased to announce the release of its newest open source tool, Scripto, which opens up the possibilities of community transcription for digital humanities projects in universities, libraries, archives, and museums. With easy-to-implement extensions for the popular open source content management system, including Omeka, WordPress, and Drupal, Scripto allows administrators for any project with collection materials requiring a transcription can now enlist a community of enthusiasts to participate in this aspect of cultural heritage work. Scripto is an open-source tool that permits registered users to view digital files and transcribe them with an easy-to-use toolbar, rendering that text searchable. The tool includes a versioning history and editorial controls to make public contributions more manageable, and supports the transcription of a wide range of file types (both images and documents). Comprehensive User’s Guide that offers advice on project planning, software installation and setup, transcription editing and oversight, and community outreach, is available on the Scripto website. Additionally, web developers are free to contribute to the project by extending the code, and by participating in a developers’ discussion group . Building on the models of other crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia and Flickr Commons, Scripto allows cultural heritage institutions to take advantage of the various communities of volunteer transcribers. Volunteers—who may include enthusiasts, transcription buffs, students, teachers, or academic researchers—transcribe collections materials, correct the mistakes made by other transcribers, and make that data searchable and accessible. Scripto is currently being implemented as a transcription tool for the Papers of the War Department project at RRCHNM, and a host of projects at libraries and archives around the country. Scripto is funded by the Office of Digital Humanities at National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Archives and Records Administration’s National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

CHNM producing Bridging Culture Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys website for NEH and ALA

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:57:16 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to partner with George Mason’s Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies on a website for the first National Endowment for the Humanities and American Library Association Bridging Cultures Bookshelf, entitled “Muslim Journeys.” A group of distinguished scholars and public programmers selected the 25 books and documentaries on the Bookshelf to familiarize the public with the diverse people, places, history, faith and cultures of Muslims in America and around the globe. A complete set of the Bookshelf will be distributed to 1,000 libraries and state humanities councils in 2013. RRCHNM is developing the website companion for the “Muslim Journeys” Bookshelf. The website will feature thematic groupings, summaries of the books, profiles of the authors, and introductory essays by renowned scholars. Also available will be additional primary sources related to the texts, bibliographies for further reading, and tools and tips for organizing, publicizing, and hosting informative and respectful discussions using the “Muslim Journeys” materials. The Muslim Journeys website will be available in January 2013. Libraries and state humanities councils can apply to the American Library Association through September 25, 2012 for a free set of Bookshelf items.

Teachinghistory.org Goes Mobile

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 13:38:01 +0000

Teachinghistory.org, the toolkit for busy teachers, has launched a mobile version, now making it easier than ever to access history quizzes (“PLAY”), videos (“WATCH”), and other resources for K–12 educators.

Development of the mobile version was spearheaded by James McCartney, the Center’s Drupal developer.

Popular Romance Project Blog Sparks Discussion

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:06:30 +0000

Since its launch this spring, the Popular Romance Project blog has attracted more than 12,000 unique visitors, 120,000 page views, and, according to Dr. Kelly Schrum, Director of Educational Projects, 250-plus “thoughtful and engaged” comments on its more than 50 substantive blog posts. Creative lead and senior web designer Chris Anne Raymond designed the Wordpress site; it is part of a multi-pronged project, which also includes a documentary film directed by Laurie Kahn, perhaps most well-known for her earlier film Tupperware!

Rosenzweig Forum

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:14:27 +0000

“One day, all of our records will be online. You can help make it happen,” proclaims the welcome screen of the National Archives and Records Administration’s Citizen Archivist Dashboard. The Citizen Archivist Dashboard is only one of many cool digital initiatives from “our nation’s attic”: you can learn more about these projects on Thursday, June 14, at 4pm at the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities, where Dr. Sharon Leon will be interviewing Pamela Wright, Chief Digital Strategist at NARA.  Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities Thursday, June 14, 4pm George Mason University (Fairfax) Johnson Center Meeting Room A (3rd floor) This event is free and open to the public. For directions to George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus, see http://www.gmu.edu/resources/welcome/Directions/Directions-to-Fairfax.html.

Summer Intern — Web Developer

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:12:08 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is seeking a creative, energetic, and well-organized student for a 2012 summer internship (8 to 12 weeks) at a leading digital humanities center. Strong grades and ability to work in a team are essential. Preference given to applicants with a working knowledge of one or more of the following: PHP, MySQL, Wordpress, JavaScript, or Drupal. Please send resume and cover letter to chnm@gmu.edu. This will be a paid internship. We will begin considering applications on 5/25/2012. About CHNM: Since 1994, CHNM has used digital media and technology to preserve and present history online, transform scholarship across the humanities, and advance historical education and understanding. Each year CHNM’s projects receive over 20 million visitors.

CHNM partners with NCPH on new History@Work site

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:39:09 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce a new partnership with the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to develop and host the organization’s new “History@Work” website at http://publichistorycommons.org/. History@Work is a group blog designed to expand on the long-running work of H-Public, to serve as an online “commons” where people from a variety of areas of the public history field could share ideas and news, and to create a bridge to future digital and other publication efforts. Like the field of public history itself, the blog is designed to blend scholarly, professional, and civic discourse arising from the practice of presenting history in public. Several members of the CHNM staff will be in attendance at this week’s NCPH annual meeting and available to discuss the new website and CHNM’s many other public history efforts. History@Work aims to cover as wide a range of perspectives and venues in public history as possible, including:

Hidden Histories of America's Front Lawn

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:05:20 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that it has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Public Programs over three years to create a mobile-optimized website that provides visitors to the National Mall with access to a rigorous interpretation of the history and culture of the space as a place where national identity is built, negotiated, celebrated, protested, and remembered. Using geospatial and thematic points of entry, Hidden Histories of America’s Front Lawn: mobile.mallhistory.us intends to make visible the rich past of the National Mall for its millions of on-site visitors through a website easily accessible by mobile phones that provides content and interpretation far superior to static guidebooks and existing mobile tours and applications. Each year, over 25,000,000 people come to the National Mall. Many of those visitors—-parents with school-aged children, students and teachers, senior citizens, travelers from other nations—-make their visit to the green expanses wandering between the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol prepared to learn about the nation’s past and the many people and events commemorated within that space. Unfortunately, they are unlikely to find much in the way of interpretive content as they wander from monument to museum. If they do find content, it is basic visitor information, not stories that bring to life the hidden history of this public place. Hidden Histories will offer these visitors a portable way to explore the Mall’s rich history while they experience the physical space.

Matthew Battles set to Visit the Center

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:44:18 +0000

Matthew Battles, author of the book Library: An Unquiet History, and Producer + Editor for Digital Humanities Projects for metaLAB at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, will be coming to visit on 4/18 at 3pm in the Science Showcase (Research Hall 101 in the tower). Matthew will talk about various new-model publishing projects he’s involved with and will give a reading from his new collection of short stories, The Sovereignties of Invention, a work released by new-model publisher Red Lemonade. See http://metalab.harvard.edu and http://redlemona.de for more information about those projects. Should be a great event for anyone interested in experiments with publishing and technology.

RRCHNM Shapes WebWise 2012

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:57:34 +0000

WebWise 2012 was not your average professional conference with a StarTrek actor and a punk rocker in the lineup as keynote speakers. The attendees of WebWise 2012, a conference sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Services for their grantees and other library, archives, and museum professionals, were inspired by LeVar Burton (Roots, Star Trek, & Reading Rainbow) and were impressed with musician Ian MacKaye’s work to self publish a digital archive of concerts recorded for his band Fugazi. Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon, and Tom Scheinfeldt of RRCHNM co-organized the conference with fellow IMLS cooperators, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC). They planned an intense and invigorating 3-day program that included a THATCamp-like unconference, workshop sessions on 21st Century Skills and gaming, five plenary panels, and four keynote speakers. Following the theme of “Tradition and Innovation,” Sharon, Sheila, and Tom worked to integrate the unique contributions of history museums, public libraries, and other local organizations into panels throughout WebWise 2012. Sharon summarized the highlights of the conference on the ProfHacker blog, published by the Chronicle for Higher Education. Don’t be too disappointed if you missed WebWise, because IMLS recorded each session and the webcasts are now available for viewing. RRCHNM and BPOC will be working with IMLS again next year to plan WebWise 2013.

The Chronicle features 12 Tech Innovators

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:34:14 +0000

Dan Cohen, the director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media was featured as one of the 12 Tech Innovators in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week. At a university where “Innovation is Tradition” Dr. Cohen seeks to “find new ways to do humanities research using digital tools, and give even non-techy scholars the ability to use them.” The article goes back to the center’s humble beginnings when Dr. Cohen first began to dive into the world of digital humanities. It also discusses the need to bring history to life using effective digital tools. In a recent project, Dr. Cohen along side colleague Dr. Fred Gibbs “examined whether one scholar’s famous assertions about Victorian thought, made on the basis of close reading of classic literature, held up against an analysis of Google’s collection of over million Victorian books.” To read the full article and the see the other 11 innovators please visit http://chronicle.com/article/Daniel-Cohen/130925/.

Digital History Games at the AHA

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:53:42 +0000

History games were on the agenda at the American Historical Association conference in January. Led by CHNM’s Director of Educational Projects Kelly Schrum, the session, entitled “Playing the Past: Learning Through Digital History Games” was another step in the increased presence of digital history at this year’s conference. The session featured a knowledgeable panel that included Dan Norton, founding partner and Creative Director of Filament Games (a Madison, WI, company that designs learning-based games); Jeremiah McCall, a high school history teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School and author of the book Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History and blog by the same name; and Leah Potter, Media Producer at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at CUNY. The panel explored the use of games to teach and learn history, discussing how games can teach subject matter as well as critical thinking and analysis. The panelists talked about the ways in which games could be valuable tools for engaging students through simulated time travel and role playing, presenting historical concepts and scenarios, and showing the varied outcomes that historical events can have. Games also have limitations and in addition to playing games, students and teachers can and should analyze them when used in the classroom. Panelists made the point that games may not be the best platform for showing the breath of history, for example, or for teaching about specific events. To illustrate their point, the panel looked at several games, including Mission US, a web-based game that features free, interactive adventures set in different eras of U.S. History. The group explored Flight to Freedom that simulates the experience of a runaway slave with decisions and consequences for each action. Other games discussed included Do I Have A Right? and several simulation games. The panel provided new information about the use of games in the teaching of history, as well as a hands-on exploration of several games. Participants actively engaged in the conversation about the usefulness and limitations of games in the classroom and beyond.

Digital Humanities Workshop at the AHA

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:58:25 +0000

From the unusual room set up to the cutting edge content, the morning session at the American Historical Association conference entitled “Digital Humanities: A Hands-On Workshop” was a unique opportunity for attendees to explore how new technology can enhance the study of history.

Designed as a digital poster session and facilitated by Director of Educational Projects Kelly Schrum, participants were able (and encouraged) to wander through the room and interact with presenters. The large crowd did just that, and were treated to a plethora of new information and ideas about how to use technology in both their scholarly work and their teaching. In addition to academics, the session also attracted teachers, museum administrators, archivists, and other history-related professionals. The attendees were treated to presentations from several CHNM staff members and affiliated scholars. CHNM Director Dan Cohen presented on the state of scholarly publishing and how new digital methods and venues might alter that landscape. In particular, Cohen discussed PressForward, an effort to aggregate the best scholarship from blogs, institutional sites, and other outlets. Fred Gibbs, Director of Digital Scholarship, spoke about text mining by dispelling myths and soothing fears about its complexity, showing simple but powerful tools for searching and reformatting data for historical research. Patrick Murray-John, Assistant Research Professor, discussed content management systems, including Omeka, and provided tips on building online research projects. On the teaching front, Jennifer Rosenfeld, Outreach Director for Teachinghistory.org, and Research Associate Debra Kathman, demonstrated history education features and resources designed to enhance teaching at all levels. Research Associate Rwany Sibaja discussed digital storytelling, explaining how to incorporate online tools into teaching and student projects.

Jeffrey McClurken from the University of Mary Washington presented tools for teaching with social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as the benefits of blogging as a class assignment. Additional information: Dan Cohen, Digital Storytelling Fred Gibbs, Text Mining Patrick Murry-John, Content Management SystemsJennifer Rosenfeld, Teachinghistory.org Rwany Sibaja, Digital Storytelling Jeff McClurken, Teaching with Social Media

Digital History Research Awards for New PhD Students at Mason

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:37:06 +0000

George Mason University and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are pleased to announce Digital History Research Awards for students entering the History and Art History doctoral program in fall 2012. Students receiving these awards will get five years of fully funded studies, as follows: $20,000 research stipends in years 1 and 2; research assistantships at RRCHNM in years 3, 4, and 5. Awards include fulltime tuition waivers and student health insurance. For more information, contact Professor Cynthia A. Kierner (Director of the Ph.D. Program) at ckierner@gmu.edu or Professor Dan Cohen (Director, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) at dcohen@gmu.edu. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2012.

CHNM Co-Organizing 2012 WebWise Conference

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:56:52 +0000

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a contract to CHNM, in partnership with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC), to help organize the 2012 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital Age to be held February 29-March 2 at the Renaissance Harbor Place in Baltimore, MD. The theme for the two-day WebWise conference will be “Tradition and Innovation,” as panelists and presenters investigate the use of digital technologies especially in the field of history. Recognizing that history museums, historical societies, and other history-focused institutions are poorly represented in national discussions of digital libraries and museums, WebWise 2012 will make a concerted effort to surface the challenges historical organizations have faced in doing digital work and the under-appreciated contributions they have made in this area. Prior to the conference, CHNM and BPOC will organize a day-long unconference, similar to THATCamp. “We are pleased to be working with these two national leaders in the field of technology integration into the services of libraries, museums, archives, and living collections,” said IMLS Director Susan Hildreth. “George Mason University and Balboa Park have been at the forefront of some of the very issues that we hope to explore further during our conference.” Since 2000, the WebWise conference has brought together representatives of museums, libraries, archives, systems science, education, and other fields interested in the future of high-quality online content for inquiry and learning. A signature initiative of IMLS, this annual conference highlights recent research and innovations in digital technology, explores their potential impacts on library and museum services, and promotes effective museum and library practices in the digital environment. It also provides recipients of technology-based grants from the Institute with an opportunity to showcase their exemplary projects.

Announcing OccupyArchive.org

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:15:34 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of #OccupyArchive occupyarchive.org, an effort to collect, preserve, and share the stories and born-digital materials of Occupy Wall Street and the associated Occupy movements around the world. Visit the “Share”occupyarchive.org/share page to offer your reflections on the occupations, or contribute a document, an image, a video, or an audio recording. Currently, the archive includes a growing set of collections of webpage screenshots, movement documents, and digital images. These collections were built with a combination of individual contributions and automated feed importing. Now, with the launch of the OccupyArchive.org website, individuals can contribute and geolocate their stories and files from the movement. Together, these materials will provide an historical record of the 2011 Occupy protests. The #OccupyArchive is a result of the efforts of volunteers from CHNM and the George Mason University History and Art History Department. It build upon the experiences and techniques developed in CHNM’s previous digital archive projects, such as the September 11th Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Bracero History Archive, and the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. #OccupyArchive is proudly powered with Omeka. For more information on the #OccupyArchive, please contact us: occupyarchive.org/contact.

Come develop with the Omeka team!

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:45:19 +0000

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is looking for a new contract developer to join our innovative, energetic, and hilarious team of developers. With guidance from our Lead Developer and Omeka Dev Team Manager, and in collaboration with other developers and members of CHNM, the new team member will work primarily on various aspects of our Omeka content management system. Duties may include helping to resolve issues, building new sites with Omeka, developing plugins and themes, and helping to design and implement future versions of the core Omeka codebase, as well as contributing to other ad-hoc projects within the CHNM ecosystem. You can see the code at https://github.com/omeka/Omeka. Some other CHNM projects are at https://github.com/chnm.

New Civil War Poster from Teachinghistory.org

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:34:37 +0000

What can a quilt, a map, photographs, a haversack, and a receipt tell you about the past? Thanks to Teachinghistory.org’s new FREE poster, “How Do You Piece Together the History of the Civil War?,” these objects can teach a lot about the Civil War and about how historians piece together the past. Explore the interactive version with links to teaching materials and websites related to the Civil War. Topics include children’s voices during the Civil War, African American perspectives, women’s roles, Civil War era music, and emancipation, as well as military history and life on the battlefield.

Learn more on the Teachinghistory.org blog. Request your copy today.

Next Steps for September 11 Digital Archive

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:45:47 +0000

Many of us still find it difficult to believe that ten years have passed since the September 11 attacks. Every person who lost a loved one or who lived through the aftermath of the events experienced something unique. It was in the wake of 9/11, we at CHNM together with our friends at the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center built the September 11 Digital Archive to preserve some of those responses to the traumatic events in the months and years that followed. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the attacks, we at CHNM are directing our efforts towards preservation and are collecting once again. We are re-opening the collecting portal and want to hear how your life has changed since September 11, 2001. By collecting reflections at this commemorative moment, we hope to further the life of the Archive as one that not only includes the most immediate reactions to the attacks, but also shows change over time as individuals reflect at different points in the post-9/11 world. Simultaneously, a Saving America’s Treasures grant, jointly-administered by the National Park Service and National Endowment for the Humanities, will help pay for our preservation efforts as we transfer the aging collection to the Omeka platform, a more stable and standardized archival system. This is an essential step to making the contents of the Archive more accessible to scholars, students, policy makers, and the general public in the coming years. Finally, we added a blog to the Archive to update you on our progress and detail some of the work required to transfer a large digital collection using one data model to another system with different one. We also plan to highlight some of the collections and items that have intrigued us as we sort through the Archive. We invite you to share your reflections and follow our progress as we move forward with preserving the history of September 11.

Introducing PressForward

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:33:19 +0000

For some time here at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media we have been thinking about the state of scholarly publishing, and its increasing disconnect with how we have come to communicate online. Among our concerns:

• A variety of scholarly work is flourishing online, ranging from long-form writing on blogs, to “gray literature” such as conference papers, to well-curated corpora or data sets, to entirely novel formats enabled by the web • This scholarship is decentralized, thriving on personal and institutional sites, as well as the open web, but could use some way to receive attention from scholarly communities so works can receive credit and influence others • The existing scholarly publishing infrastructure has been slow-moving in accounting for this growing and multifaceted realm of online scholarship • Too much academic publishing remains inert—publication-as-broadcast rather than taking advantage of the web’s peer-to-peer interactivity • Too much scholarship remains gated when it could be open

Roy Rosenzweig Prize

Thu, 05 May 2011 12:40:09 +0000

The deadline for submitting digital history projects for the Roy Rosenzweig Prize is less than two weeks away. The Prize is awarded annually for an innovative and freely available new media project that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. Eligibility The Prize will be awarded to a project that is either in its late stages of development or has been launched with in the past year but still in need of additional improvements. The prize recipient(s) will be expected to apply awarded funds toward the advancement of the project goals. How to Apply: The following must be submitted to rosenzweigprize@historians.org by May 16, 2011. A 1-2 page narrative that includes:

Newly named Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:12:21 +0000

On April 15, 2011 at 3:00 pm, donors, friends and staff gathered at the Research 1 building on George Mason University (GMU)campus to rename the Center for History and New Media in memory of its founder, Roy Rosenzweig. Through the generous support of donors, more than a million dollars was raised to rename the Center. Daniel Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, welcomed guests to the dedication ceremony. Acknowledgments were given by: Jack Censer, Dean of the GMU College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Alan Merten, President of GMU; Gary Kornblith, Professor of History from Oberlin College; Stephen Brier, Senior Academic Technology Officer Professor, CUNY; Brian Platt, Chair of the History Dept., GMU. In 1994 Roy Rosenzweig founded the Center for History and New Media at GMU to use digital media and computer technology to democratize history – to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. Roy Rosenzweig passed away after a battle with cancer in 2007. [gallery link=“file” columns=“2”]

What time is it? THATCamp time!

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:54:41 +0000

All year has been THATCamp time, seems like, but we’re now talking about that THATCamp, which will take place June 3-5, 2011. We’ve instituted some changes this year:

THATCamp 2011 will be larger: we’re planning on having 125 people who do all kinds of work related to the humanities and technology;
THATCamp 2011 will be truly open to all: instead of having an application process, we’ll be accepting all registrations up to 125 people;
THATCamp 2011 will have a BootCamp: the unconference will happen as usual on the weekend over a day and a half, but the Friday beforehand will be devoted to a series of workshops dedicated to improving technical skills; and
THATCamp 2011 is planning on at least two virtual sessions in which we get to talk to campers at THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges and to Jon Voss about the outcome of his Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit.

