CHNM is pleased to announce that later this week Patrick Murray-John (@patrick_mj) will be joining our staff as web developer and research assistant professor. Murray-John is an accomplished digital humanist with a PhD in Anglo-Saxon Literature from the University of Wisconsin, significant classroom experience, and many years of work as an Instructional Technology Specialist at the University of Mary Washington.

At CHNM, Patrick will be leading the development on the Teaching History Commons. An outgrowth of teachinghistory.org, the THCommons will serve as professional network for k-12 history teachers and the many faculty and administrators that support their work. Additionally, Murray-John will contribute to the work of CHNM’s Public Projects division, working with the Omeka development community and on a variety of new digital humanities projects.

Welcome, Patrick!

Children in Youth & History, the first website focused exclusively on children and youth in history, has received honorable mention in the 2011 RUSA ABC-CLIO Online History Awards competition, which recognizes achievements in free, open-access online history tools and reference resources.

In its announcement, the awards committee said it “was impressed with the design, execution, purpose, and content of Children in History.  . . The fact that Children in History remains a free, open-access resource, available to all and not just affiliates of elite research institutions, is a testament to your commitment to history education.”

Several CHNM staff were among the project team, including co-directors Kelly Schrum and Miriam Forman-Brunell (Affiliated Faculty), Jeremy Boggs, Chris Raymond, Susan Douglass, and Ken Albers.

The ABC-CLIO Online History Award recognizes the accomplishments of a person or a group of people producing a freely available online historical collection, an online tool for finding historical materials, or an online teaching aid stimulating creative historical scholarship.

RUSA, the Reference and User Services Association, supports excellence in the delivery of general library services and materials to adults, and the provision of reference and information services, collection development, and resource sharing for all ages.

http://news.gmu.edu/articles/5248

Recently the National Endowment for the Humanities posted the lightening talks from the Fall 2010 project directors meeting. Take a look at the videos to get a quick glimpse of the great range of cutting-edge work going on in the digital humanities.

There were two CHNM projects amongst the over 40 grant projects highlighted at the meeting. Unfortunately, the brief introduction to Scripto included some factual errors that we wish to correct.

The Papers of George Washington were founded in 1968 (not 1969) and have published 62 volumes (not 52). The Papers of James Madison have 14 remaining volumes and have published 32 volumes to date (not the 15 published volumes cited). In our 17 years of work in history and new media at CHNM, we have prized our collaborations with a full range of history professionals and organizations, and we regret if these errors suggested a lack of respect for our colleagues working on the Founding Fathers papers projects.

Many of those who follow the work of the Center for History and New Media know that we are in the middle of a special fundraising campaign in which the National Endowment for the Humanities will match donations to the CHNM endowment. Some of you have already given to this campaign, and we are tremendously grateful for your generosity. The endowment helps us to sustain dozens of educational, archival, and software projects, all of which have been and will be freely available to the millions of people who take advantage of them every year.

The NEH challenge grant is now entering the home stretch, and we have decided to do something very special with the remaining effort: raise enough funds to name the Center for History and New Media after Roy Rosenzweig, the founding director of CHNM, who tragically passed away in 2007.

Roy was—and remains—the animating spirit of CHNM. (Learn more about Roy.) We can’t tell you how important Roy is any better than Julie Meloni, who spent a week at the Center working on a new project:

The reason CHNM is uniquely positioned as instigator of and support system for this project…is the longstanding tradition of enthusiasm, creativity, collaboration, and support put in place by its founding director, Roy Rosenzweig. It is impossible to spend any time around CHNM without learning something about this man and the reasons the center exists and is a success.

Universities usually price naming opportunities in the millions of dollars, but George Mason University will allow us to name CHNM after Roy for $750,000 (plus the NEH match). An anonymous donor has already stepped forward to provide $100,000, and we need to raise the remaining $650,000 in the next two and a half years.

We welcome all donations, but believe that Roy, a true champion of democracy, would have loved the idea that small donors could have as much impact as those with deeper pockets.

