https://rrchnm.org/blog/Recent content in Blog on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New MediaHugoen-usMon, 08 Dec 2025 14:19:18 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/roy-rosenzweig-prize-for-creativity-in-digital-history-winner/Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:19:17 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/roy-rosenzweig-prize-for-creativity-in-digital-history-winner/<p>Congratulations to <a href="https://envisioningsenecavillage.github.io/">Envisioning Seneca Village</a> on being selected as the 2025 winner of the <a href="https://www.historians.org/award-grant/roy-rosenzweig-prize-for-creativity-in-digital-history/#:~:text=2023,2014">American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History!</a></p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="image.png" alt="" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="image.png" alt="" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> <p>Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the spring of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through the Visualization), a printable PDF guide with maps (A Map-based Tour), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/lost-in-the-park-roy-rosenzweigs-public-history-legacy/Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:14:41 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/lost-in-the-park-roy-rosenzweigs-public-history-legacy/<p>I first learned of Seneca Village in 2020. That summer, people tired of having to explain why Black Lives Matter and with an online audience freshly enraged at racism turned to history to popularize further examples of how Black people in the United States had been systematically dispossessed and disempowered by the forces of White power. At the time I was researching Black park use in Kansas City, Missouri where Troost Boulevard, and later Highway 71, were used to displace Black &ldquo;slums,&rdquo; leaving lasting economic and health disparities.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> I was finding, like other historians before me, that &ldquo;although not created as a racial barrier, the parks and boulevards system served as one.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> The news of a Black village buried under what is now Central Park was not surprising. The renewed popular interest in Seneca Village prompted the Central Park Conservancy to install <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.centralparknyc.org/media/documents/SenecaVillage_Signs_2023.pdf"><strong>several historical markers</strong></a> at the site.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> They formed a large outdoor exhibit near the existing New York Parks &amp; Recreation <strong><a href="https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=171184">marker</a>.</strong><sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> What I did not know at the time was that this was not the first time Seneca Village became popular.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-religious-ecologies-team-completes-digitization/Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:30:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-religious-ecologies-team-completes-digitization/<p><a href="https://religiousecologies.org/">American Religious Ecologies</a> seeks to understand how congregations from different religious traditions related to one another by creating new datasets, maps, and visualizations for the history of American religion. After years of photographing, editing, cataloging, and uploading schedules to the American Religious Ecologies website, we are excited to announce that we have uploaded the last of the 1926 religious census schedules. Although our website indicates that we are only 98% complete, we have digitized every schedule from the 1926 Religious Bodies Census housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, over time, many of these schedules have been lost or destroyed. Paper is not a permanent object. It is easily lost, destroyed, and deteriorates over time. The work being done, not just by the Religious Ecologies team, but at RRCHNM as a whole, is essential to ensuring that future generations have access to archival materials. The American Religious Ecologies project is an excellent example of this work and the benefits it can bring to historians&rsquo; understanding of various facets of United States history. The completion of the digitization aspect of this project will enable us to focus more on analyzing the data we have gathered, creating maps, and examining various statistics to better understand the distribution of churches and religion in the United States around 1926.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-sustainability-summer/Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:40:25 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-sustainability-summer/<aside>Savannah is a PhD student at George Mason University and a Graduate Research Assistant at RRCHNM.</aside> <p>This past summer I had the opportunity to work on RRCHNM’s sustainability team. Our work focused on flattening <a href="https://sustainabledh.org/blog/scott-static-search/">websites built with content management systems (CMS)</a>, such as Drupal, Omeka, and WordPress. Flattening refers to the process of simplifying dynamic, database-backed websites to static versions built with only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This minimizes server space and reduces security risks. However, flattening comes with trade-offs, such as losing dynamic features like a search function. One of my main roles this summer was creating a <a href="https://sustainabledh.org/blog/building-static-search/">static site search</a> for these flattened websites.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-funding-to-create-teaching-guides-on-the-american-revolution/Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-funding-to-create-teaching-guides-on-the-american-revolution/<h3 id="funded-through-the-american-historical-association-as-part-of-the-library-of-congress-teaching-with-primary-sources-program-the-teaching-guides-will-support-history-educators-in-teaching-a-more-comprehensive-and-complete-history-of-american-independence">Funded through the American Historical Association as part of the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program, the teaching guides will support history educators in teaching a more comprehensive and complete history of American independence.</h3> <p>RRCHNM is proud to announce new grant funding to create two teaching guides for teachers on the history of the American Revolution. The guides are funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Mid-Atlantic &amp; US Territories Region, managed by the American Historical Association. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library primary sources to better understand the complex relationships to independence experienced by various groups during the revolutionary era particularly the Black Americans and Indigenous Americans fighting for their own independence on both sides of the conflict. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians’ approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/report-from-the-seventh-conference-on-digital-humanities-and-digital-history/Tue, 13 May 2025 09:15:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/report-from-the-seventh-conference-on-digital-humanities-and-digital-history/<p>From March 19th to March 21st, 2025, the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC hosted the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History. The conference theme, real-time history, drew on Roy Rosenzweig’s call to action that historians need to directly address the methodological potential and risks of the digital age.</p> <p>Designed as a forum, the conference prompted attendees to share what opportunities, problems, and concerns arise while “documenting the now.” To allow space for unstructured creativity after long days of conferencing, the GHI team and I also arranged a zine-making workshop in which attendees crafted and exhibited their own mini magazines (just for fun!). As a first-time attendee to the DH conference, I was especially struck by how each presenter chose and justified different methodologies to achieve their project goals. The self-management evident in the still-emerging field reminded me of a Do-It-Yourself ethos usually applied to art and music. Scholars, practitioners, and activists discussed the following topics while sharing their experiences tackling real-time archiving.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/carrying-on-when-the-grants-go-away/Fri, 11 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/carrying-on-when-the-grants-go-away/<p>Over the past three decades, RRCHNM has received many awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). We’ve used a truly tiny portion of the federal budget to have a huge impact on individuals and communities. Students in public schools use our teaching resources. Visitors to public history sites learn more from our websites. Citizens wondering about the origin of our nation listen to our podcast about the American Revolution. For literally pennies per person we reach, we’ve had a huge impact on public understandings of the past.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/celebrating-womens-history-month/Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:27:33 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/celebrating-womens-history-month/<p>Since RRCHNM’s founding in the 1990s, we have been committed to highlighting the contributions women made in the past. One of our first projects was a CD-ROM version of the textbook <em>Who Built America?</em> which grew out of efforts to reinterpret American history from “the bottom up”—drawing on studies of workers, women, consumers, farmers, African Americans, and immigrants—that has helped transform our understanding of the past. This textbook highlighted perspectives often neglected in traditional teachings of American history, including women’s history.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/teaching-writing-and-research-with-ai/Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:29:49 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/teaching-writing-and-research-with-ai/<p>When Chat GPT first appeared in November 2022, the almost universal reaction in the humanities community could be summed up in one word – Yikes! Almost without warning this new tool seemed ready to make it incredibly easy for students to “write” essays using prompts that took no more than a minute to produce and then, if they were crafty, another 30 minutes to modify a bit so that it wasn’t quite so obvious that the essay had been written by a large language model (LLM).</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/celebrating-black-history-month/Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:50:48 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/celebrating-black-history-month/<p>Just a couple miles from RRCHNM is the campus of Woodson High School, part of the Fairfax County Public School system. Until this past year the school was named for W. T. Woodson, the long time superintendent of FCPS and an opponent of school desegregation. Now the school is named after Carter G. Woodson. Born in 1875, Woodson was the second Black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. Excluded from the American Historical Association and other professional historical circles, Woodson was a creator of institutions to understand and study Black history. Among the many institutions he founded was Negro History Week, founded nearly a century ago in 1926. Woodson’s observance was the precursor to Black History Month, first observed in 1970 and then federally recognized in 1976 for the bicentennial.