Remember, registration is first come, first served, so grab your spot today!

Scripto Alpha Launches with the Papers of the War Department

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:50:53 +0000

We are pleased to announce the alpha implementation of Scripto, CHNM’s open source tool for crowdsourcing documentary transcription, with the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 project. Beginning today, interested volunteers can register to begin transcribing any of the materials in this groundbreaking digital archive. With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities and the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, CHNM is pioneering a new phase in digital documentary editing, by allowing users to transcribe historical documents and contribute them to a digital archive of correspondence, speeches, accounting logs, and other documents from early American history. Building on the models of other crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia and Flickr Commons, PWD will benefit from the various enthusiastic communities of volunteer transcribers. Volunteers—who may include historians doing scholarly research, students and teachings, genealogists, and other interested members of the general public—will have the opportunity to transcribe any of the over 45,000 documents in the digital archive. In doing so, they will make that text available to the search engine, improving the ability of users to locate the materials they need. Additionally, as users select documents to transcribe the editors at the PWD project will gain significant insights into the areas of the collection that are of most interest to the wider user community. PWD’s work with community transcription is part of a larger project to make crowdsourcing possible for archivists and documentary editors with digital collections, using a slightly customized version of Scripto. Eventually, other projects will be able to plug Scripto into a number of common content management system through the use of some simple connection scripting. Editors interested in adding transcription to their archive can experiment with the tool in its current alpha state. CHNM will use the feedback from this implementation with PWD to improve the Scripto’s functionality. Please experiment with this version of Scripto by registering for a transcription account today!

For Virginians: Government Matters

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:11:53 +0000

Fairfax County Public Schools teachers explored the activities and case studies found within For Virginians: Government Matters on March 1 at an inservice about state and local government. The day included presentations by Chairman Sharon Bulova, Delegate Scott Surovell, and former Senator Emilie Miller.

Roy's Book Release Reception

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:15:21 +0000

Roy Rosenzweig Book Release: On Feb. 18, 2011 Deborah Kaplan (Roy’s wife), colleagues and friends gathered at George Mason University’s Mason Inn to celebrate the release of Roy’s new book, “Clio Wired, The Future of the Past in the Digital Age,” published by Columbia University Press. With an introduction by Anthony Grafton, the book is a collection of path breaking essays is which he charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Roy Rosenzweig (1959-2007) was professor of history and founder of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. [gallery size=“medium” link=“file” columns=“2”]

September 11 Digital Archive Awarded Saving America's Treasures Grant

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:38:11 +0000

We are pleased to announce that The September 11 Digital Archive has received a Saving America’s Treasures grant to assist in the preservation of the collection at http://911digitalarchive.org. Cutting edge at its launch nearly ten years ago, the Archive now is showing its age. This award will pay to transfer this groundbreaking digital collection to a stable, standardized, up-to-date archival system. This data transfer is an essential first step in guaranteeing that the world’s largest public collection of digital materials related to the events of September 11, 2001 will be available to scholars, students, policy-makers, and the general public in the coming decades. Launched in 2001 as an effort to capture the personal experiences, responses, and images produced in the wake of 9/11, staff at CHNM and the American Social History Project (ASHP) at the City University of New York Graduate Center used electronic media to collect, preserve and present the history of those events and the public responses to them. CHNM and ASHP built a simple portal to accept electronic submissions of first-hand accounts, emails and other electronic communications, digital photographs, artwork, and a range of other born-digital materials. Through partnerships with local community groups and national cultural institutions, the archive grew to its current size of more than 150,000 digital objects. The Save America’s Treasures program is one of the largest and most successful grant programs for the protection of our nation’s endangered and irreplaceable cultural heritage. Grants are awarded for the preservation and/or conservation work on nationally significant intellectual and cultural artifacts and historic structures and sites.

CHNM and Scholars' Lab Partner on "Omeka + Neatline"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:00:42 +0000

The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, are pleased to announce a collaborative “Omeka + Neatline” initiative, supported by $665,248 in funding from the Library of Congress. The Omeka + Neatline project’s goal is to enable scholars, students, and library and museum professionals to create geospatial and temporal visualizations of archival collections using a Neatline toolset within CHNM’s popular, open source Omeka exhibition platform. Neatline, a “contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular,” is a project of the UVa Library Scholars’ Lab, originally bolstered by a Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Omeka is an award-winning web-publishing platform for the display of cultural heritage and scholarly collections and exhibits, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation. This two-year initiative will allow CHNM and the Scholars’ Lab to expand and regularize a partnership that developed informally between the two centers over the course of the past year. Collaboration has already resulted in improvements to the core functionality of Omeka by CHNM and has led the Scholars’ Lab to produce a number of prototype plugins making Omeka a more attractive and viable option for scholarly partnerships with larger libraries and cultural heritage institutions. These include: improved data import (including EAD, a common archival standard); Solr-powered searching and browsing; and Fedora-based repository services. Further development will improve existing plugins, add preservation workflows, and refine the Neatline toolset for integration and sophisticated editing and scholarly annotation of historical maps, GIS layers, and timelines. Enhancements to Omeka’s core APIs, improved documentation, regular “point” releases, and a new Exhibit Builder will strengthen Omeka’s already large and robust user and developer communities. Omeka + Neatline is one of six contract awards made by the Library of Congress in a program that aims both to improve the Library’s own content management and content delivery infrastructure and to contribute to collaborative knowledge sharing among broader communities concerned with the sustainability and accessibility of digital content. In July of 2010, the Library of Congress targeted approximately $3,000,000 toward Broad Agency Announcements covering three areas of research interest related to these goals. Technical proposals were openly solicited from expert, multi-disciplinary communities in both academic and commercial settings in three areas: Ingest for Digital Content, Data Modeling of Legislative Information, and Open Source Software for Digital Content Delivery. In addition to guiding software development work at the Scholars’ Lab and CHNM, project directors Tom Scheinfeldt and Bethany Nowviskie will use the Omeka + Neatline project as an opportunity to document and disseminate a model for open source, developer-level collaborations among library labs and digital humanities centers.

Launch of Russian History Blog

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:02:40 +0000

Steve Barnes Director of the Center for Eurasian Studies has announced the launch of the Russian History Blog.

http://russianhistoryblog.org

CHNM welcomes Patrick Murray-John to the staff

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:38:46 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce that later this week Patrick Murray-John (@patrick_mj) will be joining our staff as web developer and research assistant professor. Murray-John is an accomplished digital humanist with a PhD in Anglo-Saxon Literature from the University of Wisconsin, significant classroom experience, and many years of work as an Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Mary Washington. At CHNM, Patrick will be leading the development on the Teaching History Commons. An outgrowth of teachinghistory.org, the THCommons will serve as professional network for k-12 history teachers and the many faculty and administrators that support their work. Additionally, Murray-John will contribute to the work of CHNM’s Public Projects division, working with the Omeka development community and on a variety of new digital humanities projects. Welcome, Patrick!

Children & Youth in History website recognized by American Library Association division

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:06:54 +0000

Children in Youth & History, the first website focused exclusively on children and youth in history, has received honorable mention in the 2011 RUSA ABC-CLIO Online History Awards competition, which recognizes achievements in free, open-access online history tools and reference resources. In its announcement, the awards committee said it “was impressed with the design, execution, purpose, and content of Children in History. . . The fact that Children in History remains a free, open-access resource, available to all and not just affiliates of elite research institutions, is a testament to your commitment to history education.” Several CHNM staff were among the project team, including co-directors Kelly Schrum and Miriam Forman-Brunell (Affiliated Faculty), Jeremy Boggs, Chris Raymond, Susan Douglass, and Ken Albers. The ABC-CLIO Online History Award recognizes the accomplishments of a person or a group of people producing a freely available online historical collection, an online tool for finding historical materials, or an online teaching aid stimulating creative historical scholarship. RUSA, the Reference and User Services Association, supports excellence in the delivery of general library services and materials to adults, and the provision of reference and information services, collection development, and resource sharing for all ages.

Fund-Raising Nears Goal to Name Center for History and New Media After Founder

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:17:58 +0000

http://news.gmu.edu/articles/5248

NEH ODH Start-Up Grant Lightening Talks, and a Correction

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:19:55 +0000

Recently the National Endowment for the Humanities posted the lightening talks from the Fall 2010 project directors meeting. Take a look at the videos to get a quick glimpse of the great range of cutting-edge work going on in the digital humanities. There were two CHNM projects amongst the over 40 grant projects highlighted at the meeting. Unfortunately, the brief introduction to Scripto included some factual errors that we wish to correct. The Papers of George Washington were founded in 1968 (not 1969) and have published 62 volumes (not 52). The Papers of James Madison have 14 remaining volumes and have published 32 volumes to date (not the 15 published volumes cited). In our 17 years of work in history and new media at CHNM, we have prized our collaborations with a full range of history professionals and organizations, and we regret if these errors suggested a lack of respect for our colleagues working on the Founding Fathers papers projects.

Special Campaign to name CHNM after Roy Rosenzweig

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:04:52 +0000

Many of those who follow the work of the Center for History and New Media know that we are in the middle of a special fundraising campaign in which the National Endowment for the Humanities will match donations to the CHNM endowment. Some of you have already given to this campaign, and we are tremendously grateful for your generosity. The endowment helps us to sustain dozens of educational, archival, and software projects, all of which have been and will be freely available to the millions of people who take advantage of them every year. The NEH challenge grant is now entering the home stretch, and we have decided to do something very special with the remaining effort: raise enough funds to name the Center for History and New Media after Roy Rosenzweig, the founding director of CHNM, who tragically passed away in 2007. Roy was—and remains—the animating spirit of CHNM. (Learn more about Roy.) We can’t tell you how important Roy is any better than Julie Meloni, who spent a week at the Center working on a new project:

Free Historical Thinking Poster from Teachinghistory.org

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:41:32 +0000

Are you looking for ways to promote thoughtful, critical reading of primary and secondary sources? Teachinghistory.org now offers a free Historical Thinking poster to help you out! This double-sided, color poster features definitions of primary and secondary sources and guides students through the process of historical inquiry. What questions should you ask when examining a primary source? Where should you look for reliable secondary sources? How do you use the evidence you’ve gathered to make an argument?

Bright illustrations and snappy captions present history as a mystery for younger students, while the flip side asks how historians know what they know about the past. Both sides feature clear visual examples of primary sources. Request your copy here.

CHNM Contract Services

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:37:51 +0000

Folks at CHNM spend most of their time working on cutting edge, grant-funded research projects like Zotero, the National History Education Clearinghouse, and the Papers of the War Department. However, as a leader in the growing fields of digital history and digital humanities, CHNM is also eager to assist other historical, educational, cultural, and governmental organizations meet the challenges of the digital age. Whether your institution is looking to manage its research activities more effectively, build a new teaching website or its next online exhibition, or improve its overall web and social media strategy, CHNM can help with a range of custom contract development, consulting, and support services, including:

National Historical Publications and Records Commission Awards Two Grants to CHNM

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:51:47 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce two grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), during the May 2010 funding cycle. First, NHPRC has awarded continued funding to the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. This groundbreaking digital editorial project presents high resolution images of some 55,000 documents from the early War Department, which burned down in 1800. The collection has been carefully reconstructed through painstaking research in more than 200 repositories and more than 3,000 collections. This funding will allow the editorial team to dramatically improve the depth and quality of the metadata associated with the documents. Second, NHPRC awarded its only grant in the “Strategies and Tools for Archives and Historical Publishing Projects” category to support the implementation, evaluation, and adaptation of CHNM’s crowdsourcing documentary transcription tool. Designed to allow members of the online public to contribute transcriptions to documentary edition projects, the tool’s initial development is being funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up Grant. The NHPRC funding will provide for expanded user interface research and evaluation, as well as the creation of a set of connector scripts that will enable the tool to plug into common open source content management systems such as Omeka, Drupal, and WordPress. NHPRC, a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources, created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States.

NEH awards a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to CHNM for Crowdsourcing Transcription Tool

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:07:53 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities to support the design and development of a tool for crowdsourcing documentary transcription. The $49,215 award will enable CHNM’s dev team to to build an open source tool to enable researchers to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, thus harnessing the power of the community of users to improve the discoverability and usefulness of the archive. Digital archives and documentary projects need a viable solution that lowers both the cost and the investment of staff time involved with transcribing of large numbers of historical documents. There will be significant benefits for both the editorial staff and for interested users, whether they are scholarly researchers, students and teachers, or members of the general public. This tool will help to address some of the long-term resource challenges facing many digital documentary editing projects. We will use the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 as a test case for the tool development. The end result of the project will be a generalized tool that can be modified to work with a host of different content management systems, such as Omeka, WordPress, or Drupal. Please contact Sharon Leon if you would like to volunteer to test the tool. This project is part of the We the People program, which encourages the teaching, study, and understanding of American History and culture.

Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to Support Regional THATCamps

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:04:13 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce a major award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the growing regional THATCamp network. The $264,000 award will provide new supports for training in digital methods and make it easier for regional THATCamps to be established and run. A regional coordinator will help prospective THATCamp organizers set up and run each conference; a compilation of open source software (“THATCamp-in-a-box”) will help support the proceedings from registration to session management; and a new curriculum for scholars inexperienced in digital methods (“BootCamp”) will be created and disseminated. In addition, a micro-fellowship program will assist aspiring digital humanists to attend a regional THATCamp. THATCamp—The Humanities and Technology Camp—is a yearly user-generated unconference established by CHNM in 2008. During the past nine months, a network of locally conceived and organized regional THATCamps has taken root around the world. Recent regional THATCamps include events in Austin, TX, Pullman, WA, Columbus OH, Los Angeles, CA, and East Lansing, MI. Additional events are currently being planned for Paris, Toronto, London, Seattle, and other cities. CHNM’s home THATCamp is scheduled for May 22–23, 2010 in Fairfax, VA.

Bracero History Archive Wins NCHP Outstanding Public History Project Award

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:57:49 +0000

On Saturday, March 13, 2010, the CHNM’s Bracero History Archive «http://braceroarchive.org» received the National Council on Public History’s award for “Outstanding Public History Project.” The award recognizes excellence in work completed within the previous two calendar years that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. Sharon Leon and other project staff, including Peter Liebhold (NMAH), Kristine Navaro (UTEP), Mireya Loza (Brown), and Alma Carillo (Brown), were on hand to accept the honor from NCPH President Marianne Babal at the annual awards luncheon. The Bracero History Archive is a landmark venture in collaborative documentation. With major partners at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and dozens of other small cultural heritage and community organizations around the country, the project has worked to collect and make available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America. The Bracero History Archive is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Preservation and Access division.

Omeka.net: Be First in Line

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:31:52 +0000

CHNM’s Omeka team is reaching for the clouds. After more than a year of planning and development, we are very pleased to announce the impending arrival of Omeka.net, a hosted web service that will bring standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Be first in line for an invitation to try the free Omeka.net Alpha, including a special bundle of plugins, themes, and storage, when it launches in April. Omeka.net will expand Omeka’s current offerings with a completely web-based service. No server or programming experience required. Similar to services offered by WordPress, the popular open-source blogging software, with the launch of Omeka.net users will be able to sign up for a free hosted Omeka site. Just create a username and password, and your online collection or exhibition is up and running. This new hosted web service will further the Omeka project’s mission to make collections-based online publishing more accessible to small cultural heritage institutions, individual scholars, enthusiasts, educators, and students. With Omeka.net, your online exhibit is one click away. Sign up today. Cross-posted at http://omeka.net

Rosenzweig Forum Returns – Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:20:45 +0000

The Rosenzweig Forum for Digital Humanities returns this month with a program entitled “Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities.” On Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Murray Room of Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, Tim Powell and Bethany Nowviskie will address and open a conversation about issues of cultural authority, intellectual property, innovation vs. sustainability, objectivity, and the need to think outside the academy’s walls. Tim Powell directs digital archive projects for the Ojibwe Indian bands of northern Minnesota, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Tim will speak about a project entitled Gibagadinamaagoom (Ojibwe: “To Bring to Life, to Sanction, to Give Authority”) and how the focus on Ojibwe culture affects issues of intellectual property, open access, and the design of the interface, metadata, and database. Bethany Nowviskie directs the University of Virginia Library’s efforts in digital research and scholarship, and is also associate director of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute. She will discuss a number of projects from UVA’s SpecLab, Scholars’ Lab, and NINES research groups related to the expression of subjectivity and perspective in interpretive digital environments. Together (and as digital humanities scholars practicing outside of the typical tenure-track path), Tim and Bethany will address and open a conversation about issues of cultural authority, intellectual property, innovation vs. sustainability, objectivity, and the need to think outside the academy’s walls. Sponsored and hosted by the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS). (The Rosenzweig Forum for the Digital Humanities is named in honor of Roy Rosenzweig and is a collaboration of the CHNM, CNDLS, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.)

CHNM AHA Panel: Humanities in the Digital Age

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:31:34 +0000

On Friday, January 5th, the Center for History and New Media presented a highly successful panel and poster session at the American Historical Association’s 2010 Conference. The CHNM-hosted session aimed to provide participants with an overview of different digital tools and services now available and how historians are using them for research, teaching, and collaboration. After brief introductions to the various posters, participants were able to walk around the room, spend time at the various stations, and talk with the presenters and other participants. A number of CHNM staff were on-hand, including CHNM Creative Lead Jeremy Boggs to discuss WordPress, CHNM Director Dan Cohen to further explain text-mining tools, Jeffrey McClurken from the University of Mary Washington to present on Omeka and student web projects, CHNM Community Lead Trevor Owens to answer questions about Zotero, and CHNM Director of Education Kelly Schrum to speak about the National History Education Clearinghouse. This was followed in the afternoon by a hands-on workshop where participants could learn to use some of the specific tools displayed at the morning session, including how to set-up a blog, create a course website, try some basic text-mining, or build a model student website. The CHNM AHA poster session was co-sponsored by the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC)

CHNM Wins International Funding for Digging into Data Challenge

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:48:56 +0000

The Center for History and New Media, as part of a team with humanities centers from the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Alberta, has received funding from the Digging into Data Challenge Competition for their project, “Data Mining with Criminal Intent: Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings.” This project will develop tools and models for comparing, visualizing, and analyzing the history of crime, using the Old Bailey Online, which contains extensive court records of more than 197,000 individual trials held over a period of 240 years in Great Britain. Eight international research teams have been awarded the first Digging into Data Challenge grants for projects that promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Four leading research agencies sponsor the international competition: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada. “Trying to manage a deluge of data and turn bits of information into useful knowledge is a problem that affects almost everyone in today’s digital age,” said NEH Chairman Jim Leach. “With this international grant program, NEH is hoping to seed projects that will not only benefit researchers in the humanities, but also lead to shared cultural understanding.” The competition winners were announced at an event Thursday night in Ottawa, Ontario, that featured remarks by NEH Chairman Jim Leach and SSHRC President Chad Gaffield. The eight winning teams represent successful applications from 22 scholars and scientists from the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. Each team includes researchers from at least two of the participating countries. With their awards, the teams will demonstrate how data mining and data analysis tools currently used in the sciences can improve scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Total project funding by all four agencies is approximately $2 million (U.S.) dollars. NEH’s contribution of $498,737 supports American scholars from five of the teams. Detailed descriptions of the eight winning projects can be found here: http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/pdf/DiggingintoDataProjects_09Dec.pdf Additional information about the competition can be found at www.diggingintodata.org. Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants enrich classroom learning, create and preserve knowledge, and bring ideas to life through public television, radio, new technologies, museum exhibitions, and programs in libraries and other community places. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available on the Internet at www.neh.gov.