So we are asking you join our Circle of Friends by pledging just $10 a month for the next 30 months. With this tax-deductible contribution, which will be matched by $100 from NEH, CHNM will officially become the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on its 20th anniversary.

Maybe you keep your precious research in Zotero or your treasured digital archive in Omeka, saving you from the expense of commercial programs. Maybe as a teacher or student you have learned more from CHNM’s free sites than from pricey textbooks. Or maybe you are grateful for our unique and powerful historical collections from George Washington through 9/11.

If so, we hope you’ll consider joining the Circle of Friends. These donors will be honored on a special page of our website and on the wall of CHNM.

Please join the Circle now, and thanks so much in advance for your support!

Are you looking for ways to promote thoughtful, critical reading of primary and secondary sources? Teachinghistory.org now offers a free Historical Thinking poster to help you out!

This double-sided, color poster features definitions of primary and secondary sources and guides students through the process of historical inquiry. What questions should you ask when examining a primary source? Where should you look for reliable secondary sources? How do you use the evidence you’ve gathered to make an argument?

Bright illustrations and snappy captions present history as a mystery for younger students, while the flip side asks how historians know what they know about the past. Both sides feature clear visual examples of primary sources.

Request your copy here.

Folks at CHNM spend most of their time working on cutting edge, grant-funded research projects like Zotero, the National History Education Clearinghouse, and the Papers of the War Department. However, as a leader in the growing fields of digital history and digital humanities, CHNM is also eager to assist other historical, educational, cultural, and governmental organizations meet the challenges of the digital age. Whether your institution is looking to manage its research activities more effectively, build a new teaching website or its next online exhibition, or improve its overall web and social media strategy, CHNM can help with a range of custom contract development, consulting, and support services, including:

• Zotero Custom Development
• Zotero Deployment Consultations
• Omeka Custom Design and Development
• Omeka Custom Data Import
• Web Design and Development (including Omeka, WordPress, Drupal)
• Web Presence and Social Media Strategy Consulting and Assessment

Please contact Tom to learn about the work CHNM has done for partners ranging from the Smithsonian Institution to Emory University to the National Museum of American Jewish History to the National Science Foundation and what CHNM can do for you.

CHNM is pleased to announce two grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), during the May 2010 funding cycle.

First, NHPRC has awarded continued funding to the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. This groundbreaking digital editorial project presents high resolution images of some 55,000 documents from the early War Department, which burned down in 1800. The collection has been carefully reconstructed through painstaking research in more than 200 repositories and more than 3,000 collections. This funding will allow the editorial team to dramatically improve the depth and quality of the metadata associated with the documents.

Second, NHPRC awarded its only grant in the “Strategies and Tools for Archives and Historical Publishing Projects” category to support the implementation, evaluation, and adaptation of CHNM’s crowdsourcing documentary transcription tool. Designed to allow members of the online public to contribute transcriptions to documentary edition projects, the tool’s initial development is being funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up Grant. The NHPRC funding will provide for expanded user interface research and evaluation, as well as the creation of a set of connector scripts that will enable the tool to plug into common open source content management systems such as Omeka, Drupal, and WordPress.

NHPRC, a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources, created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States.

CHNM is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities to support the design and development of a tool for crowdsourcing documentary transcription. The $49,215 award will enable CHNM’s dev team to to build an open source tool to enable researchers to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, thus harnessing the power of the community of users to improve the discoverability and usefulness of the archive.

Digital archives and documentary projects need a viable solution that lowers both the cost and the investment of staff time involved with transcribing of large numbers of historical documents. There will be significant benefits for both the editorial staff and for interested users, whether they are scholarly researchers, students and teachers, or members of the general public. This tool will help to address some of the long-term resource challenges facing many digital documentary editing projects.

We will use the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 as a test case for the tool development. The end result of the project will be a generalized tool that can be modified to work with a host of different content management systems, such as Omeka, WordPress, or Drupal. Please contact Sharon Leon if you would like to volunteer to test the tool.

This project is part of the We the People program, which encourages the teaching, study, and understanding of American History and culture.