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-aha-presentations/Fri, 07 Feb 2025 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-aha-presentations/<p>At the start of January, I had the privilege of attending the American Historical Association and presenting a poster for the Religious Ecologies project. While it was fun to put the poster together and answer the questions from people who came up during the poster session, my favorite part, the most valuable part, was the time spent outside the sessions.</p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="IMG_3673-scaled.jpg" alt="Rae Whyte standing in front of her poster at the American Historical Association&#39;s annual meeting" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <figcaption class="mt-2 px-1 text-sm text-stone-500"> Rachel Whyte with her Religious Ecologies Poster </figcaption> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="IMG_3673-scaled.jpg" alt="Rae Whyte standing in front of her poster at the American Historical Association&#39;s annual meeting" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> <p class="mt-3 text-sm text-white/80 text-center max-w-2xl">Rachel Whyte with her Religious Ecologies Poster</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-how-network-analysis-influenced-my-research/Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-how-network-analysis-influenced-my-research/<p>As a fifth year PhD candidate in the History Department, I have combined my desire to learn everything I can about female preachers in the early American republic with my enthusiasm for any and all data visualizations and digital humanities tools. Committed to these women, just as they committed themselves to their itinerant ministries, I have expanded my research to include more women, especially Black female preachers, and those from England and Canada who came to the States, and vice-versa. My analysis in my dissertation—a traditional history dissertation—intersects an interest in gender, race, and body studies with a religious history methodology. My focus remains on the women who preached, despite opposition from their families, husbands, pastors, and many others. I center the women, and I still emphasize their relationships with others who supported them.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/neh-institute-participants-present-at-aha-on-higher-education-history/Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/neh-institute-participants-present-at-aha-on-higher-education-history/<p><strong>Five participants in the</strong> <a href="https://www.neh.gov/divisions/education/summer-programs"><strong>NEH-funded institute</strong></a><strong>,</strong> <em><strong>Unpacking the History of Higher Education,</strong></em> <strong>presented the projects they developed at the institute at the</strong> <a href="https://www.historians.org/event/2025-aha-annual-meeting/"><strong>AHA Annual Meeting</strong></a> <strong>in January along with project co-directors, Kelly Schrum and Nate Sleeter. The summer 2024 institute brought together faculty members from higher education programs who teach or support history of higher ed courses.</strong></p> <p>At the AHA 2025 annual meeting in January, RRCHNM’s Nate Sleeter and Kelly Schrum chaired the panel, “Unpacking the History of Higher Education in the United States.” The panel grew out of <a href="https://unpacking.chss.gmu.edu/">an NEH institute of the same name</a> directed by Schrum and Sleeter in the summer of 2024 in which 25 faculty from universities nationwide came together to explore the teaching and research of the history of higher ed through archival sources. Institute participants included faculty, advanced doctoral students, librarians, and archivists who teach or support courses on the history of higher education in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/connect-with-rrchnm-at-aha25/Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/connect-with-rrchnm-at-aha25/<p>Many RRCHNM-ers will be featured in sessions coming up this week at the American Historical Associations Annual Meeting. To connect with RRHCNM and learn more about our current projects, here is a list of those sessions.</p> <h2 id="saturday-january-4"><strong>Saturday, January 4</strong></h2> <h5 id="digitizing-black-history-at-hbcus-a-collaborative-public-history-approach"><a href="https://aha.confex.com/aha/2025/webprogram/Session26272.html">Digitizing Black History at HBCU’s: A Collaborative Public History Approach</a></h5> <p>Bowery (Sheraton New York, Lower Level), 8:30am-10am</p> <p>Chaired by Marion McGee of <em>the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History and Culture</em>, and a panel with Catiana Foster of <em>Tuskeegee University,</em> Timmia King of <em>RRCHNM and George Mason University,</em> Raymond (Garrad) Lee of <em>Jackson State University,</em> Barbara Twyman of <em>Florida A&amp;M University,</em> Shyheim Williams of <em>Clark Atlanta University.</em></p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/digital-scholar-makes-year-end-donation-to-rrchnm/Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/digital-scholar-makes-year-end-donation-to-rrchnm/<p>We are pleased to announce a generous end-of-year donation from our friends and colleagues at Digital Scholar. Their gift of $100,000 will be split equally between the Director’s Innovation Fund, where it will allow us to experiment with new approaches to the study of history, and to the RRCHNM Endowment, which sustains our ongoing operations.</p> <p><a href="https://digitalscholar.org/">Digital Scholar</a> is a nonprofit organization founded in 2009, and it is dedicated to the development of software and services for researchers and cultural heritage institutions, including Omeka, Zotero, Tropy, PressForward, and Sourcery. The original development of the Zotero and Omeka software projects took place at RRCHNM, and their long-term sustainability was secured via an independent non-profit corporation, Digital Scholar.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/announcing-the-alumni-and-friends-graduate-fellowship-endowment/Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:15:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/announcing-the-alumni-and-friends-graduate-fellowship-endowment/<p>Over its thirty years, graduate students in history have been a critical part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Graduate students don&rsquo;t just take classes and work on faculty projects. <a href="https://rrchnm.org/graduate-student-education/">They create innovative scholarship that fulfills RRCHNM&rsquo;s mission of creating history in new media.</a> Most recently, history graduate students at George Mason University have rethought what a dissertation in history can mean, creating dissertations not in the conventional form of a rough draft of a book, but using websites, computation, visualization, and audio to create entirely new forms of scholarship.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/introducing-the-denig-manuscript-project/Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:59:41 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/introducing-the-denig-manuscript-project/<p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of the Denig Manuscript Project, created in collaboration with the Winterthur Museum, Garden &amp; Library.</p> <p>The Denig Manuscript Project brings an eighteenth-century, Pennsylvania-made manuscript and watercolors to life through a collaborative multimedia digital project. High-resolution digital images, updated translations, forensic analysis, sound recordings, and contextual scholarship provide enhanced access to this extraordinary document of religious life in early America. Ludwig Denig (1755–1830) created the ink and watercolor bound volume in 1784, and it remained in private hands until the 1970s. Winterthur Museum, Garden &amp; Library acquired the manuscript as a gift in 2020. Recognizing both the importance of the volume and its fragile physical state, Winterthur received support from the Schwartz Foundation and The Paper Project at the Getty to study and digitize the book. Winterthur and a team of scholars worked with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to build a digital humanities site and provide greater access to Denig’s work.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/r2-studios-receives-dr-scholl-foundation-grant/Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/r2-studios-receives-dr-scholl-foundation-grant/<p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is excited to announce that R2 Studioshas received a $10,000 grant from the <a href="https://www.drschollfoundation.com/">Dr. Scholl Foundation</a> to advance the studio’s mission to democratize access to history through podcasting.</p> <p>Founded in 2021, R2 Studios strives to tell unexpected stories based on the latest research to connect listeners with the past.</p> <p>“This generous grant from the Dr. Scholl Foundation provides meaningful support for the production of R2 Studios’ current and future series,” said Jim Ambuske, Co-Head of R2 Studios and host of <em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em>. “We are especially pleased that it will help underwrite the fourth season of <em>Your Most Obedient &amp; Humble Servant</em>, which follows the lives of women who lived through the era of the American Revolution.”</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/religious-ecologies-project-releases-introductory-video/Tue, 12 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/religious-ecologies-project-releases-introductory-video/<p>Recently, the <a href="https://religiousecologies.org/">Religious Ecologies Project</a> produced an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3hLQIH7NQ4&amp;t=3s">introductory video</a> that gives a brief history of the United States Census of Religious Bodies, an overview of this project, and the goals we hope to gain from digitizing these census schedules. Many who frequent our site may be curious about why since a great deal of this information is already in written format on our website. So, why spend time doing something that already exists?</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/connecting-threads-launches-project-site/Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/connecting-threads-launches-project-site/<p>On October 11, 2024, the <a href="https://connectingthreads.co.uk/"><em>Connecting Threads</em> project launched its website</a> and celebrated the conclusion of the first phase of the project with a public symposium at the Victoria &amp; Albert Museum in London. <em>Connecting Threads</em> is a collaborative digital history project dedicated to amplifying the contributions of Indian weavers and African Caribbean consumers to global histories of dress. Drawing on the work of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the project re-examined the history of the Madras handkerchief, an internationally popular dress accessory made of brightly coloured checked cotton, produced in coastal southeastern India and used by diverse cultures across the Global South. In the recently completed first phase of the project, we examined the influence of the Madras handkerchief on 18th and 18th century dress, particularly in the context of their use in the Greater Caribbean Region including coastal southeastern United States.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-launches-new-teaching-guides-for-pre-service-history-teachers-2/Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-launches-new-teaching-guides-for-pre-service-history-teachers-2/<p><em>Funded by the Library of Congress, these four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching post-1970s U.S. history and civics and will be available on <a href="https://teachinghistory.org/teaching-materials/teaching-guides">Teachinghistory.org</a>.