CHNM Grants Administrator Andy Privee Wins the 2009 GMU Mary Roper Award

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:37:41 +0000

Andy Privee, the grants administrator for the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), and Kathy Secrist, a long-time staff member of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, were each presented with a 2009 Mary Roper award in a ceremony at the George Mason University Center for the Arts December 2nd. The Roper Award began in 2001 and was named for a veteran GMU employee, Mary Roper, who worked in the department of biology and in the college dean’s office for 14 years. Ms. Roper was in attendance at the ceremony to honor the College of Humanities and Social Sciences staff members who have consistently demonstrated excellent performance, commitment, and dedication to the college. “Both Karen and Andy continually embody the qualities of the Mary Roper award,” said Censer. Privee joined CHNM in 2006, bringing with him 30 years of experience in administrative and operations roles for the Peace Corps and Environmental Protection Agency. An avid marathon runner, who has finished 13 different races around the east coast, Privee’s work at CHNM requires similar stamina. “He has become essential to the stability of CHNM,” said Censer. Both Privee and Secrist were presented with an engraved glass award and gifts. “Usually, success is not the result of an individual but of teamwork,” said Privee. Secrist and Privee were honored, as were four others with administrative awards: Frah Abdi (Outstanding HR and Finance), Dana Vogel (Outstanding Administrative Support), Mary Jackson (Outstanding Graduate Program Support) and Carrie Grabo (Outstanding Undergraduate Program Support).

CHNM Announces the First Receipient of the AHA Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:43:47 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is honored to announce Digital Harlem Everyday Life, 1915-1930 as the inaugural recipient of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. The award will be presented at the 2010 AHA Conference in San Diego this coming January. The Digital Harlem website presents information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in the years 1915-1930. Digital Harlem is an element of the project, Black Metropolis: Harlem, 1915-1930, which was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Unlike most studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, this project focuses not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers. It does so primarily by using legal records, which encompass not only hardened criminals but also first offenders, ordinary residents acting out of desperation, poverty or anger, and which reveal all manner of things that would not ordinarily be labeled ‘criminal’– street life, black language, music, family life – as well as evidence of the role of gambling, violence and confidence men in the black community. The Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital Historyis sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. It was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history. This nonresidential fellowship will be awarded annually to honor and support work on an innovative and freely available new media project, and in particular for work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history.

CHNM and Mount Vernon launch Martha Washington biography site

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:48:48 +0000

The Center for History and New Media and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens are proud to announce the launch of a new website chronicling the life of Martha Washington. Through the generosity of Donald and Nancy DeLaski, Martha Washington: a Life (marthawashington.us) examines Martha’s life and relationships by making available documents, historical items, teaching materials, and other resources. A biographical narrative exhibit, written by George Mason University History professor Rosemarie Zagarri, highlights the major milestones of the First Lady’s life as a young woman, bride, mother, First Lady, and widow. Three teaching modules use Martha’s experiences as a lens through which to examine themes of sociability, slavery, and the Revolutionary War. Each includes a short introductory film, a collection of primary sources, and classroom activities for middle and high school students. The site also includes a searchable archive which allows visitors to examine more than 450 items and documents related to Martha and her life. The letters, documents, images, and material culture objects in the archive provide users with a glimpse into the world of Virginia’s 18th century planter class.

George Mason and CHNM to Commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with Support from the German Embassy

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:43:15 +0000

The Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, signaling the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new era in transatlantic relations and European unity. November 9, 2009 celebrates 20 years since the Berlin Wall was torn down. Long a symbol of isolation and contention, the Berlin Wall now symbolizes hope, change and unity. Students at more than 25 US universities will celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by organizing Campus Weeks with financial and organizational support from the German Embassy in Washington DC . This fall, George Mason University and CHNM will join in the German Embassy’s campaign, Freedom Without Walls, a crosscultural celebration of the unification of East Germany and West Germany, and the possibility for peaceful change throughout the world. CHNM is hosting the George Mason website for Freedom Without Walls, which will feature updates on project news, Campus Week events, and new content. The Campus Weeks are a component of Germany ’s Freedom Without Walls campaign, an effort to reach out to the generation that was born around the time the wall came down. Ambassador Scharioth explained that reaching today’s university students is critical if the memory and the inspiration of the fall of the wall is to be preserved. “Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the vestiges of the wall remind us that freedom is precious,” he said. “We are proud to support a new generation of future leaders in their effort to discover and to share what the fall of the wall means to them,” he continued. The Freedom Without Walls Campus Weeks will include public speaking competitions and an art competition involving replicas of the Berlin Wall to be located across the country. The German Embassy has created a website with information about the historic anniversary at www.Germany.info/withoutwalls, as well as a Freedom Without Walls page on Facebook. The Germany.info website contains comprehensive information about the history of Germany’s division and reunification, and it will document the Campus Weeks using online video and photos. The Freedom Without Walls campaign is generously supported by Air Berlin and by the Max Kade Foundation, Inc. The Goethe-Institut USA and the Wende Museum in Los Angeles provide support in kind for the German Embassy’s Freedom Without Walls campaign. Colleges and Universities Participating in Freedom Without Walls Campus Weeks 2009 Amherst College Boston College Bowdoin College Brown University California State University Long Beach Canisius College , Buffalo Chapman University , LA University of Cincinnati Columbia University Cornell University Duke University University of Florida University of South Florida George Mason University Georgetown University Johns Hopkins University University of Massachusetts – Amherst University of Michigan Middlebury College University of Missouri-St. Louis University of Oregon Rice University University of St. Thomas UCLA – to be confirmed Vanderbilt University University of Virginia Wartburg College Washington University Westminster College

CHNM Celebrates GMU Open Access Week 2009

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:49:00 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is proud to support George Mason’s Open Access Week initiatives (October 19th through 23rd). Since its inception in 1994, CHNM has been committed to the free flow of information and has striven to create open source educational resources that provide room for communication and democratization of history. Open Access Week draws worldwide attention to the unrestricted sharing of scholarly research and materials for the advancement and enjoyment of all. Open Access (OA) literature is freely accessible online–maximizing the visibility, use, and impact of research. Building on the success of last year’s Open Access Day, University Libraries’ participation in OA Week offers students, faculty, staff, and the public an opportunity to learn more about Mason’s OA initiatives. Open Access is a growing international movement that encourages the unrestricted sharing of scholarly research and materials with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of knowledge and society. Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. OA maximizes access to research, thereby enhancing its visibility, use, and impact. Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research. October 19-23, 2009 marks the first international Open Access Week. Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. Organizers and contributors include SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition); the PLoS (The Public Library of Science); Students for Free Culture; OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries). For more information about Open Access Week, please visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

CHNM cohosts "The Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Good" with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:44:56 +0000

Inspired in part by CHNM’s highly successful THATCamp series, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Center for History and New Media will together cohost the Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Good, a free, one-day “un-conference” that intends to bring together interesting and interested people to talk about the problems, practicalities, and opportunities of using social media to further the missions of “institutions of conscience”—those concerned with violence and atrocities, human rights, and related issues.

CHNM Labs Report on Mobile Usage in Museums

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:23:49 +0000

CHNM Labs released a new research report today, Mobile for Museums http://chnm.gmu.edu/labs/mobile-for-museums/. Funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the report assesses how art museums are incorporating mobile technologies into visitor experiences and offers replicable mobile prototypes based on those findings. A survey of the field shows that for many years art museums have been at the forefront of offering their visitors learning experiences that extend beyond traditional exhibit labels. That trend continues as art museums add cell phone tours, podcasts, and platform-specific applications in an effort to capitalize on the commonly-owned portable devices—iPods, MP3 players, Blackberries, cell phones—that visitors already carry in their pockets. CHNM found that while all genres of museums are very interested in offering content and unique experiences using mobiles, their biggest challenge is working with small budgets and a small staff, limiting their ability to develop content for mobiles. To address these needs, Mobile for Museums offers recommendations and free, replicable prototypes based on this research on how to economically provide mobile users with positive experiences in and outside a museum. These prototypes include: • New plugins for the Omeka http://omeka.org software package allowing institutions to use already-created collections content and re-purpose it with plugins for use inside the gallery, including: Send to Mobile, Bar Codes, and Social Bookmarking. • Website design optimized for cross-platform mobile browsers that is accessible by a variety of mobile and smart phones, for possible use outside of the gallery. • A cross-platform application built in PhoneGap that harnesses the functionality native to a mobile device. These examples are simply proofs of concept, but we hope that by making them and the code available http://code.google.com/p/art-in-the-city/ we will provide the museum community with some fresh possibilities for mobile development. Finally, the report site includes a dynamic Resources section http://chnm.gmu.edu/labs/mobile-for-museums/resources/, with a Yahoo Pipe of feeds from museum-related websites discussing mobile topics. A public Zotero group offers a growing, annotated bibliography of current resources, and is open for all to join and to contribute other research in the field: http://www.zotero.org/groups/mobile_museums/items. CHNM encourages collaboration and discussion of our findings and prototypes, through commenting directly on the site. We hope that this research and development will encourage more institutions to share their development and experiments with the greater museum community.

George Mason and CHNM to Commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with Support from the German Embassy

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:40:59 +0000

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity Receives MERLOT Award for Online Learning Excellence

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:33:48 +0000

At the 2009 Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) International Conference, the CHNM website Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution was presented with the MERLOT Classics Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resource. The MERLOT Awards program recognizes and promotes outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning and to honor the authors and developers of these resources for their contributions to the academic community. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT’s vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT’s strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty-designed courses. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution is an accessible introduction to the French Revolution, presenting an broad archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University—both internationally renowned scholars of the Revolution—served as principal authors and editors. The site is a collaboration of CHNM and American Social History Project (City University of New York), and supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

CHNM celebrates the 30th Anniversary of NECC

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:12:51 +0000

As the National Education Computer Conference (NECC) celebrated its 30th Anniversary in the nation’s capital, the CHNM Outreach Team was on-hand Monday to enjoy a busy afternoon speaking with an international audience at the Convention Center in Washington, DC. The CHNM poster session highlighted free tools for teachers that promote digital literacy and critical thinking: Zotero, Omeka, ScholarPress, and the National History Education Clearinghouse Tools for Teachers. [gallery columns=“2”] The annual NECC conference—presented by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and keyed to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)—features innovative workshops, including Model Lessons, BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) sessions, and Open Source Labs. The nonprofit ISTE focuses on improving teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK–12 and teacher education.

One Week, One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barn Raising

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:18:11 +0000

We are very happy to report that CHNM has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities under its Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities program to do for the summer scholarly institute what THATCamp is doing for the scholarly conference. Under the banner of “better, faster, lighter”—as well as more pragmatic, more collaborative, and more fun—CHNM will host a diverse group of twelve digital humanists for a busy week of tool-building in Summer 2010. Welcome to One Week, One Tool, a digital humanities barn raising. With a decade of successful digital tool-building experience under its belt, we at CHNM have come to the conclusion that effective digital tools are forged mostly in practice rather than theory. Although inspirational ideas and disciplinary training are necessary, the creative process succeeds or fails due to pragmatic, often hidden or ignored fundamentals such as good user interface design, thorough code commenting and documentation, community engagement, dissemination and “marketing,” and effective project management. We may have a vision for an ideal end product, but frequently a tool is made or broken in seemingly more mundane aspects of software development. Too often these practical aspects get lost in our conferences and workshops, only to be encountered by inexperienced tool builders at later stages of development and release. We thus believe a useful digital humanities institute should involve a great deal of doing in addition to basic instruction. There is no reason that a week long institute can’t both teach and produce something useful to the community—an actual digital humanities tool—while also laying the foundation and skills for future endeavors by the participants. Indeed, the act of doing, of building the tool, should be the best way for participants to learn what digital humanities really is and how it really happens. We therefore propose a unique kind of institute: One Week, One Tool will teach participants how to build a digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week—a digital humanities barn raising. One Week, One Tool won’t be for the faint of heart. For one week in June 2010, from early mornings to late nights, we will bring together a group of twelve digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and practical experience to build something useful and useable. A short course of training in principles of open source software development will be followed by an intense five days of doing and a year of continued community engagement, development, testing, dissemination, and evaluation. Comprising designers and programmers as well as project managers and outreach specialists, the group will conceive a tool, outline a roadmap, develop and disseminate a modest prototype, lay the ground work for building an open source community, and make first steps toward securing the project’s long-term sustainability. One Week, One Tool is inspired by both longstanding and cutting edge models of rapid community development. For centuries rural communities throughout the United States have come together for “barn raisings” when one of their number required the diverse set of skills and enormous effort required to build a barn—skills and effort no one member of the community alone could possess. In recent years, Internet entrepreneurs have likewise joined forces for crash “startup” or “blitz weekends” that bring diverse groups of developers, designers, marketers, and financiers together to launch a new technology company in the span of just two days. One Week, One Tool will build on these old and new traditions of community development and the natural collaborative strengths of the digital humanities community to produce something useful for digital humanities work and to help reset the balance between learning and doing in digital humanities training. Are you ready to rumble?

Help the Center for History and New Media Innovate - Updated!

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:59:16 +0000

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (http://chnm.gmu.edu) is celebrating fifteen years of providing high-quality, free educational resources and tools to an audience that grows exponentially each year. Last year, sixteen million people visited CHNM’s websites and over two million people used our software. The historians and technologists at CHNM feel lucky to serve this vast audience, but although all of our tools and resources are free, they are not without cost. With your help we hope to continue our service and innovation for another fifteen years and beyond. The National Endowment for the Humanities has given CHNM a rare challenge grant, which will match donations to CHNM’s endowment for a limited time. Whether you use CHNM’s popular Zotero software for your research, get your daily fix from the History News Network, learn from award-winning sites such as Historical Thinking Matters and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, or scan through unique digital archives such as the Papers of the War Department, we hope you will make a contribution today. Your tax-deductible gift will help us to reach even more students, teachers, and scholars worldwide. To make your donation right now, please visit: http://chnm.gmu.edu/donate/ From all of us at the Center for History and New Media, we thank you in advance for helping us, as our motto says, “Build a Better Yesterday, Bit by Bit.” UPDATE: An anonymous donor has stepped forward who will match the NEH’s match for the month of June, up to $15,000. So now is a terrific time to contribute and stretch your donation even further!

Zotero 2.0 is Here!

Fri, 15 May 2009 10:24:09 +0000

After an extensive development and testing period and the addition of even more features to make academic research easier, more collaborative, and ready for the future, Zotero 2.0 went public tonight. I’ll be blogging extensively about Zotero 2.0 in this space over the coming weeks and months as it continues to develop, but here’s a quick list of what you get with the major upgrade: Syncing

Automatic synchronization of collections among multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
Free automatic backup of your library data on Zotero’s servers.
Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a WebDAV server (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).

People

2009 Roy Rosenzweig Forum - Social Networking and the Semantic Web

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:17:08 +0000

On Wednesday, May 13th at 7:00 p.m., the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities and the Washington Semantic Web Group will host the a forum on Social Networking and the Semantic web in the George Mason University Johnson Center Cinema. The forum will host four speakers, Mills Davis, Andy Roth, Mike Petit, and Dan Cohen, who will share their projects and lead a group discussion at the end of the evening. Mills Davis of Project10X will showcase new developments in social networking and semantic technologies within government and private industry. Andy Roth, Chief Quality Officer at AdaptiveBlue, will discuss Glue, a browser add-on that allows you to find new things based on what your friends like. Mike Petit will present Amplify, an open platform that mimics human understanding of content and offers a broad range of unique, and previously unavailable, data to SemWeb practitioners. Finally, Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media will discuss new social and collaborative features for Zotero, the free, easy-to-use Firefox extension which helps collect, manage, cite and share your research sources. More information, including speaker bios, is available at the Washington Semantic Web Meet-up forum website.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity Receives MERLOT Award for Online Learning Excellence

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:52:06 +0000

At the 2009 MERLOT International Conference this coming August, MERLOT will present Jack Censer, Dean of the George Mason University College of Humanities and Social Sciences, with the MERLOT Classics Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resource for the CHNM website, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. The MERLOT Awards program recognizes and promotes outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning and to honor the authors and developers of these resources for their contributions to the academic community. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT’s vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT’s strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty-designed courses. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution is an accessible introduction to the French Revolution, presenting an broad archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University—both internationally renowned scholars of the Revolution—served as principal authors and editors. The site is a collaboration of CHNM and American Social History Project (City University of New York), and supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The American Historical Association Announces the Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:20:09 +0000

In 2009, George Mason University and the American Historical Association will offer the first Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. This award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history. This nonresidential fellowship will be awarded annually to honor and support work on an innovative and freely available new media project, and in particular for work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. The fellowship will be conferred on a project that is either in a late stage of development or which has been launched in the past year but is still in need of further improvements. The fellow(s) will be expected to apply awarded funds toward the advancement of the project goals during the fellowship year. In a 1-2 page narrative, entries should provide a method of access to the project (e.g., web site address, software download), indicate the institutions and individuals involved with the project, and describe the project’s goals, functionality, intended audience, and significance. A short budget statement on how the fellowship funds will be used should be attached. Projects may only be submitted once for the Rosenzweig Fellowship. The entry should be submitted by e-mail to rosenzweigprize@historians.org. Questions about the prize and application process should be directed to rtownsend@historians.org. The deadline for submission of entries is May 15, 2009. Recipients will be announced at the 2010 AHA Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Mikhail Gorbachev Visits George Mason

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 10:54:25 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the keynote speaker for George Mason University’s “1989: Looking Back, Looking Forward” conference will be Former Soviet President and Nobel Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev. President Gorbachev will present the keynote address at the conference on March 24, and will additionally participate in a round table discussion the following day, with Lee Hamilton and William Webster. For more information on the conference, including tickets to the event, breakout sessions, and associated film festival, see: http://gorbachev.gmu.edu/. The conference will offer a critical perspective on how the lessons of the end of the Cold War should be applied to the challenges of international cooperation. You can examine vivid historical documents related to President Mikhail Gorbachev’s role in the epochal events of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold War, by accessing the Center for History and New Media’s project titled, Making the History of 1989, at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/.

THATCamp 2009 Now Accepting Applications

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:02:55 +0000

Back by popular demand, THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) will return to CHNM on June 27-28, 2009. Timed to follow the Digital Humanities 2009conference being hosted by our colleagues at theMaryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the second annual THATCamp will strive to recreate the collegial atmosphere and innovative spirit of last spring’s event. At the same time, we hope to build on the strengths of THATCamp 2008 and make THATCamp 2009 even better. Responding to the tremendous outpouring of interest we received in the first THATCamp, we will expand the number of campers this time from 70 to 100. We will streamline the application process to allow pre-conference discussions to begin earlier and flow more freely. And we will open up our “unconference” format even further, encouraging even more spontaneous discussion and organic scheduling. Online applications are available at http://thatcamp.org/.

CHNM Receives Third James Harvey Robinson Prize from AHA

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:10:58 +0000

On January 3, 2008, the Center for History and New Media and the History Education Group at Stanford University were awarded the American Historical Association’s James Harvey Robinson Prize for Historical Thinking Matters <historicalthinkingmatters.org>. The biennial prize is awarded for the teaching aid that had made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. Historical Thinking Matters is designed to teach students how to “think historically” by critically reading primary sources and participating in authentic inquiries about key topics in U.S. history. Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects at CHNM, was joined by Sam Wineburg and Daisy Martin from the History Education Group to accept the award from AHA President Gabrielle M. Spiegel at the General Meeting in New York City. This is third CHNM project to receive the Robinson Prize.

CHNM wins $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:11:41 +0000

CHNM has received a $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC) for Omeka, a software project that greatly simplifies the online publication of collections and exhibits. The award was given at the Coalition for Networked Information meeting Dec. 8 in Washington, D.C. MATC awards recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development. Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural web sites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability. “Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors,” said Tom Scheinfeldt, project co-lead and managing director of CHNM. “By making standards-based, serious online publishing easy, Omeka puts the power and reach of the web in the hands of academics and cultural professionals themselves.” Scheinfeldt accepted the award from Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, who chaired the blue-ribbon prize committee. The committee also included Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; John Gage, chief researcher and director of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation; Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media; John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox Corp.; Ira Fuchs, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Donald J. Waters, program officer in the Program in Scholarly Communication at the Mellon Foundation.

