Upcoming ECHO workshop and ECHO Grants

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.

NEH awards funding for “Bracero History Archive” and “Children and Youth in World History”

The Center for History and New Media and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University are pleased to announce that we have received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create websites that will separately explore Bracero history in the United States and childhood in world history.

The Bracero History Archive will preserve and provide access to the history of the Bracero program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States from 1942 to 1964. Working with our partners at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, we will create a collaborative, standards-based clearinghouse for dispersed collections relating to Bracero history, including more than 400 oral history interviews, approximately 600 scanned documents, and over 1,700 digital images.

The Children and Youth in World History project aims to promote a fuller exploration of the record of human experience by brining the scholarship on childhood and youth to U.S., European, and World history courses and working within existing curricula to enhance understanding of societies and events of the past. Children and Youth in World History will provide a reliable and accessible web resource that will enable high school teachers, community college and university instructors, and their students, to access scholarly essays and teaching materials and to utilize instructional strategies and primary sources.

Now on shelves: Dan Cohen's Equations from God

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.