</em></p> <p>RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on post-1970s history in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the<a href="https://www.loc.gov/">Library of Congress</a>. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers new to the profession.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-hosts-dh-2024-reinvention-and-responsibility/Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:00:24 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-hosts-dh-2024-reinvention-and-responsibility/<p>For over 35 years, the annual Digital Humanities Conference, organized by the <a href="https://adho.org/">Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations</a> (ADHO), has been a premier gathering for scholars, researchers, practitioners, and professionals from around the globe. This event is a vital platform for fostering dialogue, sharing knowledge, and advancing digital research and teaching across various disciplines.</p> <p>This year, the <a href="https://rrchnm.org/">Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media</a> (RRCHNM) hosted DH2024, coinciding with the center&rsquo;s 30th anniversary. Since its establishment, RRCHNM has championed the democratization of knowledge through innovative uses of digital media and technology. This mission aligns well with ADHO&rsquo;s diverse international membership and wide range of disciplinary perspectives.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/amanda-madden-receives-second-round-of-neh-funding-to-create-a-digital-edition-of-goro-datis-sfera/Wed, 28 Aug 2024 11:05:41 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/amanda-madden-receives-second-round-of-neh-funding-to-create-a-digital-edition-of-goro-datis-sfera/<p><a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/amadden8">Amanda Madden</a> of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (<a href="https://rrchnm.org/">RRCHNM</a>), in collaboration with <a href="https://www.ncf.edu/directory/carrie-e-benes/">Carrie Beneš</a> of New College of Florida, <a href="https://www.italianstudies.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/laura-ingallinella">Laura Ingallinella</a> of the University of Toronto, and independent scholar <a href="https://middleagesforeducators.princeton.edu/people/laura-morreale">Laura Morreale</a>, has been awarded a second major grant as part of the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>’ <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/research/scholarly-editions-and-translations-grants">Scholarly Editions and Translations program</a>. This grant will allow for <a href="https://rrchnm.org/news/amanda-madden-receives-neh-funding-to-create-a-digital-edition-of-goro-datis-sfera/">a continuation of</a> the scholars’ work on the<a href="https://sites.google.com/ncf.edu/sfera-project/home"><em>La Sfera</em> Project</a>, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem <em>La sfera</em> (<em>The Globe</em>).</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/deepthi-murali-and-jason-heppler-receive-neh-funding-for-connecting-threads-project/Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:31:22 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/deepthi-murali-and-jason-heppler-receive-neh-funding-for-connecting-threads-project/<p>Deepthi Murali and Jason Heppler of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (<a href="https://rrchnm.org/">RRCHNM</a>) has received a <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a> (NEH), <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/digital-humanities-advancement-grants">Digital Humanities Advancement Grant</a> (Level II) of $138, 256 in support of the ongoing global textile history project <a href="http://www.connectingthreads.co.uk"><em>Connecting Threads: Digitally Connecting Collections, Expanding Public Engagement</em></a>.</p> <p><a href="https://rrchnm.org/portfolio-item/connecting-threads/">Connecting Threads</a> is a collaborative digital history project dedicated to amplifying the contributions of Indian weavers and Afro-Caribbean consumers to global histories of dress. Drawing on the work of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the project in its first phase examined the history of the Madras handkerchief, an internationally popular dress accessory made of brightly coloured checked cotton.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/introducing-antisemitism-u-s-a-a-history-podcast/Thu, 11 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/introducing-antisemitism-u-s-a-a-history-podcast/<p><strong>Introducing</strong> <em><strong>Antisemitism, U.S.A.</strong></em><strong>:</strong> <em><strong>A History</strong></em> <strong>podcast from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and R2 Studios</strong></p> <p><a href="https://rrchnm.org/">The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM)</a> at George Mason University is excited to announce the launch of<a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/Antisemitism-USA/"><em>Antisemitism, U.S.A</em>.</a>, a limited podcast about the history of antisemitism in the United States. A narrative history podcast, <em>Antisemitism, U.S.A.</em> weaves together expert commentary with narration by <a href="https://www.markoppenheimer.com/">Mark Oppenheimer</a> to tell the story of antisemitism in the United States over the past 300 years.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-teaching-dh/Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:15:44 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-teaching-dh/<p>This 2024 spring semester at George Mason University, I was an instructor of record of HIST 390 “The Digital Past” course. This course satisfies the university’s Information Technology and Computing (IT) requirement and aims for undergraduate students to learn how to use digital tools to study the past. As a PhD history candidate at GMU and former digital history fellow at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), I have strong experience in the field of digital history, and was excited for the opportunity to expand my research and technical skills through practical application and instruction in the classroom. Following university parameters around learning outcomes for this course, I designed my own syllabus and taught specific digital history topics regarding primary source research, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, project management research workflows, and how to write historical analysis. Overall, teaching HIST 390 provided me an opportunity to reflect on what I have learned as a PhD student of digital history and develop a curriculum to instruct these skills to undergraduate students new to the field.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/religious-digitization-a-step-beyond-a-database/Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:00:22 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/religious-digitization-a-step-beyond-a-database/<p>Every ten years from 1906 to 1946, the United States Census Bureau surveyed religious congregations, synagogues, and other religious groups in a census similar to the population census. At the time, churches were considered a public good, similar to a public park or school. Through these religious censuses, the government could ensure counties had enough churches and what religions and spiritual sects were growing/prospering within the United States at any given time. Of the five religious censuses that the bureau conducted (1906-1946), only the schedules from the 1926 census still exist.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-delivers-arnhem-postal-history-prototype-database/Thu, 16 May 2024 08:55:14 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-delivers-arnhem-postal-history-prototype-database/<p>Many of us started “pandemic projects” large and small over the past several years. Tim Gale’s project, a prototype website and database of his extensive collection of postal artifacts, is one of those projects that is finally coming to life. Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, <em>Arnhem Postal History</em> will be a website with a database, an interactive map, and philatelic exhibits focusing on World War II in the Netherlands based on the 1,500 items in Gale’s collection. <em>Arnhem Postal History</em> is named in honor of the Battle of Arnhem which was fought in September of 1944. However, the scope of the collection is much wider than the Battle of Arnhem, encompassing postcards, letters, postal covers, and other documents from 1939-1945.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/aha-survey-finds-rrchnms-teachinghistory-org-and-history-matters-to-be-top-resources-for-k-12-teachers/Tue, 14 May 2024 10:35:06 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/aha-survey-finds-rrchnms-teachinghistory-org-and-history-matters-to-be-top-resources-for-k-12-teachers/<p>A <a href="https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2024/whats-being-taught-mapping-the-landscape-of-us-history-education">recent survey</a> of K-12 social studies teachers by the American Historical Association finds that <a href="http://teachinghistory.org">Teachinghistory.org</a> remains a frequently used resource with 56 percent reporting that they used the site. Funded by the Department of Education from 2008 to 2012 and directed by former Director of Educational projects Kelly Schrum, Teachinghistory.org (initially known as the National History Education Clearinghouse) is a central online location for accessing high-quality resources in K-12 U.S. history education.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/antisemitism-u-s-a-podcast-receives-generous-support-from-the-david-bruce-smith-family-foundation/Fri, 10 May 2024 10:20:07 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/antisemitism-u-s-a-podcast-receives-generous-support-from-the-david-bruce-smith-family-foundation/<p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is excited to announce that R2 Studioshas received a $50,000 gift from the David Bruce Smith Foundation to support <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/Antisemitism-USA/"><em>Antisemitism, U.S.A.</em></a><em>,</em> our forthcoming narrative podcast series on the long, complicated history of antisemitism in the United States.</p> <p>In production since 2022, this limited series is hosted by <a href="https://www.markoppenheimer.com/">Mark Oppenheimer</a> and features contributions from over two dozen leading experts in history, religious studies, politics, and public policy to explore how antisemitism has evolved in America since the nation’s founding.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-brandan-p-buck/Wed, 08 May 2024 14:30:13 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/graduate-student-reflections-brandan-p-buck/<p>My name is Brandan P. Buck, and I am currently in my fifth year as a Ph.D. candidate in history at George Mason University and graduate research assistant at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), where I have spent four of the last five years of my Ph.D. program with Mason. In this, my final semester with the RRCHM, I thought I would share how my work here and the skills learned in the history department&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cilo wired&rdquo; series of digital history courses have afforded me invaluable skills for public-facing scholarship. Through this combination of experiences, I have learned how to work with and clean &ldquo;messy&rdquo; data, analyze it using computational and spatial methods, and present it to audiences through crisp and efficient visualizations. The skills gleaned here at RRCHMN, whether banal or advanced, have aided my dissertation project and helped me turn some of its findings into a portfolio of public-facing work for popular and scholarly audiences through my blog, opinion pieces, and several podcast appearances.