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.



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!

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

Steve Barnes Director of the Center for Eurasian Studies has announced the launch of the Russian History Blog.

http://russianhistoryblog.org