Children and Youth in History Site Launches

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:17:27 +0000

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, together with the University of Missouri–Kansas City, is pleased to announce the launch of a new website focusing on notions of childhood and the experiences of children and youth throughout history and around the world. The site, Children and Youth in History (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh), offers history instructors and students access to hundreds of primary sources and a variety of resources for teachers at both the high school and college level. As with all CHNM projects, the resources contained in Children and Youth in History are and will remain free and open access. Funding for Children and Youth in History was made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

George Mason’s Center for History & New Media, Emory University Libraries Announce Zotero Partnership

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:05:07 +0000

Partnership with Emory University Libraries Further Solidifies Zotero’s Role as a Platform for Digital Research and Innovation The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the Emory University Libraries are pleased to announce a cooperative partnership on Zotero (www.zotero.org), the free, open-source bibliographic manager. A team of librarians, information technologists and faculty members led by Connie Moon Sehat, Emory Libraries’ new director of digital scholarship initiatives, will extend research capabilities of the software in collaboration with Zotero’s main development team. Sehat is a former co-director of Zotero and CHNM. For Dan Cohen, who is associate professor of history at George Mason University and director of CHNM, a relationship with Emory exemplifies the powerful opportunities for institutional cooperation offered by digital media. “The Center for History and New Media and the Zotero Project are lucky to now have the resources and experience of Emory on their side,” says Cohen, “and the continued insight and direction of Connie Sehat. We look forward to what will undoubtedly be a tremendously productive collaboration.” Cohen oversees Zotero with Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason and CHNM’s acting director of research projects. This relationship marks a significant step forward for the future of the Zotero project. “Partnering on the development of open source software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative software,” says Rick Luce, Emory University vice provost and director of libraries. Already a powerful research tool, Zotero allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources such as citations, full texts, web pages, images and other objects. It meshes the functionality of older reference manager applications with modern software and web applications, such as del.icio.us and YouTube, to amass large amounts of data in easy ways. Over the next two years, Zotero will allow researchers – and their data – to interact with one another in Web 2.0 communities, help scholars archive information with the Internet Archive and offer text-mining capabilities. Zotero also will expand educational offerings to provide more support for its growing national and international communities of users, many located in university settings. Working in conjunction with the Zotero team at CHNM, Emory’s Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and library expertise to contribute to Zotero’s anticipated growth. Since its introduction in 2006, Zotero has earned significant accolades for its facilitation of online research. It was named a PC Magazine’s “Best Free Software” in 2007 and again this year, as well as “Best Instructional Software” of 2007 as determined by the Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

CHNM Releases Omeka 0.10b

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:43:44 +0000

The Center for History and New Media, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, is pleased to announce a major new release of its Omeka web publishing platform, version 0.10b. From the Swahili word meaning “to display” or “to lay out for discussion,” Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for collections-based research of all kinds, one that bridges the scholarly, library, and museum worlds through a set of commonly recognized standards. In doing so Omeka puts serious web publishing within reach of all scholars and cultural heritage professionals. Omeka is free and open-source, easy to use, standards based, and extensible. It is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. Its unqualified Dublin Core metadata structure and adherence to web standards allows anyone to design fully accessible online exhibitions efficiently. Omeka’s modular architecture and rich API empower people with a range of programming skills to participate in its open source community and expand its capabilities by adding specialized metadata element sets and plugins. Plugins bring Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites that foster user participation. CHNM is also re-launching the project website, http://omeka.org, with a new look. The new design showcases a diverse range of Omeka-powered websites and encourages involvement from the open-source development and user community. Scholars and cultural heritage professionals no longer need extensive technical skills or expensive systems to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions. They only need Omeka. Omeka is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Omeka 0.10b Features

Making the History of 1989 Site Launches

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:57:57 +0000

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of a new website on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The site, Making the History of 1989 (http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/), offers students, teachers, and scholars access to hundreds of primary sources on or related to the events of 1989 and the end of the Cold War in Europe, interviews with prominent historians, and a series of resources for teachers at both the high school and college level. As with all resources created by our Center, all the resources contained in Making the History of 1989 are and will remain free and open access. This project has been made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C.).

Statement on Zotero Suit

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:14:37 +0000

George Mason University has just released an official statement about the Thomson Reuters lawsuit over CHNM’s Zotero, an open source competitor to Thomson Reuter’s EndNote:

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community. As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.” CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

Kress Foundation Funds CHNM Mobile Research, Omeka Plugins

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:41:11 +0000

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has awarded two grants to CHNM to undertake two new projects: a study of museums’ use of mobile communications technology and a set of Omeka plugins for art historians and art museums. The first grant will provide CHNM with funding for a thorough survey of the use of cell phones, Blackberries, iPods, and other mobile devices in art museums. Based on the survey’s findings, the project will produce a white paper of concrete recommendations on how best to use these new technologies to engage visitors with visual art objects and a set of rough prototypes or proofs of concept based on these recommendations. The second project will produce a set of three plugins for the Omeka web publishing platform geared specifically to the needs of art historians and art museums. The first of these plugins will extend Omeka’s data model to accommodate the emerging CDWA Lite (Categories for the Description of Works of Art Lite) metadata standard, which is gaining widespread adoption among the art museum community. The second will utilize Omeka’s built-in RSS feeds to allow any visitor to an Omeka website to view a museum’s collection in “slide show” or “3D” mode using the popular and visually striking Cooliris software. The third plugin will afford visitors to Omeka websites the ability to annotate and label images and share those annotations with friends, colleagues, and classmates. The new partnership with Kress underscores CHNM’s broad commitment to digital history and humanities, increasing the Center’s formal engagement with art and art history and pushing scholarly and museum technology in new directions.

THATCamp 2009

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:01:06 +0000

Back by popular demand, THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) will return to CHNM on June 27-28, 2009. Timed to follow the [Digital Humanities 2009 conference being hosted by our colleagues at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the second annual THATCamp will strive to recreate the collegial atmosphere and innovative spirit of last spring’s event. At the same time, we hope to build on the strengths of THATCamp 2008 and make THATCamp 2009 even better. Responding to the tremendous outpouring of interest we received in the first THATCamp, we will expand the number of campers this time from 70 to 100. We will streamline the application process to allow pre-conference discussions to begin earlier and flow more freely. And we will open up our “unconference” format even further, encouraging even more spontaneous discussion and organic scheduling. Stay tuned to the THATCamp blog for a more formal announcement and application guidelines.](http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/)

Inaugural WordCamp Ed to be hosted at CHNM

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:07:50 +0000

On Saturday, November 22, 2008, CHNM will host the very first WordCamp Ed, a WordCamp conference focused entirely on educational uses of the WordPress blogging and content management software in schools and universities. Organized in partnership with the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, the one-day event will feature a morning of pre-planned speakers and a barcamp-style afternoon of smaller discussion sessions. Registration is free at the WordCamp Ed blog. WordCamp Ed builds on the success of last spring’s THATCamp, reinforcing CHNM’s growing importance as a gathering place for the educational and cultural technology communities.

Jon Stewart Hosts CHNM's Rick Shenkman on the Daily Show

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:09:53 +0000

On June 11, 2008, the editor of CHNM’s History News Network, Rick Shenkman, appeared on Comedy Central’s the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss his recent work, Just How Stupid are We: The Truth About the American Voter. A current bestseller on Amazon.com*, Just How Stupid are We* cites disturbing statistics that Shenkman believes reveal Americans simply do not know much about politics. http://hnn.us/HowStupidAreWe/media.html When only 2 out of 5 citizens are able to name the three branches of the federal government, only 1 in 7 can find Iraq on a world map, and the majority believe the war in Iraq was caused by Saddam Hussein’s involvement with Al-Qaeda, Shenkman questions the ability of American voters to make intelligent and informed decisions for guiding the world’s most powerful government. Shenkman further suggests that the majority of American voters are not only unaware of current events and unable to differentiate between facts and spin, but they simply do not care to learn more if it involves reading a newspaper or book rather than absorbing their news from entertaining network news shows. Speaking with Jon Stewart, Shenkman questioned the depth of the news presented on television, including the Daily Show, and pointed to the host’s responsibility to present relevant information to viewers rather than focusing on entertaining details. Stewart praised Shenkman’s call for intellectual accountability: if the American people are going to criticize the current administration, they should educate themselves in order to be able to enact critical change. In addition to being the editor of the History News Network (http://hnn.us), Rick Shenkman is an Emmy-wining investigative journalist and the New York Times best-selling author of six books, including Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History and Presidential Ambition: How the Presidents Gained Power, Kept Power and Got Things Done.

Gulag History Site Launches

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:57:19 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives http://gulaghistory.org, a new online resource exploring the history of the Soviet Gulag.The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; Title VIII, The U.S. Department of State; Kennan Institute; and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University; and was produced in association with the Gulag Museum at Perm 36, Perm, Russia and the International Memorial Society, Moscow, Russia.

CHNM Launches National History Education Clearinghouse

Tue, 13 May 2008 08:36:15 +0000

The National History Education Clearinghouse, an online project that brings U.S. history teachers high-quality support and resources, has been launched by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and project partner Stanford University. The clearinghouse is now available to the public at http://teachinghistory.org. In October 2007, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $7 million contract, if fully funded over five years, to CHNM, in partnership with Stanford University, the American Historical Association, and the National History Center. The online project focuses on historical thinking and learning and is designed to help K-12 history teachers become more effective educators, thereby expanding student knowledge of U.S. history and its relevance to their daily lives and future. The clearinghouse provides links to the most informative and comprehensive history content on the Internet. It also provides teaching tools and resources such as lesson plan reviews, guides to working with primary sources and models of exemplary classroom teaching. The clearinghouse will link to a number of national history education organizations and associations. The website is interactive, allowing teachers to ask questions, comment on topical issues and share information on what and how they teach. “The National History Education Clearinghouse will put into the hands of any teacher with an Internet connection the highest quality materials for teaching U.S. history,” says Sam Wineburg, professor and chair of curriculum and teacher education at Stanford and executive producer and senior scholar of the clearinghouse. “We are honored to be part of the digital revolution that is changing history teaching."

CHNM to host inaugural THATCamp, May 31 - June 1, 2008

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:01:22 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce its latest initiative, THATCamp. Short for “The Humanities and Technology Camp”, THATCamp is a BarCamp-style, user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities. THATCamp is organized and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Digital Campus, and THATPodcast.

What is an “unconference”?

According to Wikipedia, an unconference is “a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event.” An unconference is not a spectator event. Participants in an unconference are expected to present their work, share their knowledge, and actively collaborate with fellow participants rather than simply attend. There are many styles of unconferences. The most famous is probably BarCamp, an international network of unconference events focused largely on open source web development.

New ECHO Gateway for the History of Science, Technology, and Industry

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:25:15 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the relaunch of the ECHO (Exploring and Collecting History Online) website. ECHO is a portal to over 5,000 websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry. In addition to better helping researchers find the exact information they need and granting curious browsers a forum for exploration, the new site also provides access to the latest in blogging on the topics of digital history and histories of science, technology and industry. The project is based at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. ECHO has been funded by two generous grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

CHNM and American Historical Association Announce New Prize

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:58:42 +0000

Roy Rosenzweig Prize in History and New Media Established in Professor’s Memory The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and the American Historical Association (AHA) have agreed to institute a joint “Roy Rosenzweig Prize in History and New Media.” The Rosenzweig Prize will be awarded annually for an innovative and freely available new media project that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. Roy Rosenzweig died from cancer on 11 October 2007. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and lectured as a Fulbright professor. As the AHA’s Vice President for Research, he urged the Association to open all book prizes to publications in new media form. The Rosenzweig Prize will be the first to specifically recognize contributions developed in digital form to the profession at large. In 2005, Rosenzweig’s Web-based project, History Matters earned him and CHNM the James Harvey Robinson Prize of the American Historical Association. In 2003, he was awarded the second Richard W. Lyman Award for his work with CHNM, particularly History Matters and the September 11 Digital Archive. The AHA and the CHNM together will select members of the prize selection committee and develop prize guidelines. The award winners will be announced at the AHA’s Annual Meeting. The George Mason University Foundation, Inc. will manage the funds for the Rosenzweig Prize. Contributions may be tax deductible to the full extent allowable by the law. Gifts for the AHA/CHNM Rosenzweig Pize may be mailed to: GMU Foundation, Inc. 4400 University Drive, MS 1A3 Fairfax, VA 22030 Checks should be made payable to the GMU Foundation, Inc. and indicate that the gift is for the AHA/CHNM Rosenzweig Prize. Gifts may also be made online at give.gmu.edu, but funds must be specified for the AHA/CHNM Rosenzweig Prize in the comments section. For questions or information on alternate methods of giving, individuals should contact: Heidi A. Bruce, Director of Development, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Phone: 703.993.9319, e-mail: hbruce@gmu.edu Contributions may also count toward the Center’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) matching grant in accordance with NEH guidelines. About the Center for History and New Media Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history - to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. CHNM combines cutting edge digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship to promote an inclusive and democratic understanding of the past as well as a broad historical literacy. CHNM’s work has been recognized with major awards and grants from the American Historical Association, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the Library of Congress, and the Sloan, Mellon, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas and Kellogg foundations. About the American Historical Association The American Historical Association (AHA) is a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts, and the dissemination of historical research. As the largest historical society in the United States, the AHA provides leadership and advocacy for the profession, fights to ensure academic freedom, monitors professional standards, spearheads essential research in the field, and provides resources and services to help its members succeed. The AHA serves more than 14,000 history professionals, representing every historical period and geographical area. As the only national association for historians studying all areas and fields of history, the AHA currently confers 25 prizes and awards, recognizing a wide variety of distinguished historical work in the form of books, distinguished teaching, and even film. Since 1896 the Association has conferred 1,276 awards that represent a catalogue of the best work of the historical profession over the past 111 years.

Washington Times on Omeka

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 10:23:26 +0000

CHNM and its new platform for publishing collections and exhibits online, Omeka, were featured this week in the Washington Times. Describing CHNM as being “at the forefront of the new wave of collecting history,” the article went on to highlight the September 11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and History Matters. Virginia Tech’s April 16 Archive, which runs on the Omeka platform, was also mentioned.

Cohen, Zotero appear in Washington Post

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:15:41 +0000

CHNM’s Zotero project and CHNM’s Director, Dan Cohen both appeared on Page A1 in Sunday’s Washington Post over the weekend. Entitled “Internet Access Is Only Prerequisite For More and More College Classes,” the front page article examined new trends in online education at institutions of higher learning across the country. Commenting on Zotero in particular and new campus technology initiatives in general, Cohen was quoted as saying “It’s part of this movement in higher education to open up … to share the products of our research, to be here for the public good.”

Zotero joins forces with Internet Archive, wins major grant

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:37:34 +0000

Although libraries have dedicated much of their time to scanning and cataloguing their materials for online access, both the expense and time of such projects have prevented many documents from being readily available. Yet, in many cases, these documents have been scanned, copied or photographed by someone, somewhere. Virtually every professor, graduate student and author maintains major private caches of these materials from their own research. Biographers have scores of letters, pictures and ephemera. Architects and architectural historians have photographs of buildings from around the world. Scholars of literature have scanned diaries and manuscripts for insights into the writing process of those they study. “This ‘hidden archive’ likely rivals existing online collections,“ says Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM). “We asked: What if there was a way to expose and share this tremendous hidden archive with scholars from around the globe?” And now there is. CHNM has joined forces with the Internet Archive on a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to provide what could potentially be the world’s largest structured archival and access environment for scholarly material. Introduced last year as open-source software that works within the popular Firefox web browser, the CHNM’s Zotero stores references and notes in the same way that other citation managers do. However, what makes Zotero unique from similar tools is its intuitive, iTunes-like interface and the fact that it runs in the web browser, allowing it to sense, record and share scholarly information on the web. Now Zotero is teaming up with the Internet Archive to provide a seamless system for archiving, public sharing and collaborating within the scholarly community. Under the new partnership, scholars will be able to easily drag and drop documents into the “Zotero Commons" and, after filling out legal information that ensures the document is in public domain, have the document uploaded to be searchable and accessible to anyone in the world. A major incentive for scholars to participate in this project is that the Internet Archive will provide them with free optical character recognition (OCR) — that is, a transcription of the words on each scan — for documents that are donated, a tremendous benefit that will allow them to search and organize their own collection. “Most scholars have not yet figured out how to take full advantage of the digitized riches suddenly available on their computers,” says Cohen. “The abundance of digital documents is actually overwhelming to some. Moreover, the major advantage of digital research - the ability to scan large masses of text quickly - is often unavailable to scholars who’ve done their own scanning or copying of texts. Yet after uploading to Zotero Commons, they will be able to search their own library very easily.” Another function of the project will be the availability for scholars to share documents with a smaller, defined and secure community, allowing for easier collaboration across long distances. The initial functionality of Zotero Commons will be rolled out in 2008.

Omeka Hits Milestone

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:21:26 +0000

Omeka, CHNM’s new free and open source platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online, hit a major milestone with the launch of Release Candidate 4 (RC4). Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. It is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content rather than programming. Three months from its initial beta release, Omeka is already in use by institutions around the country, including the Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film and Virginia Tech’s April 16 Archive. Omeka features:

ScholarPress Launched

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:14:38 +0000

CHNM Creative Lead, Jeremy Boggs and CHNM Web Developer, Dave Lester have announced the launch of ScholarPress, a hub for educational WordPress plugins. ScholarPress currently features two plugins, Courseware and WPBook. Courseware enables users to manage a class with a WordPress blog, including a schedule, bibliography, assignments, and other course information. Initially developed during the summer of 2006 with help from Josh Greenberg, former Associate Director of Research Projects, now the Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library, Courseware has since been tested and used by several professors at George Mason University. WPBook works with the Facebook Development platform to enable Facebook users to embed a Wordpress Blog onto their Facebook page. WPBook works with Courseware to create a custom application allowing students to view syllabus information directly from Facebook. A third plugin, Gradebook, will allow users to manage and display class grades securely to students. Gradebook is currently under development.

Moving Forward

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:26:52 +0000

Roy Rosenzweig co-founded the Center for History and New Media in 1994 and directed the Center until he passed away last month. In the early years, the Center was just Roy and a few others, but in the last seven years the number of projects, size of the staff, and overall ambition of the Center has grown exponentially. Presently there are over forty people working full or part time at CHNM on over two dozen active projects, from landmark history education projects like History Matters and the new National History Education Clearinghouse, important collections like the September 11 Digital Archive, and innovative software such as Zotero and Omeka. Although we always joked that Roy could do the work of many people, among his many legacies was his realization that CHNM was built not on servers and software but on people and their passion for history and digital technology, and that despite his boundless energy he could not do it all. Over the past five years Roy assembled a senior staff with decades of combined experience in the construction of new media, and hired what we like to think is one of the most talented groups of web designers, programmers, and researchers in academia. Today, that team has assumed the reins of the Center and, although in mourning, continues without missing a beat to work on some of the most exciting and important projects in the digital realm. Dan Cohen, who has worked closely with Roy since 2001 and who co-authored with him Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, has become the new director of CHNM. Other key members of the senior staff remain in place and firmly committed to the Center, including Tom Scheinfeldt (Managing Director), Kelly Schrum (Director of Education Projects), Sharon Leon (Director of Public Projects), Sean Takats (Acting Director of Research Projects), Connie Sehat (Digital Historian), and Mike O’Malley, Paula Petrik, and Mills Kelly (Associate Directors). At every stage in the growth of CHNM, Roy liked to say that “we are just getting started.” And thanks to Roy, we will continue “getting started” for many years to come.

Roy Rosenzweig: Memorial Events

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:42:36 +0000

Several memorial events are being planned to celebrate the life and work of CHNM’s beloved late director, Roy Rosenzweig, who passed away earlier this month after a valiant struggle with cancer. Details will be posted at thanksroy.org/memorialevents, where friends, colleagues, and admirers may also post memories, stories, tributes, photos and other materials in celebration of Roy.

Washington Area Technology & Humanities Fall Forum

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:13:46 +0000

This fall the Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities is pleased to present: Bob Stein on “The Evolution of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era” For the past several hundred years intellectual discourse has been shaped by the rhythms and hierarchies inherent in the nature of print. As discourse shifts from page to screen, and more significantly to a networked environment, the old definitions and relations are undergoing substantial changes. The shift in our world view from individual to network holds the promise of a radical reconfiguraton in culture. Notions of authority are being challenged. The roles of author and reader are morphing and blurring. Publishing, methods of distribution, peer review and copyright - every crucial aspect of the way we move ideas around - is up for grabs. The new digital technologies afford vastly different outcomes ranging from oppressive to liberating. How we make this shift has critical long term implications for human society. Our speaker will be Robert Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. The institute has two principal activities. one is building high-end tools for making rich media electronic documents (part of the Mellon Foundation’s higher-ed digital infrastructure initiative) and the other is exploring and hopefully influencing the evolution of new forms of intellectual expression and discourse. Previously Stein was the founder of The Voyager Company where over a 13-year period he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Who Built America, and the Voyager edition of Macbeth. We will meet on Wednesday November 7, 2007 from 4:30-7:00 PM on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus in Room 163 of the Research 1 Building. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP to Meredith Mayo ( mmayo1[at]gmu[dot]edu) by October 30, 2007 if you would like to have dinner. Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason, the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted. The Research 1 building is located on the main Fairfax campus of George Mason University. Parking is located directly across from the building in the Sandy Creek Parking Deck.