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/the-mccormick-center-for-the-study-of-the-american-revolution-supports-the-production-of-worlds-turned-upside-down/Thu, 25 Apr 2024 13:04:14 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/the-mccormick-center-for-the-study-of-the-american-revolution-supports-the-production-of-worlds-turned-upside-down/<p>RRCHNM’s R2 Studios is thrilled to announce that Siena College’s <a href="https://www.siena.edu/centers-institutes/mccormick-center-for-the-study-of-the-american-revolution/">McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution</a> has generously invested $3,000 in support of our latest podcast, <em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em>.</p> <p><a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/worlds-turned-upside-down/"><em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em></a> tells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it. Just in time for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, <em>Worlds</em> expands the story of the revolution by exploring how the crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-neh-grant-in-collaboration-with-seven-local-partners-for-digitization-of-civil-war-graffiti/Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:45:50 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-neh-grant-in-collaboration-with-seven-local-partners-for-digitization-of-civil-war-graffiti/<p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with seven local partners—the Office of Historic Resources, (City of Fairfax, Virginia); the Brandy Station Foundation; the Office of Historic Preservation, (Prince William County); R.B. Toth Associates; the Manassas Museum System; NOVA Parks; and the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation—has been awarded a $350,000 grant from the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a> <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/preservation/humanities-collections-and-reference-resources">Humanities Collections and Reference Resources</a> program.</p> <p>This grant will allow for the <a href="https://rrchnm.org/news/rrchnm-receives-grant-in-collaboration-with-fairfax-citys-office-of-historic-resources-at-historic-blenheim-and-brandy-station-foundation-for-digitization-of-civil-war-graffiti/">continuation of work</a> started by RRCHNM, <a href="https://www.fairfaxva.gov/government/historic-resources/historic-blenheim">Historic Blenheim</a>, the <a href="https://www.brandystationfoundation.com/">Brandy Station Foundation</a>, and <a href="https://rbtoth.com/index.html">R.B. Toth Associates</a>. This new round of funding will support the building and publishing of a digital archive focused on soldiers’ graffiti found in Civil War-era structures located in the greater Northern Virginia region operated by our six local project partners. The digital archive will provide scholars, students, and the public access to the graffiti and a reasonably large collection of ancillary archival material associated with the graffiti.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-neh-grant-to-support-worlds-turned-upside-down-podcast/Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:45:23 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-neh-grant-to-support-worlds-turned-upside-down-podcast/<p><a href="https://r2studios.org/">R2 Studios</a> at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) is excited to announce that Jim Ambuske, Jeanette Patrick, and Mills Kelly have been awarded $272,000 from the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a> in support of our latest podcast, <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/worlds-turned-upside-down/"><em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em></a>.</p> <p><em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em> is a narrative documentary podcast series about the history of the American Revolution. The series draws on contributions from an international cast of leading experts to explore the conflict through the lives of British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples who experienced it as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/religious-ecologies-hits-digitization-milestone/Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:56:01 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/religious-ecologies-hits-digitization-milestone/<p>The 1926 Census of Religious Bodies collected more than 232,000 schedules from religious organizations across the United States. The <a href="https://religiousecologies.org/">Religious Ecologies</a> team frequently receives requests about which denominations have been uploaded to our website, specifically which denominations have all of their schedules uploaded. As we approach the halfway point of our digitization process, we are pleased to announce that we have uploaded 121 out of the total 213 denominations to our website. These 121 different denominations consist of more than 110,000 schedules and span across dozens of states. Below is a list documenting all 121 completed denominations on our website. We are excited about this milestone and look forward to the second half of the digitization process.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/the-end-of-our-hike/Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/the-end-of-our-hike/<p>Every hike has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some are short, some are long. In the case of the Appalachian Trail, one of those hikes can last less than an hour, or it can stretch almost 2,200 miles. On October 5, 2021, the team at RRCHNM&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/">R2 Studios</a> began <em>our</em> journey through the history of America’s most iconic long distance hiking trail with episode one of <em><a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/the-green-tunnel/">The Green Tunnel</a></em> <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/the-green-tunnel/">p</a><a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/the-green-tunnel/">odcast</a>. Over the past three years we’ve made more than 40 episodes of original content on this complex history and our listeners have downloaded those episodes more than 160,000 times.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/world-history-commons-adds-several-new-primary-sources/Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:44:58 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/world-history-commons-adds-several-new-primary-sources/<p><em>World History Commons</em> recently prioritized adding primary sources from lesser-covered regions and time periods to give a more thorough overview of world history for educators to pull from. As the Project Associate heading this endeavor, I focused my efforts on ancient and post-classical Oceania, North/Central America, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.</p> <p>My largest effort went to include sources for Oceania, which had the lowest overall coverage of any region. Oceania, as a small region of dispersed island nations with less written history than other areas of the world, often receives less attention in curricula seeking to cover large amounts of space and time. However, Oceania’s vibrant history and culture can easily be incorporated into larger classroom topics regarding human migration and peopling, archaeology and material culture, early architectural advancements, imperialism, and colonization history. I included visual materials about pottery and figurines, canoes, maps, and stone structures.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/apply-now-for-the-gerda-henkel-fellowship-in-digital-history/Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:55:22 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/apply-now-for-the-gerda-henkel-fellowship-in-digital-history/<p>With the generous support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at the George Mason University (RRCHNM), and the <a href="https://www.ghi-dc.org/">German Historical Institute (GHI)</a> invite applications from postdoctoral scholars and advanced doctoral students based in Europe for a 12-month fellowship in digital history</p> <p>This fellowship aims to connect scholars from Europe to digital history in the United States. The fellowship is intended to support a junior scholar working in the field of digital history or a junior scholar with less experience in digital history but interested in learning new research methods. We welcome applications from scholars who are seeking seed-funding in order to develop an innovative idea into a new project and/or funding proposal as well as from scholars who wish to pursue fully-fledged research projects.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/connect-with-rrchnm-at-aha24/Thu, 04 Jan 2024 11:00:28 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/connect-with-rrchnm-at-aha24/<p>There are a lot of great sessions coming up at this week&rsquo;s American Historical Association&rsquo;s Annual Meeting, many of which feature RRCHNM-ers. To make finding those sessions easy for you so you can easily connect with us and learn more about our current projects, we thought we&rsquo;d list them all here for you.</p> <h2 id="friday-january-5">Friday, January 5</h2> <h5 id="teaching-history-in-the-digital-age"><a href="https://aha.confex.com/aha/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/25038">Teaching History in the Digital Age</a></h5> <p>Plaza A (Lobby, Hilton Union Square), 1:30 - 3:00 pm</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/the-john-carter-brown-library-supports-the-production-of-worlds-turned-upside-down/Thu, 14 Dec 2023 10:45:06 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/the-john-carter-brown-library-supports-the-production-of-worlds-turned-upside-down/<p>RRCHNM’s R2 Studios is thrilled to announce that The <a href="https://jcblibrary.org/">John Carter Brown Library</a> (JCB) has generously invested $10,000 in support of our latest podcast, <em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em>.</p> <p><a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/worlds-turned-upside-down/"><em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em></a> tells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it. Just in time for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, <em>Worlds</em> expands the story of the revolution by exploring how the crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/remembering-angel-david-nieves/Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:05:37 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/remembering-angel-david-nieves/<h4 id="written-by-steve-brier">Written by: Steve Brier</h4> <p>It is with great sadness that the members of the Advisory Board and the staff of the RRCHNM note the sudden passing on December 5th of our colleague and RRCHNM board member, Ángel David Nieves. A distinguished and pioneering scholar in the digital humanities and the development of experimental online publishing platforms, Ángel was Dean’s Professor of Public and Digital Humanities, Professor of African American Studies and History, and Director of Public Humanities at Northeastern University. His scholarship focused on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, social justice, and technology in the United States and South Africa. He brought to that work a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches and comradely enthusiasm for collaboration. His presence will be sorely missed in all of the sites and places that he supported and improved, including RRCHNM.