The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), National History Day (NHD), and the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) are pleased to announce that the web project, Understanding Sacrifice, won first place in the Digital Media category for the National Association for Interpretation (NAI) 2016 Interpretative Media Awards.

Understanding Sacrifice is an 18-month professional development program for middle- and high-school teachers. Working with the team from NHD and CHNM, 18 teachers create free, interdisciplinary lessons to share with other educators each year. The goal is to bring ABMC resources into classrooms to help students better understand the service, experience, and sacrifice of American service members during World War II.

To help meet this goal, the Understanding Sacrifice website provides access to lesson plans, primary source materials, videos, and stories of fallen service members who are buried or memorialized at ABMC cemeteries.  The intended audience is teachers, students, and others interested in military history.

Professionals in the field of interpretation and media development judged the entries according to the following criteria:

• The entry exhibits outstanding application of interpretive principles.
• The entry communicates its intended message most effectively and in an appropriate manner.
• The entry engages users through effective use of art and technology.

The (more…)

In July, RRCHNM welcomed 24 American historians to Mason’s Arlington campus for two intensive weeks of the National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored summer institute, Doing Digital History 2016. Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon led the group through a course designed to introduce historians, experts in their own subject areas, to digital history scholarship, methods, and tools relevant to their own research and teaching in American history.

Doing DH 2016 Participants and Team

Participants began as self-identified digital novices unsure of their abilities to keep up with the workload and left with their own web domains, experience working in the statistical programming language R, and many ideas for new teaching assignments, research projects, and digital publications. Most important, each participant became more confident engaging with and reviewing digital scholarship, advising students wishing to do digital projects, and in learning to tinker with and ask questions of digital methodologies.

Throughout the two weeks, readings and discussions were coupled with demonstrations and hands-on work. Each participant established their own web domain, installed open source software (WordPress, Omeka, R, Audacity); implemented best practices for managing their research; made visualizations; built simple maps; learned how to plan a digital project; edited sound files, planned digitally-inflected (more…)

On July 14, 2016, the Rosenzweig Center lost Ronald J. Martin, a longtime and valuable member of our team, to his struggle with cancer. Ron came to the Center in 2008 to serve join the team of scholars editing the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800, and was integral to our work with the National Park Service on the history of the War of 1812. He was an enthusiastic partner in our work to share early American history with the public, and we mourn his passing.

Serving as PWD’s only full time  staff person, Ron began as an assistant editor, but soon he moved into the role of Associate Editor. From that position, he worked with the assistant editors to complete the basic description (author, recipient, and date) of the full collection, more than 18,000 of the total 42,800 documents. Then, in 2010 he and the staff turned their attention to offering a more full description of a key subset of the collection. During the next three years, Ron shepherded the process of creating enhanced description, including people, places, and items mentioned and a general description of the document, for more than 27,000 items. Ron alone completed the description for more than 5,000 (more…)

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of A Liberian Journey: History, Memory, and the Making of a Nation <liberianhistory.org>, developed in partnership with the Liberian Center for National Documents and Records Agency (CNDRA), the Indiana University Liberian Collections, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with generous support from the National Science Foundation.

Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, attends launch ceremony at CNDRA.

The project officially launched in Monrovia at a ceremony on Monday, March 21 with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in attendance, together with members of her cabinet and the Liberian legislature.

This new digital public history site is meant to inform, raise questions, and invite stories about a transformational moment in Liberia’s past by making historical sources available for the first time in one place related to a 1926 Harvard scientific expedition to Liberia. The website features an exhibit on Chief Suah Koko, a noted woman leader in Liberia’s history; digital collections containing nearly 600 photographs, more than two hours of motion picture footage, oral histories, and documents linked to an interactive map. This effort marks the beginning of a recollection of Liberia’s lost history and for CNDRA represents a (more…)

Digital tools and resources are transforming the ways in which we research, interpret, and communicate. Be part of this change by enrolling in the graduate online Digital Public Humanities Certificate created by the Department of History and Art History and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in partnership with Smithsonian Associates. Because it is both online and part-time, students can pursue the certificate while working or attending another graduate program.  The certificate can also be combined with GMU’s own History M.A. program.

This one-year, 15-credit certificate program includes 3 online courses:

• Introduction to Digital Humanities (Fall 2016; 3 credits)
• Digital Public History (Spring 2017; 3 credits)
• Teaching Humanities in the Digital Age (Spring 2017; 3 credits)

Courses will introduce students interested in public history, museums, libraries, archives, education, and communications to ways in which they can incorporate digital public humanities skills and tools into their current or future practice. Students will learn research and presentation skills, including text mining, topic modeling, data visualization, and mapping. They will explore innovative ways to advance teaching and learning through digital tools while developing skills in digital curation, writing, and content strategy.

The program includes a 6-credit “virtual” summer internship with the Smithsonian Institution. The internship can be completed (more…)

Are you a mid-career American historian interested in digital history training for novices?

Apply now for one of 25 available spots for the Doing Digital History: 2016 summer institute to be held July 11- 22, 2016 at George Mason University. The institute is organized by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History in New Media and generously sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities.

Doing Digital History: 2016 is designed to address the existing gap in digital history training for established scholars who need instruction and a professional learning community to explore digital methodologies and theories applicable to their historical research and teaching. During the summer of 2014, RRCHNM ran the first Doing Digital History institute also sponsored by the NEH.

Institute Directors Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan will be joined by experts in the digital history and humanities fields who will guest lecture throughout the institute.

We seek applications from established faculty, public historians, archivists, librarians, museum professionals, and independent scholars specializing in US history, who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions.

Applications will be open until March 15, 2016: (more…)