History Clearinghouse Contract, Omeka Grant

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 11:01:38 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is proud to announce its award of two major grants last week from the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. CHNM received a $7 million contract from the U.S. Department of Education, one of the largest competitive grants ever won by George Mason University, to develop and maintain a National History Education Clearinghouse over the next five years in collaboration with the History Education group led by Sam Wineburg at Stanford University (SU), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the National History Center (NHC). Centered on K-12 history education, the project will aim to integrate major developments to advance history teaching and learning. The emergence of the Internet has made an unprecedented number of historical documents and resources available to teachers and students alike, while the Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) program has devoted over $700 million to improve history education. Led by Roy Rosenzweig, Kelly Schrum, and Sharon Leon, the Clearinghouse project will consolidate the most informative online history content as well as provide a digital support center for American history teachers at all levels and in all locations. More specifically, the web site will focus on seven features: history education news, history content, teaching materials, best practices, policy and research, professional development and Teaching American History grants. Adding to this web-based resource will be off-line support for teachers, such as an annual two-day conference, a biannual newsletter, an annual report on the state of history education, and workshops around the country. CHNM is also celebrating its IMLS funding for Omeka, a next-generation web-publishing platform for smaller history museums, historical societies, and historic sites. From the Swahili word meaning “to display” or “to lay out for discussion” Omeka is designed for these groups that they may not have the adequate resources or expertise necessary to create and maintain their own online tools. The free, open-source tool will allow many more museums to mount well-designed, professional-looking, and content-rich web sites without adding to their constrained budgets. It will also provide a standards-based interoperable system to share and use digital content in multiple contexts so that museums can design online exhibitions more efficiently. Beginning in October 2007, CHNM will plan, design, test, evaluate, and disseminate Omeka over four phases while working closely with our major partner, the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS). MHS represents a wide museum network and a broad range of history and heritage institutions of different sizes, audiences, and subject area interests. In addition, we will make Omeka available to other small museums through conference presentations, direct mailings, and the CHNM website.

Echo Grants, NYC Digital History Workshop

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:39:53 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce two exciting opportunities for historians of science, technology, and industry: Echo Online Collection Grants and a Doing Digital History Workshop in New York. CHNM’s Echo project is pleased to announce the availability of up to five $1000 grants to fund current research projects involving the online collection of the recent history of science, technology, and industry. Echo offers tailored consulting services to institutions and individual researchers with online projects or ideas, including help with strategic project planning, technology, website design, and outreach in building digital history collections. Examples of projects that employ Echo methods and technologies can be found at the Echo Collecting Center and include A Thin Blue Line: The History of the Pregnancy Test Kit, a joint project by Echo and the National Institute of Health, and Remembering Columbia STS-107, an online exhibit by NASA. Please submit a grant proposal of no more than 500 words and a C.V. to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line, “Echo grant proposal,” by December 1, 2007. CHNM also invites public historians of science, technology, and industry in the New York area to our next workshop on the theory and practice of digital history. The workshop will be held on January 17, 2008 at the New York Public Library. Participants will explore the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, and presentation of history; genres of online history and tools; website infrastructure and design; scholarly collaboration; digitization and online collecting; the process of identifying and building online history audiences; and issues of copyright and preservation. There is no registration fee, but spaces are limited. Please submit an application form by December 1, 2007 (available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/3794/); accepted participants will be notified by December 10. About Echo: Since 2001, the Echo project (Exploring and Collecting History Online—Science, Technology, and Industry) has promoted the collection and dissemination of the history of science and technology on the Web with the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

CHNM Helps Launch Local History Project

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:51:33 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of a new project, A Look Back at Braddock District, Fairfax County, Virginia at www.braddockheritage.org. Working with a committed team of volunteer researchers from the office of The Honorable Sharon Bulova, Braddock District Supervisor, CHNM provided technical and conceptual support for the website. Hosted by the CHNM as a community service and maintained by local residents, the site includes brief historical essays, teaching materials, and a searchable database of oral histories, photographs, and artifacts contributed by area residents. The website is a companion to the book, Braddock’s True Gold: 20th Century Life in the Heart of Fairfax County, tracing the transformation of the Braddock area from a rural region into a sprawling suburb of Washington, D.C.

CHNM Digital Memory Banks in the News

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 07:53:10 +0000

Two of CHNM’s “digital memory bank” projects have drawn major media attention of late, marking important landmarks in both American history and their own development. On August 29, 2007 on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) announced a new partnership with the Historic New Orleans Collection to present and preserve the Do You Know What It Means?, an important photo-documentary collection and long-time partner of the project. HDMB was also featured in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Stories From the Storm.” On September 11, 2007 on the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, CHNM’s September 11 Digital Archive announced the launch an improved website that for the first time provides public access to thousands of previously unavailable artifacts. In June of 2004, the September 11 Digital Archive ceased publishing new material, though it continued to collect stories, images, and other artifacts. The collection now stands at more than 150,000 digital objects, of which only a small portion has ever been made available. With the website’s relaunch, the full scope of the archive will be accessible to both researchers and the public, tripling the extent of shared memories. This major announcement garnered significant national media attention, including articles by U.S. News and World Report and The New York Times. Both projects are funded by major grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

"Voices from the Storm" Podcast Debuts

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:10:25 +0000

This summer CHNM’s Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) features a new series of podcasts, “Voices from the Storm.” Each week, from now until the end of September, Mills Kelly and Sheila Brennan read stories submitted to the online archive. Listeners hear from hurricane evacuees and survivors, as well as from volunteers who traveled to the Gulf Coast to help with the massive recovery efforts. Subscribe to the RSS feed and receive the latest podcasts and news from HDMB.

Firefox Co-Founder Blake Ross Interviewed by CHNM

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:27:24 +0000

This week the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank podcast features Firefox co-founder, Blake Ross. Ross first came to fame in 2002 after appearing on the cover of Wired Magazine while still a high school student. Ross agreed to meet with CHNM research assistants Ken Albers and Olivia Ryan at a California public library last June for an interview. Listen to the podcast for highlights or visit the Memory Bank for audio and a transcript of the full interview. Organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is a permanent, open, peer-produced digital archive of Mozilla history. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank collects and permanently preserves digital texts, images, audio, video, personal narratives, and oral histories related to Mozilla, its products, and its community of developers, testers, and users. The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is part of CHNM’s Echo project, which, since 2001, has worked to develop new ways of collecting, preserving, and presenting the history of science, technology, and industry online. Building on CHNM’s earlier work on the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank aims to create a lasting resource for generations of students, teachers, scholars, and members of the general public interested in the history of the Internet, open source software, and Mozilla.

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Earns AASLH Award

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:27:56 +0000

The American Association of State and Local History recently awarded The Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans an Award of Merit for Leadership in History for our work on the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (www.hurricanearchive.org). AASLH presents the Award of Merit to honor significant achievement in the field of local history and to honor excellence in special projects. Launched in November 2005 to collect and preserve the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) has collected nearly 25,000 items. HDMB is the largest and by far the most accessible non-commercial archive containing the stories and images of Katrina and Rita. This collected evidence will prove invaluable to future historians, and the process of recording experiences of those affected by the storms will contribute to healing and rebuilding in their communities.

Upcoming ECHO workshop and ECHO Grants

Tue, 15 May 2007 13:25:45 +0000

Doing Digital History: An Introduction for Historians of Science, Technology, and Industry July 12-15, 2007 The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) announces two exciting opportunities for historians of science, technology, and industry. This summer, CHNM’s ECHO project (http://echo.gmu.edu) invites scholars of the history of science, technology, and industry to our fourth annual workshop on the theory and practice of digital history. Participants will explore the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history; genres of online history and tools; website infrastructure and design; scholarly collaboration; digitization and online collecting; the process of identifying and building online history audiences; and issues of copyright and preservation. The workshop will be held at CHNM’s offices on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus, conveniently located outside metropolitan Washington, DC. Thanks to support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, there will be no registration fee, and a limited number of fellowships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars. As spaces are limited, please submit an application form by June 8, 2007 (available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/3601/) accepted participants will be notified by June 10th. Also through the ECHO program, the Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the availability of a number of $1000 grants to fund current research projects involving the online collection of the recent history of science, technology, and industry. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ECHO offers consulting services to institutions and individuals with online projects or ideas. We tailor our advice to your project’s scope, focus, and budget to help you implement and build your digital history collection. We can help with strategic project planning, technology, website design, and outreach. In the past we have worked with the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and many individual researchers. Examples of projects that employ ECHO’s methods and technologies to collect and present historical materials on the Web can be found at the ECHO collecting center (http://echo.gmu.edu) and include the September 11 Digital Archive(http://911digitalarchive.org/), a collection of over 200,000 stories, images, email, and documents from the attacks and their aftermath; the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Collecting and Preserving the Stories of Katrina and Rita (http://hurricanearchive.org/); A Thin Blue Line: The History of the Pregnancy Test Kit (http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/thinblueline/), a joint project by ECHO and the National Institute of Health; and Remembering Columbia STS-107 (http://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Introduction.html), an online exhibit by NASA. Please submit a grant proposal of no more than 500 words and a C.V. to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line, “ECHO grant proposal,” by 1 July 2007.

Now on shelves: Dan Cohen's Equations from God

Thu, 10 May 2007 13:26:53 +0000

Beginning with Plato and ending on the eve of the twentieth century, CHNM Director of Research Projects, Dan Cohen’s latest book, Equations from God (Johns Hopkins University Press), tells the story of how and why so many Europeans and Americans came to see mathematics as a divine language, a way to ascend above the petty differences of mankind and commune with the mind of the Deity. Although it focuses on an ostensibly technical topic, it is written in a plainspoken way that makes the world of the mathematician accessible to a general audience, and it contextualizes that world within the religious, social, and political upheaval of the Victorian era. And it reveals surprising ideas from many unpublished works such as diaries, notebooks, sermons, and letters - ideas that remain remarkably relevant in today’s world. Equations from God is now available from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other outlets. Cohen is coauthor with Roy Rosenzweig, of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press) and manages several projects at CHNM including Echo and Zotero.

Virginia Tech launches April 16 Archive in collaboration with CHNM

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:24:17 +0000

Virginia Tech’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) has just announced the launch of the April 16 Archive. Employing technologies originally developed in conjunction with CHNM’s stable of “Digital Memory Bank” projects including Echo, the September 11 Digital Archive, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the new archive will preserve a diverse record of the events surrounding April 16, 2007 by collecting first-hand observations, photographic images, sound recordings, media reports, personal writings, official statements, individual blog postings, and any other documents that can be stored as digital files. In addition to local reactions, the archive welcomes responses from across the globe in any language. Through this archive, we aim to leave a positive legacy for the larger community and contribute to a collective process of healing, especially as those affected by this tragedy tell their stories in their own words. The Center for History and New Media is honored to be part of this important project and proud to assist the efforts of our Virginia Tech colleagues to preserve the memory of the recent tragedy in Blacksburg. A full press release is available from CDDC at http://www.april16archive.org/news/.

CHNM Podcasts Keep On Rolling

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:25:19 +0000

The Center for History and New Media continues to build on the early success of its two new podcasts, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Podcast and Digital Campus, releasing new episodes almost weekly and attracting new subscribers by the dozens. This week Episode 6 of the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Podcast provides highlights from an an oral history taken by CHNM alumna Olivia Ryan from XUL developer Neil Deakin last June in which Neil offers some insights into what it is like to move from a volunteer to a full-time Mozilla employee. Meanwhile, Episode 4 of Digital Campus asks the question “Can social networking sites like Facebook play a productive role in the humanities?” and reports on recent meetings on the digital humanities and digital museums, Google’s new My Maps service, and the Creative Common’s Learn initiative. Visit http://mozillamemory.org/blog/ and http://digitalcampus.tv/ to subscribe to the podcasts or to download individual episodes to your PC, iPod, or Mp3 player.

Rosenzweig Receives OAH Distinguished Service Award

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:24:51 +0000

On Saturday, March 31, during the 100th Annual Meeting of the the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, CHNM Director Roy Rosenzweig was presented with the OAH Distinguished Service Award for an individual or individuals whose contributions have significantly enriched the understanding and appreciation of American history:

The executive board recognizes Roy Rosenzweig, George Mason University, for his outstanding contributions to labor and public history, and his dedication to reaching new and diverse audiences as expressed in his pioneering efforts in the uses of digital technology and new media. Over his more than thirty-year career, Rosenzweig’s work has served as a model of collaborative, public-spirited service and research.Roy Rosenzweig is the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media; College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History; and Director of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, where he has taught since 1981. Rosenzweig earned his Ph.D. in history at Harvard (1978). His dissertation, later published as Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1880-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1983) insisted that explorations into popular amusements and pastimes are as central to our understanding of working class politics as voting patterns, strikes, and shop floor protests. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, coauthored with Elizabeth Blackmar (Cornell University Press, 1992) won prizes for urban history, historic preservation, and New York history, and remains the definitive study of the park. In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998), Rosenzweig and coauthor David Thelen challenged us to move beyond our pessimism regarding Americans’ lack of historical knowledge, and to appreciate our publics’ deep personal connections to the past through the compilation of genealogies, memorabilia collections, and museum visits. Rosenzweig is unmatched among his peers as an advocate for new media and technology and he has guided (and sometimes gently pushed) many of us through the technological revolution. He has been associated with a list of pioneering media projects which includes the American Social History Project CD-ROM, Who Built America? (2000); his additional participation as an editor and author of the print volumes represented a culmination of a life’s dedication to history “from the bottom up” for Roy and many of his colleagues at the ASHP. In 1994 Rosenzweig founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which has been at the forefront of efforts to use new media and digital technology to promote an inclusive and democratic understanding of the past, while reaching new and diverse audiences. A life member of the OAH, Rosenzweig has aided numerous organizational programs and committees over the past seventeen years. He played a lead role in incorporating electronic technology into the various programs and operations, including serving on the electronic advisory committee.

CHNM Podcast — "Digital Campus"

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 13:28:03 +0000

CHNM is happy to announce the launch of a new podcast, Digital Campus, now available from iTunes and http://digitalcampus.tv The biweekly roundtable will discuss how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Our inaugural episode features CHNM Director of Research Projects, Dan Cohen, CHNM Associate Director, Mills Kelly, and CHNM Assistant Director, Tom Scheinfeldt discussing the controversy over whether Wikipedia is a useful or problematic resource for student, the launch of Windows Vista, the rise of Google Docs as an alternative to MS Word, and recent stories about Blackboard’s patents and their social bookmarking site, Scholar.com. And at the end of the podcast, we share links to the best free wiki software and sites on digital maps and books. Subscribe to Digital Campus via iTunes or at http://digitalcampus.tv

CHNM and The Speech Accent Archive on NPR

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:23:49 +0000

Lynn Neary of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition spoke with Professor of Linguistics, Steven Weinberger, about The Speech Accent Archive, a CHNM-affliated site. The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. Check it out here.

CHNM launches First Podcast – Mozilla Digital Memory Bank

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 12:55:47 +0000

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of its first podcast. The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Podcast will feature highlights from oral histories taken from current and former Mozilla employees. The biweekly show will cover a wide range of topics such as the open source development process, thoughts on the unique successes of Firefox, the cultural relationships between developers and volunteers, and comparisons between corporate and open source experiences. The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is a permanent, open, peer-produced digital archive of Mozilla history. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, The Mozilla Digital Memory Bank collects and permanently preserves digital texts, images, audio, video, personal narratives, and oral histories related to Mozilla, its products, and its community of developers, testers, and users. Building on CHNM’s earlier work on the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank aims to create a lasting resource for generations of students, teachers, scholars, and members of the general public interested in the history of the Internet, open source software, and Mozilla. Help preserve the history of Mozilla and Firefox by contributing your own stories, emails, chat transcripts and documents to the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank.

CHNM launches Probing the Past

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 13:19:48 +0000

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of a new website: Probing the Past: Virginia and Maryland Probate Inventories, 1740-1810. What was daily like life in the 18th century? For slaves? For slave owners? What objects did people use everyday for work, eating, or play? Probing the Past is a free website that allows users to explore these questions and many more. The site presents 325 probate inventories that were recorded between 1740 and 1810 in selected Virginia and Maryland counties. Resources include digitized copies and transcriptions of the inventories, keyword and advanced searches, browsing by decade and county, two in-depth interviews with scholars on how to analyze probate inventories, and three lesson plans. Funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and completed in collaboration with Gunston Hall Plantation, Probing the Past uses material culture to illuminate the rituals and social relations of 18th-century families in Virginia and Maryland, as well as the region’s economy and connection to larger markets.

World History Matters awarded the 2007 James Harvey Robinson Prize

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 13:22:14 +0000

On January 5, 2007 at the American Historical Association’s Annual General Meeting, representatives from CHNM, including Roy Rosenzweig, Kelly Schrum, Kristin Lehner, and Sharon Leon accepted the James Harvey Robinson Prize for World History Matters (Co-Director, Mills Kelly was unable to attend). The Robinson Prize was established by the AHA Council in 1978 and is awarded biennially for the teaching aid that has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. The prize committee noted that “the impressive depth and breadth of its primary sources, the comprehensive geographical scope and transnational approach, and the user-friendly site design will enable high school and college world history teachers and students to make use of the rich site resources to investigate the complexities of global history.” This is the third time that CHNM was the recipient or co-recipient of the Robinson Prize. In 1994, CHNM was recognized for its work on the CD-ROM Who Built America?, which was produced by the American Social History Project at the City University of New York. In 2005, CHNM also shared the prize with ASHP for their joint work on the website, History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web.

DC Area Technology & Humanities Forum returns December 5th

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 08:19:29 +0000

Scholarship 2.0: What Web 2.0 means for Digital Humanists Tuesday December 5th from 5-7pm, Research 1 Room 462, Center for History & New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia This fall’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities focuses on the opportunities and challenges presented by Web 2.0 technologies for digital humanists. Speakers will include Bryan Alexander on “Web 2.0 and Digital Humanists,” Dan Cohen on “Zotero and the Next Generation of Scholarly Research,” and Eddie Maloney on “When is an ePortfolio not an ePortfolio? Georgetown University’s Digital Notebook project.” Bryan Alexander researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts colleges. His specialties include digital writing, weblogs, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, wireless culture and teaching, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration. He contributes to a series of weblogs, including NITLE Tech News, MANE IT leaders, and Smartmobs, when not creating digital learning objects (like Gormenghast). He has taught English and information technology studies at the University of Michigan and Centenary College. Dan Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media. His research is in European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. He is co-author with Roy Rosenzweig of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History. At the Center for History and New Media he has co-directed the September 11 Digital Archive and the Echo project, and has developed software tools for scholars, teachers, and students. Eddie Maloney is the Managing Director of CNDLS, the Director of Research and Learning Technologies for CNDLS and the Office of Information Systems, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English. He holds a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and a Master’s Degree from Syracuse University, both in English Literature. In his various roles at the University, Eddie helps to define Georgetown’s technology strategy as it relates to teaching and scholarship. His first love, though, is teaching, which he has been doing at the university level for the past fourteen years. As a faculty member in the Department of English, he teaches 20th-century literature and narrative theory courses. He has published on James Joyce and J. D. Salinger, as well as on issues related to narrative and literary theory, film studies, and hypertext fiction. He is currently working on a book-length project on the use of artificial paratexts in fictional narratives. The Forum will meet on Tuesday December 5, 2006 from 5:00-7:00 PM on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus in the Center for History & New Media Lab (room 462) in the Research 1 Building, directly across from the Sandy Creek Parking Deck. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP online for dinner by November 28. Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at GMU and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool now available

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 09:54:23 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of Zotero: The Next-Generation Research Tool. Generously funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and a major grant from the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Zotero is poised to change dramatically the way scholarly research is performed online. Zotero is a free, easy-to-use, open source research tool that runs in the Firefox web browser and helps scholars gather, annotate, organize, and share the results of their research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when the user is viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information in the correct fields. The 1.0 beta release of Zotero provides advanced functionality for gathering, organizing, and scanning research, as well as basic import/export capability and bibliographic formatting tools. Automatic updates to the software in the fall and winter of 2006-2007 will provide many more citation styles, the ability for Zotero to recognize even more online resources, even better support for importing and exporting entire collections, and integration with Microsoft Word and other word processors. Later versions of Zotero will allow users to share their collections with other users, collaborate on research projects using Zotero, send their collections to other free web services (such as mapping or translation sites), and receive recommendations and feeds of new resources that might be of interest. Zotero is free and available to the general public at www.zotero.org. Download your copy today!

Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 come to CHNM

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 11:19:25 +0000

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are pleased to announce the award of a grant from National Historical Publications and Records Commission to bring the innovative electronic archive Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 to Fairfax. Ultimately, the project will make more than 50,000 documents from the first decade and a half of the War Department’s history available to researchers, teachers, and students free of charge in a fully-searchable online database. In the young nation’s early years, the War Department controlled more than 70 percent of the nation’s budget, was the largest consumer of fabric, clothing, food, medicine, and weapons in the country, and provided pensions to veterans, widows, and orphans. Nearly all the contact that early Americans had with their new federal government was through the War Department, making the records of the office a kind of “National Archives” of the young nation. Unfortunately, those documents were destroyed by fire in 1800; for years, scholars believed the entire collection to have been lost. Mason’s involvement with Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 continues more than a decade of work reconstituting and archiving those records. That effort began at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania with the acquisition and digitization of copies of the War Department’s files that had been scattered across hundreds of repositories and archives. Over the course of several years, staff at ESU located copies of the files destroyed in the fire and converted them to digital images. Staff at CHNM are now in the process of entering sophisticated data about each of the documents into a database that will finally make these digital images fully searchable. The Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 are expected to make their first appearance online in 2007.

NEH awards funding for "Making the History of 1989: Sources and Narratives on the Fall of Communism"

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 11:22:10 +0000

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are excited to announce that we have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a website on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The project–Making the History of 1989–will have three main features: a database of 300 primary sources (text, images, audio, video) on the events of 1989; multimedia interviews with four historians make visible the strategies scholars use when working with primary sources and interpreting the past; six teaching modules and ten teaching case studies provide historical context, tools, and strategies for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources. When it is completed in early 2009, the project will debut at a meeting at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Wilson Center, the growing list of partners in the project includes the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project (Washington, D.C.), the Wende Museum (Los Angeles), and the Research Network 1989 (Berlin).

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Collects 5,000 Objects

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 11:18:10 +0000

Since its launch in November 2005, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank has collected over 5000 digital objects from institutional partners, such as the Louisiana State Museum and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and from hundreds of individual contributors. The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History and other partners, organized this project. Generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts. We hope to foster some positive legacies by allowing the people affected by these storms to tell their stories in their own words, which as part of the historical record will remain accessible to a wide audience for generations to come. This project builds on prior work by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, and other partners such as the Library of Congress and the Red Cross, to collect and preserve history online, especially through the ECHO project and the September 11 Digital Archive. It is part of a growing practice of using the Internet to preserve the past through “digital memory banks.”

Katrina's Jewish Voices heard in CHNM partner site

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 11:18:55 +0000

To preserve the Jewish experience of Hurricane Katrina, the Jewish Women’s Archive has announced the launch of Katrina’s Jewish Voices, an online collecting project and digital archive. Employing technologies and techniques developed at CHNM and in collaboration with CHNM’s Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, Katrina’s Jewish Voices allows members of the Jewish community in New Orleans and across the country to contribute their stories and photographs. The collection currently stands at nearly 200 images, emails, documents, and other digital objects related to the Jewish experience of Hurricane Katrina and is growing daily. Since 1995, the Jewish Women’s Archive has worked to uncover, chronicle, and transmit the rich history of American Jewish women.

CHNM announces completion of Women in World History website

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:12:30 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce completion of the Women in World History website, an online curriculum resource center designed to help high school and college world history teachers and their students locate, analyze, and learn from primary sources dealing with women and gender in world history. Resources include more than 200 primary sources; 15 curriculum modules complete with primary sources, introductions, teaching strategies, and lesson plans; 30 scholarly website reviews; 8 guides to analyzing specific kinds of primary sources, such as oral history and religious texts; 9 teaching case studies; and 4 archived discussion forums on teaching about women in world history. Funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities and private donations, Women in World History integrates three approaches central to current scholarship in world history and the history of women: an emphasis on comparative issues rather than civilizations in isolation; a focus on contacts among different societies; and an attentiveness to “global” forces, such as technology diffusion, migration, or trade routes, that transcend individual societies. Project materials also utilize recent advances in our understanding of how historical learning takes place, including complex interaction with sources, recursive reading, and skills used by historians.

CHNM and National Park Service Open Ellis Island Exhibition

Tue, 09 May 2006 11:15:22 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce the opening of a virtual and physical exhibit on the Russian Gulag. CHNM has teamed with the U.S. National Park Service and the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, to provide a companion website for the traveling exhibit Gulag: Soviet Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom, now open at Ellis Island. Located at http://www.gulaghistory.org/exhibits/nps, the website provides a virtual tour of the traveling exhibit, information on related activities in the exhibit’s host cities, curricular materials for secondary school teachers on the history of the Gulag and a place for visitors to respond to the exhibit and share their own stories. In addition, with major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for History and New Media, the George Mason University Department of History & Art History, and Professor Steven A. Barnes are constructing a new web-only exhibit, Gulag: Many Day, Many Lives. Opening in Fall 2007, this exhibit will immerse viewers in the varied experiences of an array of Gulag prisoners. Through audio, video and visual imagery, Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives will engagingly present, in vignettes and full biographies, a range of prisoners’ lives. Furthermore, in cooperation with the Gulag Museum of Perm, Russia, this website will also offer a virtual tour of that reconstructed camp/museum.

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank gets an A+ from Education World

Wed, 03 May 2006 08:59:59 +0000

Stating that the “site is very well designed and interesting,” Education World awarded CHNM’s Hurricane Digital Memory Bank an A+ rating. It also recommended the project to students and teachers at nearly all grade levels, from early elementary to high school. Education World helps educators to integrate the Internet easily into the classroom by offering free resources and reviews through its website.

The CHNM Suspects

Tue, 02 May 2006 11:16:48 +0000

The Center for History and New Media participated in the annual Victims’ Rights 5k run/walk held at George Mason University on April 27, 2006. “The CHNM Suspects” included over 20 runners and walkers, all of whom took some time away from their computers to enjoy a beautiful spring day!

"Taking Games Seriously" - Spring 2006 DC Area Technology & Humanities Forum scheduled for May 15

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 11:14:22 +0000

Taking Games Seriously: The Impact of Gaming Technology in the Humanities Monday, May 15th from 4-6pm, Car Barn 316, 3520 Prospect St. NW, Georgetown University Please join Michelle Lucey-Roper (Federation for American Scientists) and Jason Rhody (National Endowment for the Humanities) for a discussion moderated by Mark Sample (George Mason University) on gaming and the humanities. Discussion will center on gaming and its implications for education; thinking about ways to exploit aspects of video game technology to create innovative learning spaces; and games as a possible conduit to online archives or museum collections. Michelle Lucey-Roper is the Learning Technologies Project Manager for the Discover Babylon Project and the Digital Promise Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington, DC. She has created and managed several technology projects and research initiatives that helped to improve public access to primary source materials. While working towards her doctorate on the interaction of word and image, Lucey-Roper researched and designed curricula for a wide range of subject areas and created new information resources. Before joining FAS, she worked as a librarian, teacher and most recently at the Library of Congress as a research associate. She earned her B.A. at Trinity College, Hartford, CT; her M.A at King’s College, London; and received a doctorate from Oxford University. Jason Rhody, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, is currently writing his dissertation, entitled Game Fiction. He has taught courses and given conference presentations on new media, electronic literature, and narrative. He currently works on a web-based education initiative, EDSITEment, for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He previously worked for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, an institute dedicated to using technology to enable humanities research and teaching. Jason writes about games and literature on his blog, Miscellany is the Largest Category. Mark Sample teaches and researches both contemporary American literature and New Media/Digital Culture, and he is always exploring how literary texts interact with, critique, and rework visual and media texts. His current research projects include a book manuscript on the early fiction of Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison, exploring their engagement with consumer culture, particularly how they use what Walter Benjamin calls “dialectical images” to reveal the latent violence of everyday things. Another project concerns the interplay between video games, the War on Terror, and the production of knowledge. Professor Sample received an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University (1998) and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (2004). The forum will be held on Monday, May 15th from 4pm to 6pm at Georgetown University in the Car Barn. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. Street parking around campus is severely limited and strictly enforced by the DC police and the DC Department of Public Works. Most streets require a Zone 2 residential permit issued by the District of Columbia for parking for longer than two hours. A limited number of metered spaces are available on Reservoir Road, 37th Street and Prospect Street. For those up for a short walk, the Southwest Garage is accessible from Canal Road or Prospect St. The nearest metro station is Rosslyn, across Key Bridge. You must RSVP for dinner by May 8th. Co-sponsored by the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM), the DC Area Technology & Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provides an opportunity for DC area scholars interested in the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

Mason Basketball Digital Memory Bank

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:11:45 +0000

The Mason Basketball Digital Memory Bank is now live at http://hoops.gmu.edu. With their first trip to the Final Four in school history, Mason is enjoying what is undoubtedly its finest season. The Patriots have won an NCAA Tournament game for the first time, set a school record with 27 wins, and defeated a pair of top-10 teams (Connecticut and North Carolina) for the first time in the history of the University. The Patriots’ Cinderella story has made George Mason the focus of national attention, with Mason Fever spreading across the country. It is difficult to gauge what result the Patriots’ historic run will have on the University, but its impact will undoubtedly be felt. As Patriot hoops make history, our historians are helping fans become a part of the story. By posting online their memories and media files of this momentous run to the Final Four, fans around the world can become a part of this important process. Our stories, as a component of this digital archive, will become part of a living history. This project builds on prior work by George Mason Universityâ€™s Center for History and New Media, and other partners such as the Library of Congress and the Red Cross, to collect and preserve history online, especially through the ECHO project, the September 11 Digital Archive, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. It is part of a growing practice of using the Internet to preserve the past through “digital memory banks.” Please spread the word about the Mason Basketball Digital Memory Bank and please be sure to visit hoops.gmu.edu and tell us your experience (or show us your experience in photos) with George Mason’s unbelievable run in basketball and be a part of online history! Go Patriots!

Cohen and Rosenzweig on Death of Multiple-Choice Exams

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:12:21 +0000

CHNM staffers Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig have published an article in the Feb. 24, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education on the implications of Cohen’s H-Bot software, and of similar data-mining services and the web in general. “No Computer Left Behind” argues that just as the calculator - an unavoidable modern technology - muscled its way into the mathematics exam room, devices to access and quickly scan the vast store of historical knowledge on the Internet (such as PDAs and smart phones) will inevitably disrupt the testing - and thus instruction - of humanities subjects. As the editors of the Chronicle put it in their headline: “The multiple-choice test is on its deathbed.” This development is to be praised, Cohen and Rosenzweig argue; just as the teaching of mathematics should be about higher principles rather than the rote memorization of multiplication tables, the teaching of subjects like history should be freed by new technologies to focus once again (as it was before a century of multiple-choice exams) on more important principles such as the analysis and synthesis of primary sources. You can read their article in the CHNM History and New Media essays repository.

Women in World History Recognizes National Women's History Month

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 11:12:58 +0000

In recognition of National Women’s History Month, CHNM’s NEH-funded Women in World History website would like to announce its imminent completion. Women and World History provides free access to primary sources about women across all time periods and world cultures - valuable resources for incorporating information about the myriad ways women have shaped world history into classrooms, lectures, and libraries. Download a flier to display.

Women in World History Announces Online Forum

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 09:54:46 +0000

CHNM is happy to announce that our Women in World History project will host the last in its series of four month-long online forums in March 2006, Women in Asia. These forums give world history teachers the chance to talk about ways to teach issues surrounding women and gender in world history, and how to access classroom resources, including online primary sources. An educator with high school classroom experience and a historian moderates each forum. Each forum is an accessible email listserv that allows all participants to post comments and see all responses. The forum begins March 1: Women in Asia, moderated by Dorothy Ko (Barnard College) and Kurt Waters (Virginia Public Schools). To Register for the Women in Asia forum, subscribe (join) via e-mail: 1.Address an e-mail message to listserv@listserv.gmu.edu 2.Put the following in the body of the message: subscribe WOMENINASIA-L yourfirstname yourlastname A confirmation message will be sent to your e-mail address asking you to confirm your subscription request. You must reply to this message with “ok” in the body of the message. Leave the subject unchanged. Once you have subscribed to the list, you can post messages to the list by sending e-mail to WOMENINASIA-L@listserv.gmu.edu For more information see http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/forum.html For help registering contact wwh@chnm.gmu.edu

CHNM's Sheila Brennan discusses Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 11:06:33 +0000

KOLE radio in Beaumont, TX will feature CHNM’s Hurricane Digital Memory Bank on Friday, February 10 between 3 and 4 pm (CST). Fox Forum host Dan Gresham will interview Hurricane Digital Memory Bank Project Manager, Sheila Brennan, and will take calls during that time. Listeners may tune into 1340 or 1380 AM, or listen to a streamed broadcast online.

Cohen on Illinois Public Radio

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 09:16:13 +0000

On Friday, February 3, CHNM’s Director of Research Projects, Dan Cohen appeared on Illinois Public Radio’s Focus 580 to discuss his recent book, Digital History and other topics in history and new media. The entire interview is now available as an MP3 file from WILL’s website.

Women in World History Announces Online Forum

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:08:29 +0000

CHNM is happy to announce that our Women in World History project will host the third in its series of four month-long online forums in February 2006, Women in Latin America. These forums give world history teachers the chance to talk about ways to teach issues surrounding women and gender in world history, and how to access classroom resources, including online primary sources. An educator with high school classroom experience and a historian moderates each forum. Each forum is an accessible email listserv that allows all participants to post comments and see all responses. Our third forum begins February 1: Women in Latin America, moderated by Donna Guy (Ohio State University) and Sharon Cohen (Maryland Public Schools). To Register for the Women in Latin America forum: Subscribe (join) via e-mail: 1.Address an e-mail message to listserv@listserv.gmu.edu 2.Put the following in the body of the message: subscribe WOMENINLATINAMERICA-L yourfirstname yourlastname A confirmation message will be sent to your e-mail address asking you to confirm your subscription request. You must reply to this message with “ok” in the body of the message. Leave the subject unchanged. Once you have subscribed to the list, you can post messages to the list by sending e-mail to WOMENINLATINAMERICA-L@listserv.gmu.edu For more information see http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/forum.html For help registering contact wwh@chnm.gmu.edu

CHNM on CNN

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 10:42:03 +0000

On Friday, January 13, CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” featured CHNM’s Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. Internet reporter, Jacki Schechner, enthusiastically highlighted the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank’s efforts to collect the stories and memories of the 2005 hurricane season.

CHNM Launches Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:09:41 +0000

In an effort to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, The Center for History and New Media has launched the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. A collaboration with the University of New Orleans, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank brings together a diverse network of regional and national partners including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and the Louisiana State Museum to collect and preserve first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, podcasts, and other digital materials related to the devastating Gulf Coast storms of 2005. In addition to aiding historical efforts, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank aims to foster some positive legacies by allowing the people affected by these storms to tell their stories in their own words, which as part of the historical record will remain accessible to a wide audience for generations to come. Funded by a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank builds on prior work by the Center for History and New Media and other partners to collect and preserve history online, especially through the Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online - Science, Technology, Industry project and the September 11 Digital Archive. It is part of a growing practice of using the Internet to preserve the past through “digital memory banks.” Download the press release.

CHNM "Tech Tuesday"

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 10:46:03 +0000

On Tuesday, January 10, Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen will discuss their new book, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web on NPR and WAMU’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show. Rosenzweig and Cohen will take questions live from noon to 1 PM EST, and the entire show will be syndicated via iTunes and other outlets as part of WAMU’s podcast series.

CHNM named among "The Best of the Humanities on the Web" by NEH

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:06:42 +0000

The Center for History and New Media has been nominated for inclusion in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ EDSITEment: The Best of the Humanities on the Web project as one of the best online resources for education in the humanities. A peer review panel composed of educators and administrators in education organizations and higher education institutions reviewed the site and determined that CHNM met the EDSITEment criteria for intellectual quality, content, design, and most importantly, classroom impact. EDSITEment is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of the Great City Schools, MarcoPolo Foundation and the National Trust for the Humanities. EDSITEment provides resources for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality material on the Internet in subjects such as literature and language arts, foreign languages, art and culture, and history and social studies.

Firefox Scholar in Chronicle of Higher Education

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:05:58 +0000

Featured in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education is CHNM’s latest software development project, “Firefox Scholar.” Due for beta release in Summer 2006, Firefox Scholar will help teachers, students, and scholars organize and cite materials they have found online. Comprised of a set of browser extensions, Firefox Scholar will allow researchers to recognize and capture metadata from online objects; collect documents, images, and citations from the web; and allow those materials to be sorted, annotated, and searched–all directly within their web browser window. Like the Firefox browser itself, Firefox Scholar will be open and extensible, allowing others who are building digital tools for researchers to expand on the platform. Firefox Scholar is one of a growing suite of free, easy-to-use, open source tools available from CHNM.

Cohen and Rosenzweig on Truth, Lies, and the Web

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:29:32 +0000

Historians have generally taken a dim view of the state of knowledge on the Web, pointing to the many inaccuracies on Web pages written by amateurs. In a new article in First Monday, CHNM Director of Research Projects, Dan Cohen and CHNM Director, Roy Rosenzweig assess this conventional wisdom with the help of CHNM’s innovative H-Bot automated historical fact finder. Adopting mathematical and computational perspectives alien to historians–but not to computer scientists–Cohen and Rosenzweig show that while the Web may include many inaccuracies, when assessed as a whole through statistical means, it is actually extremely accurate. Moreover, Cohen and Rosenzweig’s mathematical methods suggest new techniques for historical research and new approaches to teaching history in an age in which an increasingly significant portion of the past has been digitized. Take a fresh look at the History Web, this week at CHNM.

CHNM "Blogosphere"

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:20:56 +0000

The Center for History and New Media has always been on the cutting edge of technology and scholarship, and today a new resource joins the already extensive CHNM site: the CHNM blogosphere. Visit us to read CHNM faculty and staff member perspectives on trends in digital history and traditional historical scholarship. Nate Agrin’s web tech / random topic blog explores current events and how the world is affected by information sharing. See also Nate’s open code notebook at quirks.exposured. Sheila Brennan looks at the online museum world and history resources, with detours into discussions about life in Texas and dissertation work. Jeremy Boggs post thoughts houghts on how historians can use the electronic form as a tool for academic and educational expression. Dan Cohen covers the digital humanities, the world of Google and search technologies, and programming and software for academics. Josh Greenberg’s blog Epistemographer includes his thoughts on new web technologies, science and technology studies, and related topics. Stephanie Hurter explores topics related to the history of print and public expression and how technology and new media affected (and continue to affect) these things. Mills Kelly maintains a blog devoted to the teaching and learning of history online. Sharon Leon posting cover history, religion, science and occasional cultural topics. Tom Scheinfeldt’s blog, Found History, chronicles the myriad ways and places non-professionals do history - sometimes without even knowing it.

Leon awarded Stanley Jackson Prize

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 11:03:40 +0000

The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences named Sharon Leon, Associate Director of Education Projects at CHNM, as the winner of the third annual Stanley Jackson award for her paper, “Hopelessly Entangled in Nordic Pre-suppositions’: Catholic Participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s.” (59:1, January 2004)." The Jackson Prize was created in the honor of Dr. Stanley W. Jackson (1920-2000). Dr. Jackson was a former editor of the journal, president of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and a distinguished professor of psychiatry and medical history at Yale Medical School. he Jackson Prize is given for a paper published in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. The prize of $500 is awarded yearly by a committee appointed by the editor for the best paper that appeared in the journal in the previous 3 years. Click here to read the article.