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/worlds-turned-upside-down-receives-funding-from-virginias-250-commission/Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/worlds-turned-upside-down-receives-funding-from-virginias-250-commission/<p>RRCHNM’s R2 Studios is thrilled to announce that the <a href="https://va250.org/">Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission</a> has generously awarded $10,000 in support of our latest podcast, <em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em>.</p> <p><a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/worlds-turned-upside-down/"><em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em></a> tells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it. Just in time for America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, <em>Worlds</em> expands the story of the revolution by exploring how the crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-launches-next-round-of-teaching-guides-for-pre-service-history-teachers/Thu, 16 Nov 2023 12:00:05 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-launches-next-round-of-teaching-guides-for-pre-service-history-teachers/<p><em>Funded by the Library of Congress, the four teaching guides support new prospective teachers teaching Indigenous history and will be available on <a href="https://teachinghistory.org/teaching-materials/teaching-guides">Teachinghistory.org</a>.</em></p> <p>RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on Indigenous history in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/">Library of Congress</a>. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers new to the profession.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/a-veterans-day-salute-to-our-valued-partnership-with-the-defense-pow-mia-accounting-agency/Sat, 11 Nov 2023 11:31:17 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/a-veterans-day-salute-to-our-valued-partnership-with-the-defense-pow-mia-accounting-agency/<p>This Veteran’s Day, we at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) would like to highlight the incredible work of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). The mission of the <a href="https://www.dpaa.mil/Our-Missing/Past-Conflicts/">DPAA</a> is to provide the fullest possible accounting for American personnel lost in foreign conflicts going back to World War II, with the ultimate goal of finding these lost personnel, completing their stories, and bringing them back to their families and loved ones, thus bringing closure to them and to the nation. Such a monumental effort requires an army of professionals working tirelessly across the globe, including administrators, military personnel, historians, archeologists, doctors, scientists, and field specialists.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/talking-to-the-dead-spiritualists-and-seances/Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:29:23 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/talking-to-the-dead-spiritualists-and-seances/<p>During my time working on the <em><a href="https://religiousecologies.org/">American Religious Ecologies</a></em> project I became focused on female ministers and other types of religious leadership that appear in the Census. This interest aligns well with my dissertation research, <a href="http://carolinegreer.com/greer-research/silent-on-slavery/">which focuses on female preachers in the nineteenth century</a> and their bodily experiences, analyzing even earlier examples of successful female religious leadership.</p> <p>One religion with a large amount of female representation in twentieth century leadership are the different denominations of Spiritualists. In studying the National Spiritual Alliance, I found that almost 40% of the preachers listed on census schedules were definitely women, compared to the 25% of men listed, seen here in the map “<a href="https://religiousecologies.org/visualizations/spiritualist-map/">Male and Female Pastors in the National Spiritual Alliance</a>” (a number of pastors only had their initials given, making it hard to know their gender). Though the importance of female leadership and representation are one of the more significant markers of the Spiritualist faith, anotherimportant facet of their faith is the belief in communicating with the dead.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/exploring-true-crime-in-early-modern-europe-in-the-classroom/Wed, 18 Oct 2023 10:34:04 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/exploring-true-crime-in-early-modern-europe-in-the-classroom/<p>This semester I’m using my expertise on crime and violence in a new way: I’m teaching an upper-level undergraduate course “True Crime in Early Modern Europe.” When we think of the true crime genre, we tend to think of documentaries, Netflix shows, Pulp Fiction, and podcasts, to name just a few popular formats. What most people don’t know, however, is that “true crime” as a genre originated in the early modern world–mostly Europe but also premodern China and the Americas. Bestsellers in the genre included pamphlets, murder ballads, and executioner’s songs which sensationalized crimes, spoke of motives, and reflected on justice.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/revolutionary-beginnings/Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:00:40 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/revolutionary-beginnings/<p>We all know how the American Revolution ends, but do we really understand its beginnings?</p> <p>In the mid-1750s, far from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or Charleston, and farther still from London, Paris, or Madrid, the choices made by British settlers, French colonists, and Indigenous peoples in a place they knew as the Ohio Country sparked a global war with revolutionary implications.</p> <p>Nothing about their actions was inevitable, nor could they have known of what was to come.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-otis-receives-neh-funding-to-develop-and-host-summer-institute-on-dh-methods/Thu, 07 Sep 2023 12:00:16 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-otis-receives-neh-funding-to-develop-and-host-summer-institute-on-dh-methods/<p>Jessica Otis of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (<a href="https://rrchnm.org/">RRCHNM</a>) in collaboration with <a href="https://dh.ucla.edu/person/ashley-sanders/">Ashley Sanders</a> of UCLA, have been awarded funding as part of the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>’ <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/institutes-advanced-topics-in-the-digital-humanities">Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities</a> program. This grant will facilitate an institute that will guide participants through fundamental mathematical concepts that underpin common Digital Humanities (DH) methods.</p> <p><em>The Mathematical Humanists</em> will include a series of in-person, online, and asynchronous professional development workshops to be hosted by <a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/">George Mason University</a> and the <a href="https://dh.ucla.edu/">University of California, Los Angeles</a>, on statistics, graphs and networks, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics methods that inform computational humanities methodologies such as network analysis, and text mining and analysis.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/nate-sleeter-and-kelly-schrum-receive-neh-funding-to-host-summer-faculty-institute/Wed, 06 Sep 2023 12:08:19 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/nate-sleeter-and-kelly-schrum-receive-neh-funding-to-host-summer-faculty-institute/<p>Dr. Nate Sleeter, of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (<a href="https://rrchnm.org/">RRCHNM</a>), and Dr. Kelly Schrum, of the <a href="https://highered.gmu.edu/">Higher Education Program</a> (HEP), at <a href="https://www.gmu.edu/">George Mason University</a> have been awarded funding as part of the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>’ <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/education/institutes-higher-education-faculty">Institutes for Higher Education Faculty</a> program. This grant will facilitate an institute on the history of higher education, which is central to understanding higher education’s present and future, especially for students in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs who will lead our colleges and universities for decades to come.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/amanda-madden-receives-neh-funding-to-create-a-digital-edition-of-goro-datis-sfera/Tue, 05 Sep 2023 12:08:10 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/amanda-madden-receives-neh-funding-to-create-a-digital-edition-of-goro-datis-sfera/<p><a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/amadden8">Amanda Madden</a> of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (<a href="https://rrchnm.org/">RRCHNM</a>), in collaboration with <a href="https://www.ncf.edu/directory/carrie-e-benes/">Carrie Beneš</a> of New College of Florida, <a href="https://www.italianstudies.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/laura-ingallinella">Laura Ingallinella</a> of the University of Toronto, and independent scholar <a href="https://middleagesforeducators.princeton.edu/people/laura-morreale">Laura Morreale</a>, have been awarded a major grant as part of the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>’ <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/research/scholarly-editions-and-translations-grants">Scholarly Editions and Translations program</a>. This grant will facilitate collaboration among a team of scholars to complete the<a href="https://sites.google.com/ncf.edu/sfera-project/home"><em>La Sfera</em> Project</a>, an open-access multimedia edition of Goro Dati’s fifteenth-century poem <em>La sfera</em> (<em>The Globe</em>).</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/nate-sleeter-becomes-rrchnms-director-of-educational-projects/Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:04:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/nate-sleeter-becomes-rrchnms-director-of-educational-projects/<p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that <a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/nsleete1">Dr. Nate Sleeter</a> has become our new Director of Educational Projects. The K–12 and college educational resources that RRCHNM makes freely available to teachers, students, and parents regularly receive millions of visits per year, and they are used in the curricula of schools from Virginia to California.</p> <p>Nate has for several years been RRCHNM’s primary specialist in creating educational resources. His new role as Director of Educational Projects reflects both the results he has achieved in creating educational materials at RRCHNM for more than a decade, and the renewed emphasis that RRCHNM is making on history education in schools.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-past-present-and-future/Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:16:40 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-past-present-and-future/<p>The first time that I came across the name Roy Rosenzweig was in the textbook for a class titled simply, “Historiography.” The book discussed Rosenzweig’s 1983 book, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/american-history-general-interest/eight-hours-what-we-will-workers-and-leisure-industrial-city-18701920"><em>Eight Hours for What We Will</em></a>, as a key work in American labor history. Since <em>Eight Hours</em> is a history of workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, just thirty miles from where I grew up, I went to the library and checked out the book. As I read, I was captivated by how Rosenzweig had captured the lives and labors of working-class people.