CHNM Labs

CHNM is developing and testing innovative ideas all the time. In some cases, these are “side projects” that grow out of the staff’s interests. In other cases, they are the results of grant funded research. CHNM Labs provides a showcase for this important research and development work.

Teaching + Learning

Playing History: a site to aggregate information on free historical games, interactives and simulations on the web in a simple, searchable database that makes them easy to find, rate, and review. (By Trevor Owens and Jim Safley)

Research + Tools

Digital Humanities Now: a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention. Fully automated, the site is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.

Hacking the Academy: a book crowdsourced in one week. Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society? In keeping with the spirit of hacking, the book will itself be an exercise in reimagining the edited volume.

Archiving Social Media: a one-day, unconference-style workshop on the challenges and opportunities involved in the archiving of social media in all its forms. In the last year or two it has become increasingly clear that the ephemera of digital conversations, especially those on Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media are of incredible potential importance to scholars. How will future historians/political scientists/geographers/humanists write the history of significant events (or of daily life) without some system to preserve these digital materials and the conversations and content they represent?

Collecting + Exhibiting

Mobile for Museums: an exploration of the current use and future possibilities for the use of mobile technologies in museums. (Funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation)

Digital-JumpStart: a series of un-conference-like sessions within traditional professional meetings and conferences that provide a forum for participants with a wide range of experience with web and new media projects to work through the issues of starting and completing real-world technology projects and “Web 2.0″ initiatives.

Summit on Digital Tools for Museum Educators: a meeting to bring together museum educators from the nation’s most prominent art museums to discuss the work that they are doing in their museums, and to introduce them to new digital tools that might enhance their work. The meeting will result in a set of strategic and technical recommendations about how to advance online museum education.