The CHNM-hosted session aimed to provide participants with an overview of different digital tools and services now available and how historians are using them for research, teaching, and collaboration. After brief introductions to the various posters, participants were able to walk around the room, spend time at the various stations, and talk with the presenters and other participants.

A number of CHNM staff were on-hand, including CHNM Creative Lead Jeremy Boggs to discuss WordPress, CHNM Director Dan Cohen to further explain text-mining tools, Jeffrey McClurken from the University of Mary Washington to present on Omeka and student web projects, CHNM Community Lead Trevor Owens to answer questions about Zotero, and CHNM Director of Education Kelly Schrum to speak about the National History Education Clearinghouse.

This was followed in the afternoon by a hands-on workshop where participants could learn to use some of the specific tools displayed at the morning session, including  how to set-up a blog, create a course website, try some basic text-mining, or build a model student website. The CHNM AHA poster session was co-sponsored by the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC)

The Roper Award began in 2001 and was named for a veteran GMU employee, Mary Roper, who worked in the department of biology and in the college dean’s office for 14 years.  Ms. Roper was in attendance at the ceremony to honor the College of Humanities and Social Sciences staff members who have consistently demonstrated excellent performance, commitment, and dedication to the college.

“Both Karen and Andy continually embody the qualities of the Mary Roper award,” said Censer.

Privee joined CHNM in 2006, bringing with him 30 years of experience in administrative and operations roles for the Peace Corps and Environmental Protection Agency. An avid marathon runner, who has finished 13 different races around the east coast, Privee’s work at CHNM requires similar stamina.

“He has become essential to the stability of CHNM,” said Censer.

Both Privee and Secrist were presented with an engraved glass award and gifts.

“Usually, success is not the result of an individual but of teamwork,” said Privee.

Secrist and Privee were honored, as were four others with administrative awards: Frah Abdi (Outstanding HR and Finance), Dana Vogel (Outstanding Administrative Support), Mary Jackson (Outstanding Graduate Program Support) and Carrie Grabo (Outstanding Undergraduate Program Support).

Open Access Week draws worldwide attention to the unrestricted sharing of scholarly research and materials for the advancement and enjoyment of all. Open Access (OA) literature is freely accessible online–maximizing the visibility, use, and impact of research. Building on the success of last year’s Open Access Day, University Libraries’ participation in OA Week offers students, faculty, staff, and the public an opportunity to learn more about Mason’s OA initiatives.

Open Access is a growing international movement that encourages the unrestricted sharing of scholarly research and materials with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of knowledge and society. Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication. OA maximizes access to research, thereby enhancing its visibility, use, and impact.

Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research. October 19-23, 2009 marks the first international Open Access Week.

Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. Organizers and contributors include SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition); the PLoS (The Public Library of Science); Students for Free Culture; OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries).

For more information about Open Access Week, please visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/.

More information, including speaker bios, is available at the Washington Semantic Web Meet-up  forum website.

The site, Children and Youth in History (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh), offers history instructors and students access to hundreds of primary sources and a variety of resources for teachers at both the high school and college level.

As with all CHNM projects, the resources contained in Children and Youth in History are and will remain free and open access.

Funding for Children and Youth in History was made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University
and the Emory University Libraries are pleased to announce a
cooperative partnership on Zotero (www.zotero.org), the free,
open-source bibliographic manager. A team of librarians, information
technologists and faculty members led by Connie Moon Sehat, Emory
Libraries’ new director of digital scholarship initiatives, will
extend research capabilities of the software in collaboration with
Zotero’s main development team. Sehat is a former co-director of
Zotero and CHNM.

For Dan Cohen, who is associate professor of history at George Mason
University and director of CHNM, a relationship with Emory exemplifies
the powerful opportunities for institutional cooperation offered by
digital media. “The Center for History and New Media and the Zotero
Project are lucky to now have the resources and experience of Emory on
their side,” says Cohen, “and the continued insight and direction of
Connie Sehat. We look forward to what will undoubtedly be a
tremendously productive collaboration.” Cohen oversees Zotero with
Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason and CHNM’s
acting director of research projects.

This relationship marks a significant step forward for the future of
the Zotero project. “Partnering on the development of open source
software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital
humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the
research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative
software,” says Rick Luce, Emory University vice provost and director
of libraries.

Already a powerful research tool, Zotero allows users to gather,
organize and analyze sources such as citations, full texts, web pages,
images and other objects. It meshes the functionality of older
reference manager applications with modern software and web
applications, such as del.icio.us and YouTube, to amass large amounts
of data in easy ways.

Over the next two years, Zotero will allow researchers – and their
data – to interact with one another in Web 2.0 communities, help
scholars archive information with the Internet Archive and offer
text-mining capabilities. Zotero also will expand educational
offerings to provide more support for its growing national and
international communities of users, many located in university
settings. Working in conjunction with the Zotero team at CHNM, Emory’s
Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and
library expertise to contribute to Zotero’s anticipated growth.

Since its introduction in 2006, Zotero has earned significant
accolades for its facilitation of online research. It was named a PC
Magazine’s “Best Free Software” in 2007 and again this year, as well
as “Best Instructional Software” of 2007 as determined by the
Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political
Science Association.

The site, Making the History of 1989 (http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/), offers students, teachers, and scholars access to hundreds of primary sources on or related to the events of 1989 and the end of the Cold War in Europe, interviews with prominent historians, and a series of resources for teachers at both the high school and college level.

As with all resources created by our Center, all the resources contained in Making the History of 1989 are and will remain free and open access.

This project has been made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Historical Institute (Washington, D.C.).

http://hnn.us/HowStupidAreWe/media.html

When only 2 out of 5 citizens are able to name the three branches of the federal government, only 1 in 7 can find Iraq on a world map, and the majority believe the war in Iraq was caused by Saddam Hussein’s involvement with Al-Qaeda, Shenkman questions the ability of American voters to make intelligent and informed decisions for guiding the world’s most powerful government.

Shenkman further suggests that the majority of American voters are not only unaware of current events and unable to differentiate between facts and spin, but they simply do not care to learn more if it involves reading a newspaper or book rather than absorbing their news from entertaining network news shows.

Speaking with Jon Stewart, Shenkman questioned the depth of the news presented on television, including the Daily Show, and pointed to the host’s responsibility to present relevant information to viewers rather than focusing on entertaining details. Stewart praised Shenkman’s call for intellectual accountability: if the American people are going to criticize the current administration, they should educate themselves in order to be able to enact critical change.

In addition to being the editor of the History News Network (http://hnn.us), Rick Shenkman is an Emmy-wining investigative journalist and the New York Times best-selling author of six books, including Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History and Presidential Ambition: How the Presidents Gained Power, Kept Power and Got Things Done.