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/passing-the-baton/Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:00:24 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/passing-the-baton/<p>At the 2001 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Roy Rosenzweig dumped a cup of coffee on me. He didn’t mean to, of course, but he did.</p> <p>It happened in the days when search committees often interviewed job candidates in hotel rooms and I was there to interview for a job at George Mason University. Roy and I had spoken on the phone about the position prior to my interview and, not knowing Roy, I’d been a bit intimidated during that call. I had read several of his books and articles in graduate school and he was <em>the guy</em> when it came to digital history.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-additional-funding-to-create-more-teaching-guides/Thu, 27 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-additional-funding-to-create-more-teaching-guides/<h4 id="library-of-congress-funding-for-these-teaching-guides-builds-upon-earlier-work-that-supports-new-prospective-teachers-as-they-teach-difficult-subjects-in-history">Library of Congress funding for these teaching guides builds upon earlier work that supports new prospective teachers as they teach difficult subjects in history.</h4> <p>RRCHNM is proud to announce funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/">Library of Congress</a> for 2023-24. With these funds we will create four more teaching guides for pre-service teachers on difficult to teach topics. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history — with a focus on topics that can be especially challenging for teachers who are new to the profession. The guides provide activities where students engage with primary sources and model historians&rsquo; approach of understanding people in the past through the evidence they left behind. They also contain guidance for incorporating these activities into a typical history curriculum.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-to-host-dh2024-conference/Fri, 14 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-to-host-dh2024-conference/<p>We are thrilled that in just about a year from now, RRCHNM and the <a href="https://adho.org/">Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations</a> (ADHO) will be bringing DH2024 to Washington, D.C.!</p> <p>The annual ADHO Digital Humanities Conference is the central and largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe, presenting them with a unique opportunity for the exchange of their work and ideas and the fostering of future collaborations. In 2024, approximately 1,000 people from around the globe are expected to attend DH2024 from August 6 - 9. This will be the first time the conference has been held in the United States in a decade.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/collaboration-with-nmaahc-and-hbcu-partners-moves-into-beta-testing-mode/Fri, 30 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/collaboration-with-nmaahc-and-hbcu-partners-moves-into-beta-testing-mode/<p>A team from RRCHNM spent three days in Atlanta in June conducting an Omeka S training workshop for the five HBCU partner institutions in the <a href="https://hcac.rrchnm.org/">HBCU History Culture and Access Consortium</a> sponsored by the Office of Strategic Partnerships at the National Museum for African American History and Culture. Our PhD students Timmia King (below, left) and Amber Pelham (below, right) worked closely with project teams from the five HBCUs in the project – Jackson State University, Tuskegee University, Clark Atlanta University, Texas Southern University, and Florida A&amp;M University – as the project moves from the <a href="https://rrchnm.org/news/rrchnm-kicks-off-collaboration-with-nmaahc-and-hbcu-partners/">initial training phase</a> into beta testing mode. Timmia and Amber designed the training workshop themselves and executed it with great skill. During the second day of the convening our team and the HBCU partners spent some time thinking through the critical metadata issues involved in such a complex multi-institutional public history project. Over the coming year the HBCU partners will populate the database with items from their incredibly rich collections and designers from the Smithsonian will develop the front end experience for website visitors.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/your-most-obedient-and-humble-servant-joins-the-r2-studios-network/Mon, 15 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/your-most-obedient-and-humble-servant-joins-the-r2-studios-network/<h4 id="this-post-is-cross-posted-on-r2studiosorg-with-further-details-about-the-announcement">This post is cross-posted on <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/blog/your-most-obedient-humble-servant-joins-the-r2-studios-network/">r2studios.org</a> with further details about the announcement.</h4> <p>RRCHNM&rsquo;s R2 Studios and historian Kathryn Gehred are excited to announce a new partnership that will bring the highly-rated podcast series <em>Your Most Obedient &amp; Humble Servant</em> to the R2 Studios network.</p> <p><em>Your Most Obedient &amp; Humble Servant</em> is a women’s history podcast that showcases 18th and early 19th-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. Using her training as a historian and documentary editor, Gehred and her guests dig into the story behind each letter and the lives of the women who wrote or received them.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-religious-ecologies-receives-second-neh-grant-to-work-with-1926-census-of-religious-bodies/Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:06:35 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-religious-ecologies-receives-second-neh-grant-to-work-with-1926-census-of-religious-bodies/<p>We are grateful to acknowledge a second NEH grant in support of our <em><a href="https://religiousecologies.org">American Religious Ecologies</a></em> project. The National Endowment for the Humanities <a href="https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-3563-million-258-humanities-projects-nationwide">announced this week</a> that RRCHNM will receive a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant for $350,000 to continue our work with the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies for the next three years. This new grant follow on our previous award, also from the HCRR program in the NEH&rsquo;s Division of Preservation and Access, which was received in 2019.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/tropy-1-13-release/Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/tropy-1-13-release/<p>The Tropy team is pleased to announce the release of <a href="http://tropy.org">Tropy 1.13</a>. In addition to several performance and user interface improvements (see <a href="https://github.com/tropy/tropy/releases/tag/v1.13.0">full release notes here</a>), this release introduces the new standard project type. In standard projects, all imported images are copied into a bundled project folder, which can be moved around freely or shared with other devices without having to consolidate photos. Users can opt to continue working with the previous project type, which is now called an “advanced” project. Users may also convert their projects into standard projects if they wish. For more details, see the latest <a href="https://tropy.org/blog/new-project-types-in-tropy-1-13">Tropy blog post</a>.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/leadership-gift-from-digital-scholar-kicks-off-30th-anniversary-campaign/Thu, 30 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/leadership-gift-from-digital-scholar-kicks-off-30th-anniversary-campaign/<p>We are very pleased to announce the lead gift for our 30th anniversary Campaign for RRCHNM. Our friends and former colleagues at <a href="https://digitalscholar.org/">Digital Scholar</a> have made an incredibly generous gift to our Center &ndash; $15,000. This first major gift helps us launch the Campaign for RRCHNM with a bang and is a great step forward in our efforts to raise funds to help us continue to provide the best possible digital historical projects, to give our students amazing educational opportunities, and to make high quality educational resources related to history available to all. Everyone here extends our thanks for this very generous gift.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/announcing-death-by-numbers-beta/Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/announcing-death-by-numbers-beta/<p>RRCHNM is excited to announce the formal beta launch of the <a href="https://deathbynumbers.org/">Death by Numbers database</a>. There’s over a year left to go in the project and we’re still hard at work adding data to the database and building our first visualizations, so don’t be surprised at how large some of the gaps are in the dataset. But we wanted to go public and give our audience a chance to provide feedback on what we’ve created so far.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/production-now-underway-for-worlds-turned-upside/Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/production-now-underway-for-worlds-turned-upside/<h4 id="this-post-is-cross-posted-on-r2studiosorg-with-further-details-about-the-announcement">This post is cross-posted on <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/blog/production-now-underway-for-worlds-turned-upside-down/">r2studios.org</a> with further details about the announcement.</h4> <p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/">R2 Studios</a> are excited to announce that production is underway for <em>Worlds Turned Upside Down</em>. This new podcast seriestells the story of the American Revolution as a transatlantic crisis and imperial civil war through the lives of people who experienced it.</p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="Worlds-Turned-Upside-Down_small.png" alt="Podcast cover art for Worlds Turned Upside Down, featuring show name and R2 Studios logo over an image of the revolutionary war that depicts a skirmish in town, British soldiers waving the union jack and colonists - men, women, and children - fleeing and fighting." loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="Worlds-Turned-Upside-Down_small.png" alt="Podcast cover art for Worlds Turned Upside Down, featuring show name and R2 Studios logo over an image of the revolutionary war that depicts a skirmish in town, British soldiers waving the union jack and colonists - men, women, and children - fleeing and fighting." class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> <p>For many modern citizens of the United States, “the cause of America” that gave birth to a new nation in 1776 and the heroic stories we tell ourselves about its founding remains “in great measure the cause of all mankind.” But for the people who lived through it, the revolutionary era upended their lives in ways they could never have imagined. The crisis that engulfed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century inspired British Americans, Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Europeans, and other peoples to question their loyalties, challenge authority, seek freedom, and resist revolutionary change.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/schedule-for-the-rrchnm-data-working-group-spring-2023/Tue, 14 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/schedule-for-the-rrchnm-data-working-group-spring-2023/<p>The RRCHNM data working group meets every other week each semester. The working group exists to aid and abet one another as we seek to create data-driven histories. In our sessions, we share work-in-progress, discuss readings, and teach one another the techniques of the trade. Each semester we create the schedule collaboratively. Here is our schedule for spring semester, 2023.