CHNM's Bracero History Project in the News

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 11:04:24 +0000

The El Paso Times and Denton Record-Chronicle reported this week about CHNM’s Bracero History Project, a joint effort with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso. The Bracero History Project seeks to establish a new model for museum and cultural institution collaboration, creating a nationwide network to collect the oral histories and mementos of braceros, Mexican guest workers brought to the United States for agricultural labor between 1942-1964. Among the project’s intended outcomes are a comprehensive online archive of Bracero history and a traveling exhibit that will provide insight into the history of work, immigration, and race relations during this period. Click on the links to read the articles: El Paso Times, Denton Record-Chronicle

Google Print & Mass Digitization Projects: DC Tech & Humanities Forum to be held on 11/28/05

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:04:54 +0000

This fall’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities will focus on “Massive Digitization Programs and Their Long-Term Implications: Google Print, the Open Content Alliance, and Related Developments.” Our panelists are Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, and attorney Jonathan Band. Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems. Jonathan Band is a Washington-based attorney who helps shape the laws governing intellectual property and the Internet through a combination of legislative and appellate advocacy. He has represented library and technology clients with respect to the drafting of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), database protection legislation, and other statutes relating to copyrights, spam, cybersecurity, and indecency. He received his BA from Harvard College and his JD from Yale Law School. He worked in the Washington, D.C. office of Morrison & Foerster for nearly 20 years before opening his own law firm earlier this year We will meet on Monday November 28, 2005 from 4:00-6:00 PM on George Mason Universityï¿½s Arlington Campus (not the Fairfax campus, as in the past) in room 121 of the (brick) “Original Building, - which is at 3401 Fairfax Drive, Arlington - just one block from the Virginia Square Metro on the Orange line. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. Please click here to RSVP for dinner. There is no public parking at the Arlington campus, but you can probably find metered parking on the street at that hour. Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at GMU and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

Guide to Digital History Published by CHNM Staff Members

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 11:05:28 +0000

The University of Pennsylvannia Press has just published Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. Cohen is Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and Rosenzweig is Director and founder of CHNM. The book can be purchased online from Amazon but is also available for free on the CHNM website. The book provides a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians - teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts - who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. It begins with an overview of the different genres of history websites, surveying a range of digital history work that has been created since the beginning of the web. The book then takes the reader step-by-step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy-to-use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and how to reach and respond to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age, and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance on insuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years. The book grows out of the work of the ECHO project, which has been generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Department of Education awards Loudoun County Public Schools and CHNM new Teaching American History Grant

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:03:10 +0000

The Department of Education awarded CHNM another Teaching American History grant in partnership with Loudoun County Public Schools. Loudoun County is now one of the nine county school systems, including Alexandria City, Fauquier, Fairfax, Clarke, Culpeper, Frederick, Manassas City, Orange, and Winchester, that CHNM works with to strengthen teachers content knowledge in Virginia and U.S. history and skills in teaching history. The grant, serving 150 teachers and 44,000 students in Loudoun, provides instruction divided into two cohorts. The first includes workshops, summer learning institutes and lectures by prominent historians focused on Virginia history as U.S. history, including Native American life in the Chesapeake; the legacy of George Washington; and slavery and reconstruction, including the Civil War and post-Civil War life. The second cohort, open to teachers in all grades as well as English as Second Language (ESL) and special education teachers, will feature a 2-day summer workshop and five school year workshops.

Completed World History Sources Project

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:02:29 +0000

This summer CHNM completed the NEH-funded World History Sources, a website focused on the learning and teaching of world history with primary sources. The site features: Finding World History, a guide to the 200 best online primary source archives in world history; Unpacking Evidence, eight guides to analyzing primary sources as part of world history; Analyzing Documents, eight multimedia models of scholars analyzing primary sources, designed to make the work of historians experienced in world history sources more visible; and Teaching Sources, case studies in which experienced classroom teachers offer a look “behind the scenes” into planning and teaching primary sources in world history. We plan to continue our work in world history, refining and broadening the site’s content and accessibility. Visit the site here: http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources.

IMLS awards funding for "Firefox Scholar" and "The Object of History"

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 11:00:40 +0000

CHNM is pleased to announce two new awards from the Institute for Museum and Library Services for Firefox Scholar and The Object of History. The Object of History, a joint project of CHNM and the Smithsonian Institutionï¿½s National Museum of American History, will develop a new model for bringing museum objects and expertise to students in remote classrooms and for teaching them how to engage and analyze these artifacts. Through virtual representations and interpretations of iconic objects chosen from the NMAH collection, students will learn about key themes in American history. CHNM plans to develop six interactive web-based object lessons and virtual field trips that provide not only an educational resource for students and teachers nationwide but also provide a cost-effective, innovative, and replicable model for history museums seeking new ways to educate audiences and disseminate collections. Firefox Scholar, a collaboration with the Virtual Library of Virginia, will create a set of free, open source web browser tools, which will enhance scholarsï¿½ access to and use of digital library and museum collections. Firefox Scholar operates within the browser window and allows users to recognize and capture metadata from online objects, collect documents, images, and citations from the web. Firefox Scholar will relieve libraries and museums of the need to build personal collection tools for their users and greatly leverage the substantial investment they have already made in digitizing collection materials. Like the Firefox browser, Firefox Scholar will be open and extensible, allowing others who are building digital tools for researchers to expand on the platform.

Public hearing for new CHNM project: "Virginia History Here"

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 10:15:00 +0000

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University will host a public hearing to consider its planned proposal to the Virginia Deptartment of Transportation’s enhancement program for a new project, “Virginia History Here.” The project plans to use new mobile communications technologies to improve access to Northern Virginia’s rich stock of historical roadside markers. The meeting will be held at George Mason University on October 3rd in Student Union Building I, Room C, from 7pm-9pm. Please contact Heather Velez with any questions at (703)993-4585.

NEH awards funding for "Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives"

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 10:13:40 +0000

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are excited to announce that we have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a premier bi-lingual Russian-English interactive web-based exhibit entitled, “Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives.” Drawing on the research of historian Steven Barnes at GMU, this web exhibit will provide an innovative, multifaceted consideration of the human struggle for survival in the Gulag, the brutal and often lethal Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps and internal exile. The Gulag was an inhuman system that consumed millions of lives, and the web exhibit will reveal that stark brutality while engaging the public to think about the diversity of the Gulag experience, the ethical quandaries of survival in extreme situations, and the difficulties entailed in overcoming the legacy of past injustice. “Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives” will provide visitors with a clear, accessible, and engaging history - accompanied by rich visual, audio, and film resources and grounded in the most recent scholarship.

Echo site chosen as Voice of America's "Website of the Week"

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 10:59:33 +0000

August 20, 2005 : The Center for History and New Media is happy to announce that Our World, Voice of America’s weekly science and technology magazine, selected Echo as their “Website of the Week.” Art Chimes, the host of Our World, discussed the dynamic and diverse nature of Echo with Dan Cohen, CHNM’s Director of Research Projects, and pointed out Echo’s unique features which provide users with the means to research, collect, and build history online. To listen to the broadcast, visit here. For a transcript, visit here.

Speech Accent Archive relaunched

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 10:58:58 +0000

The Center for History and New Media, Technology Across the Curriculum Program, and the Linguistics Program in the Department of English are pleased to announce the release of a newly designed and expanded website: the speech accent archive. Originally started by Professor Steven Weinberger in 1998, the speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers. The archive currently houses over 400 speech samples and continues to accept submissions.

Rosenzweig on Digital Archives in Chronicle of Higher Education

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 09:50:24 +0000

CHNM Director, Roy Rosenzweig appears in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education with a column entitled Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely. In the article, Rosenzweig argues that it is not enough to digitize sources and build archives. Rather, the librarians, archivists, and scholars who create digital resources must also take measures to insure they remain accessible to all and to help students make sense of what they find there. As examples of this approach, Rosenzweig points to several CHNM projects, including History Matters, World History Matters, and CHNM’s forthcoming project, Historical Thinking Matters, which will scaffold primary sources in a way that encourages students to check sources, corroborate evidence, and contextualize it.

Alexandria schools recognize CHNM and GMU

Thu, 26 May 2005 09:43:34 +0000

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University have received an award from Alexandria City Public Schools for “commitment and dedication to the students of Alexandria City Public Schools” for their work with ACPS teachers through the Creating a More Perfect Community project. Creating a More Perfect Community is a Teaching American History grant awarded to Alexandria City Public Schools and funded by the United States Department of Education. A partnership with George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media and the Office of Historic Alexandria, this grant is an exceptional professional development opportunity for teachers to improve their content knowledge through a year-long study. In a city where students come from 75 different countries this project seeks to create a stronger sense of community through a deeper understanding of history. The project includes six workshops and a summer seminar featuring university historians, four book discussions, visits to historic sites, and the opportunity for teachers to participate in a professional community to enhance their instructional skills to work successfully with students.

Completion of Lost Museum Announced

Tue, 17 May 2005 10:58:02 +0000

Together with longtime collaborators at the CUNY Graduate Center’s American Social History Project, CHNM is happy to announce the completion of The Lost Museum: Exploring Antebellum American Life and Culture. This innovative, interactive website re-creates P. T. Barnumï¿½s American Museum, mid-nineteenth century America’s pre-eminent popular cultural institution, on the night before its fiery demise in July, 1865. A unique learning resource that combines immersive experience with historical narrative and documentation, The Lost Museum’s cornucopia of diverse attractions highlight the major compromises and conflicts of the antebellum and Civil War eras in U.S. history. Produced primarily at the American Social History Project (ASHP), The Lost Museum offers a 3-D spatial exploration of four re-created museum rooms containing over 160 interactive artifacts and attractions; a searchable archive of more than 300 primary documents; and 22 teaching resources geared to diverse classroom settings. These features allow contemporary virtual visitors to experience the fascinating intricacy of nineteenth-century exhibitions and to embark on a search for clues to solve the fictional mystery of who (among social and political groups in the period) may have burned down the building in July 1865. Teachers can choose among classroom activities and other resources suitable for high school and college U.S. history courses. Eight years in the making, The Lost Museum combines extensive research and writing with detailed 3-D modeling, database programming, and moving image presentation. The site has received awards from the Archivists Roundtable of New York (“most innovative application of archives to the Internet”), Horizon Interactive (Honorable Mention, Education/Training Web site), and Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival (Platinum Award, New Media). Production of the site was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Old York Foundation, and the CUNY Graduate Center’s New Media Lab.

CHNM Website Rated Tops by ISTE

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 10:55:25 +0000

The Center for History and New Media is happy to announce that its website has been chosen as one of the best for secondary school teachers by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Written by James Lerman and published by ISTE 101 Best Web Sites for Secondary Teachers lists CHNM alongside such projects as the National Geographic Education Guide, the Newsweek Education Program, and the United Nations Cyberschoolbus as one of only fourteen Social Studies websites to be included in the new guide. ISTE is a nonprofit professional organization with a worldwide membership of ISTE is a an educational technology professionals.

History Matters Recognized by New York Public Library

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 10:56:02 +0000

The New York Public Library selected History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web to be included in its Best of Reference 2005. The Best of Reference, created each year by a committee of librarians from The New York Library, is a list of 25 reference books and websites acknowledging useful resources for local branch reference work. In 2004 the American Libary Association named History Matters one of the “Best Free Reference Web Sites.” The September 11 Digital Archive was included in the Best of Reference 2004.

CHNM-affiliated project profiled in Chronicle

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 10:56:28 +0000

The Business Plan Archive, a project directed by David Kirsch at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and hosted at CHNM, is featured this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Business Plan Archive is a cousin to CHNM’s own Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online project, and CHNM has collaborated with Kirsch on several projects to collect, preserve, and present digital materials in the history of science, technology, and industry. Both Echo and the Business Plan Archive are funded by major grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Click here to download the article.

Cohen, Syllabus Finder featured in Inside Higher Ed

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 10:56:59 +0000

Reviewed this week in Inside Higher Ed is an article by CHNM Director of Research Projects, Dan Cohen. The subject of the article, which appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of American History is CHNM’s innovative software tool, Syllabus Finder and the sophisticated analysis of the place of textbooks in U.S. survey courses that Cohen performed using this tool. Syllabus Finder was created by Cohen as an experiment in the fledgling world of web services, where computers talk directly to each other to try to solve complicated problems or complete tasks that would be difficult to do otherwise. In this case, the computers that talk to each other are the Center for History and New Media’s web server and Google’s web server. The Syllabus Finder sends an optimized, specially packaged version of your query to Google, which sends back information and possible matches. The Syllabus Finder then processes this information and combines it with simultaneous searches on in-house databases (e.g., a database of educational institutions, so it can tell you which university or college a syllabus comes from). It also has algorithms that try to extract additional information from matching syllabi, such as assigned books. When this complex process is finished, the Syllabus Finder displays all of the information it has found.

Digital Stories: Multimedia Narratives, Cultural Resources, and Humanities Knowledge

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:54:43 +0000

This spring’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities, which will focus on new ways of representing humanities knowledge through short multimedia narrative. Authors of these multimedia narratives combine images, music and sound from personal and cultural archives, cultural institutions, popular culture, and their own research and interviews to produce short pieces, sometimes called digital stories. Questions raised by this panel include:

In what ways can humanities knowledge be expressed in short, multimedia-enabled, narrative forms?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this form?
How can we represent cross-cultural and cultural understanding in these forms?
What is the relationship between issues in multimedia literacy and the development of these new ways of making and presenting humanities knowledge?
What is the role of cultural institutions and their archives (especially digital) in this work?
What does it mean to have “amateurs” making this knowledge? How does this work relate to the work of “professionals” in the humanities academy, cultural institutions and public work? Panelists Cecilia O’Leary (History, California State University-Monterey Bay), Bernie Cook (American Studies, Georgetown University), J.P. Singh (Communication, Culture & Technology, Georgetown University) and Michael Coventry (Communication, Culture & Technology & Visible Knowledge Project, Georgetown University) will show and discuss student-authored multimedia narratives from their courses, followed by vigorous and engaging discussion with the audience. Student authors may also be present to discuss their work in light of these issues. The forum will be held on Wednesday, April 27th from 4pm to 6pm in Lauinger Library on Georgetown’s campus. There will be an informal dinner after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP online for dinner at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/683/ by April 22. Directions and Parking information for Georgetown University can be found at http://otm.georgetown.edu/. Parking can also be found on the street. The nearest metro station is Rosslyn, across Key Bridge. For more information, please contact Michael Coventry (coventrm@georgetown.edu). Co-sponsored by the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM), the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provides an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

Censer & CHNM Publish Electronic Article

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:51:05 +0000

Jack Censer (Chair of the CHNM Advisory Board) and Lynn Hunt (Eugen Weber professor of history at UCLA) have–in collaboration with five other scholars and CHNM–created an online scholarly article, “Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd.” The American Historical Review has published the article, one of the very first digital articles to appear in the flagship journal of the American Historical Association. The article includes the perspectives of six different scholars, both historians and art historians. Censer and Hunt explain that crowd actions have long been a subject of contention in the historiography of the French Revolution, but they contend that text-based sources have dominated the historiography. In contrast, the essays in this article take as their point of departure a bank of forty-two images selected to represent the variety of ways that crowds could be depicted. Censer and Hunt argue that visual evidence is particularly important in the case of the French Revolution: not only did thousands of images proliferate in a remarkable diversity of formats, but also those images often spoke to issues, such as crowd violence, that proved difficult for supporters of the Revolution to discuss frankly in speeches or newspaper articles. The electronic presentation makes it possible to view the images separately as well as within the articles, to read the discussion that took place among the authors about their findings, and to directly compare different authors’ interpretations of particular images.

Kelly Receives Virginia's Outstanding Faculty Award

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:54:12 +0000

T. Mills Kelly, assistant professor of history and art history and associate director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), will receive a 2005 Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award (OFA), the commonwealth’s highest honor for faculty at Virginia’s colleges and universities. Kelly was the first honoree in the new category of Teaching with Technology. Gov. Mark Warner will recognize Kelly and 11 other educators in a ceremony in the Richmond State Capitol this morning. Read more in the Mason Daily Gazette or click here to download the full article.

Echo exhibit reviewed in The Public Historian

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 09:34:20 +0000

A Thin Blue Line, CHNM’s online exhibition documenting the history of the pregnancy test kit is the subject of a website review published in the most recent issue of The Public Historian, the journal of the National Council on Public History. A Thin Blue Line is a collaboration between CHNM’s Echo project and the National Institutes of Health and features an online survey of visitor’s experiences with home pregancy tests. Click here to read the review.

History Matters wins Robinson Prize

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 10:49:21 +0000

The American Historical Association has awarded the James Harvey Robinson Prize for “outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history” to History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. History Matters was created by CHNM in collaboration with the American Social History Project at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The award citation praised History Matters for being “an incredibly rich and ‘user friendly’ web site.” The prize committee found that History Matters “offers students and teachers an amazing array of online resources, ranging from expansive lists of annotated web sites, to annotated syllabi that take viewers behind the scenes to see how various classroom activities actually worked (or didn’t), to intensive guides of how to use various types of primary sources. As such, History Matters is a model of its kind presented in a highly attractive and easy-to-navigate format.”

HNN in NYT

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:50:28 +0000

New York Times columnist John Tierney discusses Rick Shenkman’s predictions about the presidential inaugural address. Shenkman is editor of CHNM’s History News Network. Click here to read the article.

CHNM celebrates 10th anniversary

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 10:46:38 +0000

From its humble origins in the mind “and on the personal computer” of a single historian at George Mason University to its current place as one of the most respected and visited Internet sources for history with nearly ten million visitors a year, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) is proudly celebrating its tenth anniversary. Almost as old as the Web itself, since 1994 CHNM has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history - to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. See http://chnm.gmu.edu/old_news/archives/chnm_10th_anniv_pr.pdf for the full press release.

CHNM Director recognized for "excellence in the humanities"

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 10:47:23 +0000

In a ceremony held December 9, 2004 at Old Town Hall in Fairfax, Virginia, CHNM Director, Roy Rosenzweig was presented with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ Award for Excellence in the Humanities. The award recognizes citizens whose work - both professional and volunteer - has significantly benefited Virginians, and whose efforts embody the Virginia Foundation mission “to develop the civic, cultural, and intellectual life of the Commonwealth by creating learning opportunities for all Virginians - to bring the humanities fully into Virginia’s public life, assisting individuals and communities in their efforts to understand the past, confront important issues in the present, and shape a desirable future.” One of six recipients this year, Rosenzweig was singled out for the work he has done in the creation and development of CHNM and for his standing as a pioneer in the use of emerging technologies for the research, study, and teaching of history. Download the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ press release.

Echo expands to include Collecting and Tools Centers

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:47:56 +0000

CHNM announces the launch of the new Echo Collecting Center and Tools Center, which join the Research Center and Resource Center to make Echo the most comprehensive website for collecting and presenting the history of science, technology, and industry online. The Collecting Center provides annotations and links to all the websites collecting history online and offers a Practical Guide to creating and managing online surveys. The Tools Center offers a collaborative directory of tools applicable to the practice of digital history, including CHNM’s own suite of tools that help teachers, students, and researchers to find, create, and manage digital materials. Since 2001, Echo has used the Internet to collect and present the recent history of science, technology, and industry. As a laboratory for experimentation in this new and unperfected field, it has, among other objectives, worked to foster communication and dialogue among historians, scientists, engineers, doctors, and technologists. It also hosts free workshops and offer free consultation services to assist other historical practitioners in launching their own websites. In addition, Echo provides a centralized guide and portal for those seeking websites on the history of science and technology. This guide helps researchers find the exact information they need while also granting curious browsers a forum for exploration. Echo has been funded by two generous grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has been a leader in using the Internet to study, document, and present the past innovatively and rigorously.

