This is the text of my presentation in the session on the future of digital humanities centers, on day two of RRCHNM20. November 15, 2014.  I wasn’t originally slated to be one of the speakers, but by the time it became clear that one person we had invited could not attend, I realized that I should be speaking, that people wanted to hear from me about the future of RRCHNM. Accordingly, I departed from the brief and spoke not about DH centers in general, but instead about the future of the center whose anniversary we marked that day. We will soon be posting video recordings of both this session, and the afternoon session on the future of digital history. In the meantime, Bethany Nowviskie, one of the other speakers has also posted her talk online: “speculative computing and the centers to come.”
—Stephen Robertson

The twentieth anniversary of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media finds it in a period of transition. A little more than a year ago, both Dan Cohen, the director, and Tom Scheinfeldt, the managing director, whose names appear in the credits of at least twenty-six Center projects, left to pursue new opportunities. The departure of visionary leaders has generally been fatal for digital humanities centers. But (more…)

On Friday, January 5^th, the Center for History and New Media presented a highly successful panel and poster session at the American Historical Association’s 2010 Conference.

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 (more…)

Andy Privee, the grants administrator for the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), and Kathy Secrist, a long-time staff member of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, were each presented with a 2009 Mary Roper award in a ceremony at the George Mason University Center for the Arts December 2nd.

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 (more…)

The Center for History and New Media is proud to support George Mason’s Open Access Week initiatives (October 19th through 23rd). Since its inception in 1994, CHNM has been committed to the free flow of information and has striven to create open source educational resources that provide room for communication and democratization of history.

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 (more…)

On Wednesday, May 13th at 7:00 p.m., the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities and the Washington Semantic Web Group will host the a forum on Social Networking and the Semantic web in the George Mason University Johnson Center Cinema. The forum will host four speakers, Mills Davis, Andy Roth, Mike Petit, and Dan Cohen, who will share their projects and lead a group discussion at the end of the evening. Mills Davis of Project10X will showcase new developments in social networking and semantic technologies within government and private industry. Andy Roth, Chief Quality Officer at AdaptiveBlue, will discuss Glue, a browser add-on that allows you to find new things based on what your friends like. Mike Petit will present Amplify, an open platform that mimics human understanding of content and offers a broad range of unique, and previously unavailable, data to SemWeb practitioners. Finally, Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media will discuss new social and collaborative features for Zotero, the  free, easy-to-use Firefox extension which helps collect, manage, cite and share your research sources.

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

The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the keynote speaker for George Mason University’s “1989: Looking Back, Looking Forward” conference will be Former Soviet President and Nobel Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev.  President Gorbachev will present the keynote address at the conference on March 24, and will additionally participate in a round table discussion the following day, with Lee Hamilton and William Webster.  For more information on the conference, including tickets to the event, breakout sessions, and associated film festival, see:  http://gorbachev.gmu.edu/.  The conference will offer a critical perspective on how the lessons of the end of the Cold War should be applied to the challenges of international cooperation.
You can examine vivid historical documents related to President Mikhail Gorbachev’s role in the epochal events of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold War, by accessing the Center for History and New Media’s project titled, Making the History of 1989, at:  http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, together with the University of Missouri–Kansas City, is pleased to announce the launch of a new website focusing on notions of childhood and the experiences of children and youth throughout history and around the world.

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.

Partnership with Emory University Libraries Further Solidifies Zotero’s Role as a Platform for Digital Research and Innovation

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 (more…)

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University is pleased to announce the launch of a new website on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

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.).

On June 11, 2008, the editor of CHNM’s History News Network, Rick Shenkman, appeared on Comedy Central’s the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss his recent work, Just How Stupid are We: The Truth About the American Voter.  A current bestseller on Amazon.com, Just How Stupid are We cites disturbing statistics that Shenkman believes reveal Americans simply do not know much about politics.

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 (more…)