</p> <ul> <li>1 February 2023: Check-in and planning</li> <li>15 February 2023: Discussion of readings</li> <li>1 March 2023: Text analysis techniques</li> <li>29 March 2023: Notebook computing</li> <li>12 April 2023: Creating and consuming data APIs</li> <li>26 April 2023: Data visualization challenge</li> </ul> <p>New this semester is our data visualization challenge. Participants in the group will all work on the same dataset (to be determined) and create a data visualization.  We will then compare results to see how different people approached the problem. There won’t be a single winner: instead, we will give out yearbook-style superlatives (“most likely to succeed,” “quirkiest,” “most likely to work in finance” and so on).</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-grant-in-collaboration-with-fairfax-citys-office-of-historic-resources-at-historic-blenheim-and-brandy-station-foundation-for-digitization-of-civil-war-graffiti/Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-grant-in-collaboration-with-fairfax-citys-office-of-historic-resources-at-historic-blenheim-and-brandy-station-foundation-for-digitization-of-civil-war-graffiti/<p>The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), in collaboration with Historic Blenheim and the Civil War Interpretive Center (Fairfax City, VA) and the Brandy Station Foundation (Brandy Station, VA), has been awarded a $60,000 grant from the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">National Endowment for the Humanities</a>’ Division for Preservation and Access, <a href="https://www.neh.gov/grants/preservation/humanities-collections-and-reference-resources">Humanities Collections and Reference Resources</a>.</p> <p>This planning grant will facilitate collaboration between the three partners for the planning of a digitization project focused on Civil War graffiti found in Civil War buildings located in Virginia and elsewhere. The grant will also facilitate the development of collaborative workflows between the three organizations and digital preservation professionals.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-at-the-aha/Tue, 31 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-at-the-aha/<p>The first week of January 2023 was quite a week for the team at RRCHNM. Close to twenty of us were at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, presenting papers, taking part in round tables, and showing off work at poster sessions. Our fantastic graduate students made up a significant share of all the research posters presented at the conference.</p> <p>If you know RRCHNM, you <em>probably</em> know us as a research center creating new approaches to digital history. But our mission is also to build the future of our field by providing students a wide variety of opportunities to grow as historians. And it’s because education is so central to our mission that we were so excited to see how many of our students were on the program at the conference this year.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/basics-of-tropy/Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/basics-of-tropy/<p>Each semester, RRCHNM hosts a series of &ldquo;Basics Of&rdquo; sessions that teach the basics of an application, process, or methodology so our graduate students, affiliates, and faculty can get together and learn about that topic. These sessions are hosted by RRCHNM members who are resident experts on the selected topic.</p> <p>This semester, our first session will be &ldquo;Basics of Tropy&rdquo; with Postdoctoral Research Fellow Douglas McRae. Read on to learn more about this session happening on Tuesday, January 31, 2023, from 1-2pm EST.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/remembering-paula-petrik/Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/remembering-paula-petrik/<p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="Petrik_Paula-1-150x150.jpg" alt="Black and white headshot of Paula Petrik." loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="Petrik_Paula-1-150x150.jpg" alt="Black and white headshot of Paula Petrik." class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> Today we share the sad news that Professor Paula Petrik, our former colleague here at RRCHNM, has passed away at the age of 74 at her home in Montana.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/connect-with-rrchnm-at-aha23/Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/connect-with-rrchnm-at-aha23/<p>There are a lot of great sessions coming up at this week&rsquo;s American Historical Association&rsquo;s Annual Meeting, many of which feature RRCHNM-ers. To make finding those sessions easy for you so you can easily connect with us and learn more about our current projects, we thought we&rsquo;d list them all here for you.</p> <h2 id="friday-january-6">Friday, January 6</h2> <h5 id="doing-accessible-digital-history"><a href="https://aha.confex.com/aha/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/23546">Doing Accessible Digital History</a></h5> <p>Philadelphia Marriot Downtown - Grand Ballroom Salon K, 10:30 am - 12 pm,</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/how-philip-lampi-recovered-the-lost-history-of-early-american-elections/Tue, 08 Nov 2022 13:07:19 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/how-philip-lampi-recovered-the-lost-history-of-early-american-elections/<p>As Americans go to the polls to vote in today’s midterm Congressional elections, they will be able to watch results flow practically in real time. By the end of the day, the data for the election returns will be more or less available. For much of United States history, of course, information flowed more slowly. But even still, we can take it for granted that there are regular records of elections, and that it is straightforward to find out who won.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/r2-studios-launches-season-2-of-the-green-tunnel-podcast/Tue, 04 Oct 2022 13:30:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/r2-studios-launches-season-2-of-the-green-tunnel-podcast/<p>Season Two of <em><a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/the-green-tunnel/">The Green Tunnel</a></em> podcast, produced here at <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/">R2 Studios</a>, launched today. In this season we will be focused on the larger question of who the Appalachian Trail is for and will come at that question from a variety of directions. When <a href="https://www.r2studios.org/show/the-green-tunnel/founding-the-trail/">Benton MacKaye first proposed the trail</a> in 1921, he wanted it to be a place for working class people to get away for a few hours or a few days, to get some fresh air, and to experience the healing power of time under the trees. Today’s trail, visited by millions of people each year, is a complex place with overlapping audiences and identities. MacKaye likely would have been very surprised to see the diversity in the hiking population—diversity that cuts as many ways as you can count.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/introducing-datascribe-101/Wed, 21 Sep 2022 12:30:36 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/introducing-datascribe-101/<h4 id="fall-workshops-hosted-by-the-datascribe-project-team-will-further-support-user-exploration-of-datascribe-101s-capabilities">Fall workshops hosted by the DataScribe project team will further support user exploration of DataScribe 101&rsquo;s capabilities.</h4> <p>Earlier this year, RRCHNM released <a href="https://datascribe.tech/">DataScribe</a>, a structured transcription module for the <a href="https://omeka.org/s/">Omeka S platform</a>. This module enables scholars to identify the structure of the data within their sources, speed up the transcription of their sources, and reliably structure their transcriptions in a form amenable to computational analysis. Scholars can turn sources into tables of data stored as numbers, dates, categories, and more.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/r2-studios-receives-grant-for-podcast-on-history-of-american-antisemitism/Thu, 15 Sep 2022 10:30:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/r2-studios-receives-grant-for-podcast-on-history-of-american-antisemitism/<p><a href="https://r2studios.org/">R2 Studios</a> and The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) are excited to announce that Jeanette Patrick, John Turner, and Lincoln Mullen have been awarded $50,000 from the <a href="https://www.hluce.org/">Henry Luce Foundation</a> to begin work on a podcast exploring the history of American antisemitism.</p> <p>RRCHNM’s R2 Studios, led by Patrick, will produce the project, which will be written by Turner and Mullen, both historians of American religion. Zev Eleff, president of Gratz College and a leading historian of American Judaism, is collaborating with the RRCHNM team on this project.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-interpretive-essays-added-to-collecting-these-times/Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:00:40 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-interpretive-essays-added-to-collecting-these-times/<p><em><a href="https://collectingthesetimes.org/s/collecting-these-times/page/home">Collecting These Times</a></em> (CTT), funded by <a href="https://www.schusterman.org/">Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies</a>, <a href="https://jimjosephfoundation.org/">Jim Joseph Foundation</a>, <a href="https://lkflt.org/">Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah</a>, and <a href="https://www.russellberriefoundation.org/">The Russell Berrie Foundation</a>, documents the many ways that diverse communities of American Jews have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.</p> <p>The core of CTT is a portal that connects users to the many archives, libraries, and other institutions around the country that collected digital and physical materials about the Jewish experience of and response to the pandemic. CTT also displays materials collected by RRCHNM and its many partners in this effort.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-launches-new-teaching-guides-for-pre-service-history-teachers/Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-launches-new-teaching-guides-for-pre-service-history-teachers/<h4 id="funded-by-the-library-of-congress-the-four-teaching-guides-will-support-new-prospective-teachers-teaching-the-history-of-religion-and-will-be-available-on-teachinghistoryorg">Funded by the Library of Congress, the four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching the history of religion and will be available on <a href="https://teachinghistory.org/teaching-materials/teaching-guides">Teachinghistory.org</a>.</h4> <p>RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on the history of religion in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/">Library of Congress</a>. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers who are new to the profession.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-welcomes-25-graduate-students-for-the-new-academic-year/Fri, 26 Aug 2022 14:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-welcomes-25-graduate-students-for-the-new-academic-year/<p>The start of the academic year at RRCHNM also means the return of many of our graduate students. This week RRCHNM welcomed <a href="https://rrchnm.org/our-people/">twenty-five graduate research assistants or graduate affiliates</a>.