Post on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

How To Make an Academic Zine for a Public Audience

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re at all familiar with the fiercely independent, anti-institutional history of the zine, you might reject the supposition that they can be used within academic circles. Yet zines have potential as a creative, cohesive outlet for public history.

Zines originated around the 1930s in science fiction circles but are most often associated with the latter half of the twentieth century. Used as an alternative art form outside of mainstream media, zine authors from the 1960s through the 1990s used self-publishing to broadcast bold ideas through small, often collaborative, pamphlets. Zine topics could range from birth control to bus routes, but almost always were intended to communicate something significant from the creator to the outside world. For a brief history of zines, visit the Rare Book Collection at UNC Libraries.

South Asia Collections at The Met: A Preliminary Computational Look

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published at https://www.deepthimurali.com/art-history-and-data/south-asia-at-the-met

Museum metadata is messy metadata (and sometimes, also, just messy in non-computational ways.) But museum metadata is also historical archive that scholars and the public alike ignore.

Every object in a museum collection arrives with a story attached — a donor’s name, a date, a department assignment, a classification. Individually, these are administrative details: the bureaucratic residue of how an object got from somewhere else to a vitrine, a storage shelf, or a database entry. But at scale, across thousands of objects and more than a century of acquisitions, these details become historical data. They become a record of how an institution decided what South Asia was, who got to decide that, and when those decisions were made.

Debs Invites Arrest

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Clyde Miller hated what he was hearing. It was June 1918, and the U.S. had been at war for a little over a year, and the man on the platform in the park in Canton, Ohio was speaking — passionately, mockingly — about the many ways that the war had undermined the rights of American citizens. Socialists had been sent to jail for criticizing the war, complained Eugene Debs, the most famous Socialist in America: “It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.” There was knowing laughter from the crowd of picnicking socialists.

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.

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.

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

Post on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

How To Make an Academic Zine for a Public Audience

South Asia Collections at The Met: A Preliminary Computational Look

Debs Invites Arrest

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

Graduate Student Reflections: Sustainability Summer

Report from the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History

Carrying On When the Grants Go Away

Celebrating Women's History Month

Teaching, Writing, and Research with AI

Celebrating Black History Month

Graduate Student Reflections: AHA Presentations

Graduate Student Reflections: How Network Analysis Influenced My Research

Graduate Student Reflections: Teaching DH

Graduate Student Reflections: Brandan P. Buck

The End of Our Hike

Talking to the Dead: Spiritualists and Seances

Exploring True Crime in Early Modern Europe in the Classroom

RRCHNM Past, Present, and Future

Remembering Paula Petrik

How Philip Lampi recovered the lost history of early American elections

New Interpretive Essays Added to Collecting These Times

RRCHNM's Custom API for Data-Driven Projects

Remembering the Creation of the September 11 Digital Archive

Models of Argument-Driven Digital History

Transcribing Structured Data with the DataScribe Module for Omeka S

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

New Publication Model, Editor for Current Research in Digital History

From Historical Sources to Datasets: A Preview of DataScribe