Roy Rosenzweig discusses digital preservation in Investors Business Daily

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 10:45:34 +0000

“RESEARCHERS LOOK TO SAVE DISAPPEARING LANGUAGES ONLINE” BY SHEILA RILEY FOR INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY NOVEMBER 9, 2004 Academics are creating repositories of information in cyberspace - and making the ivory tower more democratic in the process. Preserving endangered languages is one example. Researchers look to catalog languages that are rarely spoken, so that the tongues won’t be lost to the ages. “People whose languages have ceased to be spoken have come to appreciate them afterward,” said Doug Whalen, a linguistics researcher at Haskins Laboratories, affiliated with Yale University in New Haven, Conn. A record of the language, particularly a spoken record, is invaluable - especially if a tongue is disappearing. Whalen says efforts to revive languages can be difficult because the communities that spoke them - mostly indigenous peoples - are often scattered. Online access to materials is critical for academics studying languages and people who are trying to recover lost languages, he says. The University of California, Berkeley, is working to get its endangered-language print and audio archives online for that reason. Preserving languages has a huge societal benefit, according to Leanne Hinton, head of UC Berkeley’s linguistics department. The alternative would lead to losses at many levels, she says. “When we lose a language in the world, we’re losing a lot more than a set of words,” Hinton said. Grammatical systems, thought systems and knowledge systems all disappear. At least half the world’s 6,700 languages are endangered, Hinton says. American Indian languages, which have dwindled from 300 to 175, are a case in point. UC Berkeley has a century’s worth of endangered language archives collected by anthropologists and linguists. Until now, accessing them meant going to the campus or requesting that copies be put in the mail. Recent federal and private grants will let the university digitize the materials, making them accessible to anyone interested. Berkeley will get help developing digitization methods from the San Francisco-based Rosetta Project, cyberspace’s largest language archive. The Rosetta Project includes written examples of languages, audio files, and grammar and sound descriptions in languages ranging from Apache to Zulu. At last count, it had 1,761 languages online - and plans to add the rest. The project hopes to get contributions from academic researchers and members of endangered-language communities. Laura Buszard-Welcher is curator of the ambitious effort, which has $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation. The goal of digital archiving is to have materials where people can get to them, she says. That means they aren’t collecting dust in a professor’s office. In her office, Buszard-Welcher has stacks of material made by missionaries cataloging the language of the Potawatomi - a tribe in the Midwest, Great Lakes region and Canada. She spent years working with tribal elders making audio recordings and creating a dictionary and written grammar of the Potawatomi language. “The result of it is that I have a rather huge collection of materials sitting in my home office,” rather than having it available for the world to see, Buszard-Welcher said. That’s the way it is for many linguists, but it’s a practice that needs to change, Buszard-Welcher says. Linguistics isn’t the only discipline redefining itself via the Web. George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., is making history in cyberspace. Academics there have collected 150,000 online “objects” from ordinary people - including stories, e-mails, audio recordings, PDF files and images - about Sept. 11, 2001. The project, called the Sept. 11 Digital Archive, will go to the Library of Congress. The work is managed by the university’s Center for History and New Media. It’s democratic in a broad sense, says Roy Rosenzweig, the center’s director. “We’re making these primary materials of history available to people across the country,” he said. The Sept. 11 Digital Archive lets ordinary people - not just historians - write history, Rosenzweig says. Projects such as George Mason’s were considered on the academic fringe just five years ago, but are becoming more common, he says. They share similarities with the tech world’s open-source movement, Rosenzweig says. In open source, any and all contributors can make additions to freely available software code. The Linux operating system is the most famous example. Those in the humanities are taking note, Rosenzweig says. “It’s partly because we’re not really in business,” he said. “Our business is the social good.” That’s what makes open source an attractive concept, he says. “A model of giving things away, of participation, is a very appealing one,” Rosenzweig said.

CHNM to build database for National Museum of American Jewish History

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 10:43:09 +0000

CHNM has been awarded a contract build a custom collections management system for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. The new system will allow NMAJH researchers working at museums and historical societies around the nation to upload and organize images and information about collections of American Judaica via a web-based interface. NMAJH will use the system to create comprehensive database of artifacts from American Jewish history in preparation for a planned new permanent exhibition.

CHNM to build custom software tools for NEH's Edsitement portal

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 10:43:46 +0000

In partnership with the City University of New York’s City College and the American Social History Project, and with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for History and New Media is proud to annouce the launch of a new project called Lessons of History. CHNM has been awarded nearly $150,000 to build three new software tools for the NEH’s EDSITEment web portal, including a “Text Collection and Annotation Tool,” an “Image Collection and Annotation Tool,” and an “Image Manipulation Tool.” These tools will be integral parts of the Lessons of History project, which will also include student interactive activities and lesson plans. The tools will enable the project’s focus on facilitating the close reading of important documents, visual and textual, of the American political past. Students will use these tools to gather and then closely analyze the online historical documents creating knowledge with the materials of history. The tools will allow for the modeling of good practice by educators as well as the creation of new knowledge by students. The Lessons of History tool-building project leverages CHNM’s substantial experience in providing guides to how historians analyze evidence such as photographs or maps. For example, on the website History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, CHNM and ASHP have developed Making Sense of Evidence", which provides strategies for analyzing online primary materials, with interactive exercises and a guide to traditional and online sources. The Lessons of History tools will also build on CHNM’s standing as a pioneer in designing interactive tools for academic purposes. Here CHNM has developed several highly successful free digital tools for historians and history teachers. For example, CHNM’s history note-taking database Scribe has been downloaded by more than 6,000 people and has been recommended in a number of guides to doing historical work. Similarly, CHNM’s Syllabus Finder has been used over 200,000 times, and about 1,500 people use the CHNM’s Web Scrapbook, Survey Builder, and Poll Builder.

Digital Tools for the Humanities: What's Being Developed? What is Needed?

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 10:44:31 +0000

This fall’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities focuses on “Digital Tools for the Humanities: What’s Being Developed? What is Needed?” Our panelists are David Greenbaum and Raymond Yee from the University of California Berkeley’s Interactive University Project, Susan Schreibman and Amit Kumar from the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and Dan Cohen from George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). All of the panelists have developed interesting new tools for scholars and students in the humanities, which they will demonstrate. We will meet on Wednesday, October 27th from 4:00-6:00 PM at GMU’s Student Union Building II, rooms 5 & 6. There will be an informal dinner (Thai food) after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. You must RSVP online for dinner by 22 October at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/form/395. Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at GMU and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted. You can find directions to GMU at http://www.gmu.edu/welcome/Directions-to-GMU.html (This includes directions to the CUE Bus, which goes from the Vienna Metro Stop to the Campus.) Parking information is at http://www.gmu.edu/univserv/parking/Visitors.html. And a campus map is at http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/.

Digital preservation grant includes CHNM

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 10:45:04 +0000

In partnership with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, CHNM has received an award from the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program to build upon work done in connection with its Business Plan Archive, a two-year-old initiative to preserve records from the historic dot-com era of the late 1990s. Currently the Business Plan Archive contains business plans, marketing plans, technical plans, venture presentations, and other business documents from more than 2,000 failed and successful Internet start-ups. As part of the Library’s national digital preservation strategy, the new grant will help CHNM and its partners expand this collection to include a vast collection of legal documents as well as the personal narratives of entrepreneurs, employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and others touched by this historic period. Press Archive - Information Week Mason Gazette Internet News

Now on shelves: History Matters: A Student Guide to U.S. History

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 10:41:33 +0000

History Matters: A Student Guide to U.S. History Online Alan Gevinson, Kelly Schrum, Roy Rosenzweig Based on the award-winning website History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, which is a joint project of CHNM and the American Social History Project at the CUNY Graduate Center, this unique resource pairs an annotated guide to 250 of the most useful U.S. history websites for student research. An introduction helps students find, evaluate, and use online sources independently. Intended for the experienced Web surfer and the novice alike, the introduction encourages the development of good research habits through discussion of primary and secondary sources, tips on evaluating website content, and advice on electronic source citation and avoiding plagiarism. The rest of the volume provides chronologically arranged starting points for Internet research, directing students to document, audio, video, and image collections for authoritative and reliable investigation. Sites cover a broad range of political, social, and cultural sources from early Native American legal cases, to Civil War photographs, to Jazz Age African American sheet music. A substantive review of each featured website identifies research topics best served by the site, and select illustrations depict what students will find. Indexes by subject and by medium help students locate appropriate websites for specific projects. History Matters: A Student Guide to U.S. History Online is now available for purchase at Amazon

New Echo website launched

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:52:25 +0000

Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online - Science, Technology, and Industry (http://echo.gmu.edu/) announces the launch of its redesigned, expanded, and improved website. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Echo provides the most comprehensive portal for the history of science on the Web, including a searchable guide to more than 5,000 websites on the history of science, technology, and industry, as well as website reviews and annotations, and the latest science news. Echo also hosts free workshops, offers free consultation services to assist other historical practitioners in launching their own websites, and provides a free practical guide to doing online history.

September 11 Digital Archive featured on WGN

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 11:17:10 +0000

CHNM Assistant Director Tom Scheinfeldt discusses the September 11 Digital Archive on Chicago’s WGN Radio 720 “Nick at Night” show. Click here to listen to the interview.

September 11 Digital Archive posts visitor response cards from Smithsonian exhibition

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 14:51:52 +0000

From September 11, 2002 to July 6, 2003, more than 1 million people from around the world visited “September 11: Bearing Witness to History,” an exhibit at the National Museum of American History. In addition to displays of photographs, television footage, artifacts from ground zero, and voicemail recordings from the morning of the attacks, the exhibit included a section with pencils and cards inviting visitors to share their reflections and memories of September 11, 2001.

September 11 Digital Archive guarantees preservation of Here Is New York gallery

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:22:38 +0000

Here Is New York, the online gallery of images depicting the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, will not go the way of most website content, vanishing forever into the cyber-ether: Rather, this extensive and unique collection of photographs, taken by both amateurs and professionals, has a secure spot in the historical record.

Here Is New York is the latest acquisition of the September 11 Digital Archive. In addition to the nearly 7,000 professional and amateur images in the Here Is New York online gallery, the Archive contains more than 130,000 written accounts, e-mails, audio recordings, video clips, photographs, Web sites and other materials that document the attacks. These items will provide researchers with a major source of information about the attacks.

Fourth DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 13:58:37 +0000

Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, these periodic forums will explore important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested in the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted. Our forum, the fourth in the series, will consider “Do the Humanities need a Cyberinfrastructure: A Conversation with John Unsworth,” Chair of the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Dean, Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As the importance of technology-enabled innovation grows across all fields, scholars are increasingly dependent on sophisticated systems for the creation, curation, and preservation of information. They are also dependent on a policy, economic, and legal environment that encourages appropriate and unimpeded access to both digital information and digital tools. It is crucial for the humanities and the social sciences to join scientists and engineers in defining and building this infrastructure so that it meets the needs and incorporates the contributions of humanists and social scientists. John Unsworth will discuss how the ACLS-sponsored national commission is investigating and reporting on these issues. Vigorous and engaging discussion by the audience will follow. The Forum will be held at Georgetown University. We will meet in Car Barn Room 303 at 3520 Prospect St, NW (near corner of 36th and Prospect St) on the corner of the Georgetown campus. An informal dinner will follow. The talk and ideas are free, but the cost for the dinner will be $10. Please RSVP by April 24th to Clarissa Hinds hindsc@georgetown.edu. You can find directions to Georgetown at http://otm.georgetown.edu/directions.cfm. For information on parking see http://otm.georgetown.edu/. Parking can also be found on the street. The nearest metro station is Rosslyn, across Key Bridge.

History Matters recognized by the American Library Association

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 16:18:37 +0000

The American Library Association’s Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) committee included History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web on its sixth annual list of Best Free Reference Web Sites. The annual series recognizes “outstanding reference sites” that meet a list of criteria including quality, depth and usefulness of content; “ready” reference; availability; ease of use; currency of content; authority of producer; uniqueness of content; and the appropriate use of the web as a medium.

NIH, CHNM launch Web exhibit exploring history of home pregnancy tests

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:35:12 +0000

On the 25th anniversary of the home pregnancy test kit, the National Institutes of Health and CHNM launched A Thin Blue Line, a new web exhibit that explores the history of the pregnancy test kit from the NIH laboratory to the digital age, and encourages women to add their own stories to the history of the pregnancy test through an online survey.

A Thin Blue Line includes a historical timeline of pregnancy testing, portrayals of the pregnancy test in popular culture, and scientific background on the research that led to the development of the test. Personal narratives submitted anonymously are part of the exhibit, and all responses will be permanently archived by the ECHO project for future students and scholars.

CHNM launches Critical Infrastructure Protection Oral History Project

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 10:38:10 +0000

In partnership with the George Mason University’s National Center for Technology & Law, CHNM has launched a three-year project to document the evolution of U.S. critical infrastructure protection policy in the years leading up to September 11, 2001. Through face-to-face and telephone interviews with members of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection and other key policy makers, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Oral History Project seeks to provide insights into the lively debates that have shaped the national response to new threats and a valuable tool for charting a course for the future. A well-attended reception to mark the project’s launch was held on February 4, 2004 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, where CHNM staff member Tom Scheinfeldt presented the project to members of the President’s Commission, industry executives, national security personnel, and other interview subjects. For more information on the project and its aims, see http://echo.gmu.edu/CIPP/.

French Revolution Website Recognized by NEH

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:35:49 +0000

NEH has selected Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution for inclusion on EDSITEment (http://edsitement.neh.gov) as “one of the best online resources for education in the humanities.” Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was nominated for inclusion in the EDSITEment project in response to an open call for nominations posted on its website and on several humanities listservs. The site was then reviewed by both a peer review panel and a Blue Ribbon panel composed of educators and administrators in education organizations and higher education institutions. Both panels determined that the site met the EDSITEment criteria for intellectual quality, content, design, and most importantly, classroom impact.

NASA, ECHO launch Web exhibit on Columbia space shuttle

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 10:36:23 +0000

One year after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the NASA History Office has partnered with ECHO’s Shuttle Archive to collect personal reflections on space exploration as part of an online exhibit about Columbia’s mission and crew. The exhibit includes NASA photos, documents, and reports of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. A link to the ECHO Shuttle Archive allows visitors to submit their thoughts on the loss of the Columbia and view additional materials including government reports, scientific research abstracts, and media coverage of the event.

CHNM takes on DoHistory

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 10:35:17 +0000

In November 2003, CHNM acquired DoHistory, a website that explores the life of eighteenth-century New England midwife Martha Ballard, whose diary was the basis for Lauren Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Laurie Kahn-Leavitt’s PBS film, both entitled A Midwife’s Tale. CHNM acquired the website from the Film Study Center at Harvard University, where the website was developed. DoHistory features the entire text of Martha Ballard’s diary, more than 300 documents on eighteenth-century New England life and culture, behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of the book and the film, teaching materials, and practical guides on how to conduct and publish historical research.

Department of Education awards CHNM two Teaching American History Grants

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:33:31 +0000

CHNM, in partnership with eight Northern Virginia school districts, received two three-year Teaching American History grants from the Department of Education in October 2003. Creating a More Perfect Community, a joint project with Alexandria City Public Schools, provides U.S. history instructors with professional development focused on content and skills specifically related to teaching history, including the use of primary sources and new media. Peopling the American Past, a partnership with Clarke, Culpeper, Fauquier, Frederick, Manassas City, Orange, and Winchester school districts, similarly provides professional development centered on improving the teaching of U.S. history in elementary, middle, and high schools. The project also involves Special Education and ESL teachers who incorporate U.S. history content into their curricula.

CHNM co-hosts forum on website design

Sat, 11 Oct 2003 10:34:37 +0000

In October 2003, CHNM and Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship hosted “What Can Good Web Design Do for Humanities Projects: Reflections and Case Studies.” The forum provided an opportunity for scholars, designers, and interested students to discuss how technical design as expressed through the web encouraged or discouraged learning. Brad Johnson of Second Story reviewed sites his company has produced, showing how advanced designs that harnessed such technology as Flash enabled users to simulate experiences such as touring Egyptian tombs. George Mason University Professors Michael O’Malley and Paula Petrik discussed the importance of not just using the web as a bulletin board, but of harnessing the medium’s capacity to stimulate unmediated learning among students and multi-sensory presentation of historical materials.

What Can Good Web Design Do for Humanities Projects? Reflections and Case Studies

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 10:32:07 +0000

This fall’s Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities focuses on “What Can Good Web Design Do for Humanities Projects: Reflections and Case Studies.” Our panelists are Brad Johnson, Creative Director, and Julie Beeler, Studio Director, of Second Story (http://www.secondstory.com) and Mike O’Malley and Paula Petrik, Associate Directors, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. We will meet at George Mason University’s (GMU) Johnson Center, Assembly Room A, on Thursday, October 2, 2002 from 4:30-6:30 PM. There will be an informal dinner after the forum. The cost for the dinner (Thai food) will be $10. Please RSVP for dinner by 25 September to Joan Fragaszy (jfragasz@gmu.edu). Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at GMU and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, the DC Area Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted. You can find directions to GMU at http://www.gmu.edu/welcome/Directions-to-GMU.html (This includes directions to the CUE Bus, which goes from the Vienna Metro Stop to the Campus.) Parking information is at http://www.gmu.edu/univserv/parking/Visitors.html. And a campus map is at http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/.

New York City blackout renews attention to CHNM project

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 20:11:39 +0000

Following the massive power outages that hit the northeastern United States in August 2003, The Blackout Project - a CHNM website that covers the history of New York City’s great blackouts of 1965 and 1977 - received sudden, unprecedented attention. The news media as well and those who remember the earlier blackouts came to the site to learn more and to reminisce. Almost a hundred people added their stories to the growing oral history archive on the site.

Roy Rosenzweig receives Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center

Tue, 13 May 2003 10:29:45 +0000

The second Richard W. Lyman Award was given today to CHNM Director Roy Rosenzweig. Presented by the National Humanities Center, the Lyman Award recognizes the innovative use of information technology in humanistic scholarship and teaching. “The Lyman Award continues to recognize scholarly achievement of unusual merit and impact,” said James J. O’Donnell, Georgetown University provost and chair of the Lyman Award selection committee. “Roy Rosenzweig’s work creatively uses new tools to reach broader audiences and to affect those audiences more deeply. In so doing, he sets an example for historians and for scholars more generally of critical engagement and effective communication.” Dr Rosenzweig accepted the award during a ceremony and reception at the Library of Congress. See http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/news/prlymanaward2003.htm for the full press release. See http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/lymanaward/lymanaward.htm for more information about the Lyman Award.

Second DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 13:54:22 +0000

Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, these periodic forums will explore important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested in the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted. Our forum, the second in the series, will consider: “Making Digital Narratives: Archive and Story in New Media” How do we connect narratives to archives in digital spaces? How do the presentations of digital collections change narrative possibilities or even challenge the idea of narrative and authority? How do the tensions between stories and archives change the roles of curators, teachers, and other humanities practitioners? The two panelists will be Judy Gradwohl (Smithsonian National Museum of American History) and Bill Tally (Center for Children and Technology, NYC). Vigorous and engaging discussion by the audience will follow. The Forum will be held at Georgetown University. We will meet in Lauinger Library (The Murray Room, 5th Floor. You must have a valid ID/Drivers license, etc to enter). Off the main quad near Healy Circle: 37th and 0 Streets NW. An informal dinner will follow. The talk and ideas are free, but the cost for the dinner will be $10. Please RSVP for dinner by 15 February to Clarissa Hinds hindsc@georgetown.edu. You can find directions to Georgetown at http://otm.georgetown.edu/directions.cfm. For information on parking see http://otm.georgetown.edu/. Parking can also be found on the street. The nearest metro station is Rosslyn, across Key Bridge.

Washington DC Area Forum on Technology and the Humanities

Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:28:41 +0000

September 11 Digital Archive Launched

Fri, 11 Jan 2002 14:14:38 +0000

The Center for History and New Media at GMU has just launched the September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org) to preserve the history of September 11 by creating a permanent digital record of the 9/11 events and the responses to those events. They need the help of the GMU community–and that of friends, family, and neighbors–to make this important project a reality. They are asking people to contribute personal accounts and recollections at http://911digitalarchive.org/stories/add.html. The experiences need not have been at or near the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, nor do they need to be heroic or harrowing personal tales. These can be very short or much longer reminiscences about how you were affected by the 9/11 events. In addition to personal recollections, they are providing a simple way online to archive email messages (at http://911digitalarchive.org/email/add.html) that people wrote or received about the events and a repository of digital images (at http://911digitalarchive.org/images/add.html), where people can easily place the pictures they took or received of the 9/11 events. Please contribute your own personal experiences or emails and encourage others to participate as well. The September 11 Digital Archive is funded by a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and organized by CHNM in collaboration with the American Social History Project at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The Digital Archive is working with many other groups around the country, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Behring Center, to preserve this history. Feel free to contact them via email at info@911digitalarchive.org if you need further information. ABOUT THE PROJECT The September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org) uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania and the public responses to them. to record and preserve the record of 9/11 by: collecting first-hand accounts of the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath (especially voices currently under-represented on the web), collecting and archiving emails and digital images growing out of these events, organizing and annotating the most important web-based resources on the subject, and developing materials to contextualize and teach about the events. The Digital Archive will also use these events as a way of assessing how history is being recorded and preserved in the twenty-first century and as an opportunity to develop free software tools to help historians to do a better job of collecting, preserving, and writing history in the new century. Our goal is to create a permanent record of the events of September 11, 2001. In the process, we hope to foster some positive legacies of those terrible events by allowing people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience, providing historical context for understanding those events and their consequences, and helping historians and archivists improve their practices based on the lessons we learn from this project.