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.

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 Systems
Jennifer Rosenfeld, Teachinghistory.org
Rwany Sibaja, Digital Storytelling
Jeff McClurken, Teaching with Social Media

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.

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.

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.

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.

Required

• Proficiency in PHP and Javascript
• Strong Object-Oriented programming skills
• Familiarity with the MVC design pattern
• Familiarity with Zend Framework
• Excellent communication skills with others at all levels of programming skill, from “Hello World!” novice to seasoned guru
• Ability to balance competing needs and priorities in designing code
• Creativity in problem-solving, and openness to experimenting with unfamiliar approaches

Preferred

• Experience working on open source software projects
• Familiarity with HTML5, CSS3, and graphic design principles
• Experience with Amazon Web Services and other cloud services
• Experience with PHPUnit testing framework
• Background or experience in the Humanities

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and of award-winning history content on the Web (for example: Zotero, Omeka, teachinghistory.org and the Bracero History Archive). Each year CHNM’s many project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research.

Our preference is for a freelance developer who can join us onsite at George Mason University, which is located 15 miles from Washington DC, and is accessible by public transportation.

Please send a resume and cover letter to jobs@chnm.gmu.edu. We will begin reviewing materials immediately and will close the position on November 15.

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.

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

Legacy formats like the journal of course have considerable merit, and they are rightly valued: they act as critical, if sometimes imperfect, arbiters of the good and important. At the same time, the web has found ways to filter the abundance of online work, ranging from the tech world (Techmeme) to long-form posts (The Browser), which act as screening agents for those interested in an area of thought or practice.

What if we could combine the best of the scholarly review process with the best of open-web filters? What if we had a scholarly communication system that was digital first?

Today we’re announcing a new initiative to do just that: PressForward, generously supported by a $862,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation‘s Digital Information Technology program.

PressForward will bring together the best scholarship from across the web, producing vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around. PressForward will:

Develop effective methods for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the best online scholarship, including scholarly blogs, digital projects, and other web genres that don’t fit into traditional articles or books, as well as conference papers, white papers, and reports

Encourage the proliferation of open access scholarship through active new forms of publication, concentrating the attention of scholarly communities around high-quality, digital-first scholarship

Create a new platform that will make it simple for any organization or community of scholars to launch similar publications and give guidance to institutions, scholarly societies, and academic publishers who wish to supplement their current journals with online outlets

We hope you’ll join us making this new form of scholarly communication a reality. You may be a researcher in a field that is underserved by traditional outlets, because it is new, interdisciplinary, or involves non-textual media. Perhaps you have a digital project that can only be “published” if you describe it in an article. You may be an editor of a journal who would like to supplement standard articles with digital content from across the web, or a scholarly society that wants to find and feature online work. As PressForward evolves, we hope to serve all of these constituencies, as well as a broad audience currently locked out of gated scholarship.

Learn more about PressForward on our new site, or by sending us an email. You can also follow us on Twitter or via RSS.

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:

• A method of access to the project (e.g, website address, software download)
• The institutions and individuals involved with the project
• The project’s goals, functionality, intended audience, and significance
• A short budget statement on how the funds will be used

Note: Projects may only be submitted once for the Rosenzweig Prize.

Deadline

All submissions must be entered by May 16, 2011. Recipients of the Prize will be announced at the 2012 AHA Annual Meeting in San Diego.

For more details please visit: http://www.historians.org/prizes/Rosenzweig_Fellowship.cfm.

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.