</p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="First-Day-Fall-2022-scaled.jpg" alt="" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <figcaption class="mt-2 px-1 text-sm text-stone-500"> RRCHNM on the first day of classes. </figcaption> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="First-Day-Fall-2022-scaled.jpg" alt="" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> <p class="mt-3 text-sm text-white/80 text-center max-w-2xl">RRCHNM on the first day of classes.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-kicks-off-collaboration-with-nmaahc-and-hbcu-partners/Wed, 17 Aug 2022 11:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-kicks-off-collaboration-with-nmaahc-and-hbcu-partners/<p>This year the team at RRCHNM began a unique collaboration with the <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/">National Museum of African American History and Culture</a> (NMAAHC) and five HBCU partners. The <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/connect/strategic-partnerships/hbcu-history-and-culture-access-consortium">HBCU History, Culture, and Access Consortium</a> (HCAC) brings together NMAAHC and the archives of <a href="https://www.tuskegee.edu/libraries/archives">Tuskegee University</a>, the <a href="https://www.jsums.edu/margaretwalkercenter/">Margaret Walker Center</a> at Jackson State University, the <a href="https://www.famu.edu/academics/libraries/mark-eaton-black-archives-research-center-and-museum/index.php">Meek-Eaton Black Archives Research Center &amp; Museum</a> at Florida A&amp;M University, the <a href="http://www.tsu.edu/academics/colleges-and-schools/colabs/vpa/museum.html">University Museum</a> at Texas Southern University, and the <a href="https://www.cau.edu/art-museum/index.html">University Art Museum</a> at Clark Atlanta University.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-partners-with-winterthur-museum-to-present-pennsylvania-illuminated-manuscript/Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-partners-with-winterthur-museum-to-present-pennsylvania-illuminated-manuscript/<p>RRCHNM is happy to announce a partnership with the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library to present the history of a fascinating and unique eighteenth-century American manuscript.</p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="2020-0011_19.jpg" alt="Aerial view of the Ludwig Dening Manuscript, opened and laid flat on a table. Left page includes text in German that has been handwritten in brown, blue, and red ink on the page. Pages are centuries old and show natural yellowing, but the text remains legible. Right page depicts a drawing of the passage on the left, which features Jesus and his followers, walking ahead and through some hills. Image is in full color, including green hills, trees, and a blue river. Each person is in varied colored robes including blue, yellow, and red." loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="2020-0011_19.jpg" alt="Aerial view of the Ludwig Dening Manuscript, opened and laid flat on a table. Left page includes text in German that has been handwritten in brown, blue, and red ink on the page. Pages are centuries old and show natural yellowing, but the text remains legible. Right page depicts a drawing of the passage on the left, which features Jesus and his followers, walking ahead and through some hills. Image is in full color, including green hills, trees, and a blue river. Each person is in varied colored robes including blue, yellow, and red." class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> <p>Ludwig Denig Manuscript, 2021.0011, Winterthur Museum, Garden &amp; Library, Gift of Alessantrina and David Schwartz, and the Schwartz Foundation. Photograph, Courtesy of Winterthur Museum.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnms-custom-api-for-data-driven-projects/Wed, 06 Apr 2022 17:25:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnms-custom-api-for-data-driven-projects/<p>RRCHNM is a shop that is more and more working on computational history and historical data visualization. But we are also first and foremost a web shop: ever since Roy Rosenzweig saw the potential of the internet and left CD ROMs behind, we’ve been committed to delivering history via people’s web browsers. Those two commitments are becoming increasingly compatible. For example, Ben Schmidt has written persuasively about the next decade of data programming <a href="https://benschmidt.org/post/2020-01-15/2020-01-15-webgpu/">happening in the browser via JavaScript</a>. But combining data analysis and the web takes work. In this blog post, I want to explain how we are solving one aspect of that challenge via our custom data API.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/what-came-before/Wed, 27 Oct 2021 09:20:23 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/what-came-before/<p>Episode 2 of <a href="https://podcasts.rrchnm.org/show/the-green-tunnel/">The Green Tunnel podcast</a> launched today. In this episode we tell the story of the settler communities that existed along the route of the Appalachian Trail before the AT arrived. We’ve chosen three examples of those communities, each of which helps tell the story of life in the Appalachian mountains before Benton MacKaye dreamed up the AT in 1921. One community was home to people recently emancipated from enslavement, another was a thriving coal mining and railroad town until the mines played out, and the people of the third community had to rally their friends and neighbors to try to find a little boy who had wandered away from his schoolhouse in 1891. What was life like in the Appalachian mountains before the trail? Listen to our episode to learn more.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-grant-from-library-of-congress-to-create-teaching-resources-for-pre-service-teachers/Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:13:09 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-grant-from-library-of-congress-to-create-teaching-resources-for-pre-service-teachers/<p>RRCHNM is excited to announce a new grant award from the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/programs/teachers/about-this-program/">Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources</a> program. As part of the grant, RRCHNM will develop teaching resources on difficult to teach topics with a focus on teaching the history of religion in the United States in K-12 schools. Teachers, especially if they are new to the profession, are often reticent to approach topics that might potentially be controversial or give rise emotional reactions. As a result, important themes for understanding history can receive less attention than they deserve in K-12 education.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/remembering-the-creation-of-the-september-11-digital-archive/Fri, 10 Sep 2021 13:49:13 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/remembering-the-creation-of-the-september-11-digital-archive/<p>Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the team here at the Center for History and New Media, in collaboration with our partners at the <a href="https://ashp.cuny.edu/">American Social History Project</a> at CUNY, began building a new kind of digital archive, one that would be open to all contributions from anyone who wanted to contribute a memory, a photograph, an email, or whatever they wanted preserved. With the support of the <a href="https://sloan.org/">Alfred P. Sloan Foundation</a>, we were able to assemble a team of collaborators committed to collecting and preserving the history of that terrible day. What began as a crazy idea turned into a project that now houses 72,000 personal stories, more than 6,000 images, and more than 900 audio and video files. The <a href="https://911digitalarchive.org/">September 11 Digital Archive</a> is truly one of the richest collections related to the history of the events surrounding the events of that day and their aftermath.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/models-of-argument-driven-digital-history/Tue, 07 Sep 2021 06:00:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/models-of-argument-driven-digital-history/<p>The <em>Models of Argument-Driven Digital History</em> website launched today: <a href="https://model-articles.rrchnm.org/">find it here</a>. It contains a set of published journal articles annotated by their authors to highlight the use of digital methods to make historical arguments. The site is part of a larger project on which I have been collaborating with Lincoln Mullen since 2017, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to encourage argument-driven digital history as a form of digital scholarship.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/transcribing-structured-data-with-the-datascribe-module-for-omeka-s/Fri, 06 Aug 2021 10:10:56 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/transcribing-structured-data-with-the-datascribe-module-for-omeka-s/<p>by Janet Hammond</p> <p>DataScribe is an Omeka S module that helps ease laboriously detailed transcription work. Created at RRCHNM and funded by the <a href="https://www.neh.gov/">NEH</a>, this module allows users to complete a two-step process. The <strong>first</strong>is to craft transcription forms for structured data, which is particularly useful when transcribing historical forms and other highly structured documents. (<a href="https://religiousecologies.org/blog/deploying-datascribe-to-create-a-new-dataset-for-american-religious-history/">Greta Swain’s write up</a> on <em>American Religious Ecologies</em>’ bloggoes into detail about this process.) <strong>Then</strong>, professionals can use these forms to transcribe data into a format amenable to computational analysis, combining the data creation and data cleaning steps of a project into a single process. This blog post focuses on the second step.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-otis-receives-major-nsf-grant/Fri, 30 Jul 2021 15:07:13 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-otis-receives-major-nsf-grant/<p>RRCHNM Professor and Director of Public Projects <a href="https://rrchnm.org/author/jessica-otis/">Jessica Otis</a> has been awarded $443,425 from the NSF to support her digital work on the history of the plague in early modern London. The project, called &ldquo;Assessing the Arithmetic of Early Modern London&rsquo;s Bills of Mortality,” involves the creation, publication and computational analysis of a dataset of weekly and annual mortality statistics produced for the city of London between 1603 and 1752.</p> <p>Plague was one of the most dreaded diseases in early modern England. The city of London alone lost an estimated 225,000 people to plague in the century between 1563 and 1665. As an extension of government attempts to track plague deaths during outbreaks, London officials started publicly distributing a weekly series of mortality statistics called the Bills of Mortality at the turn of the seventeenth century. Jessica&rsquo;s project uses the Bills of Mortality to investigate how lived experiences of plague outbreaks intersected with an emerging quantitative mentality among the people of early modern England. It examines how ordinary people aggregated, transformed, and interpreted death counts in order to draw conclusions about changes in the early modern use of and trust in numbers over time. In doing so, the project investigates contemporary perceptions of numbers and historicizes a quantitative method of knowledge generation that has become central to twenty-first-century understandings of the world.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-digital-military-history-postdoctoral-fellowship/Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:44:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-digital-military-history-postdoctoral-fellowship/<p>We are pleased to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will be collaborating with the <a href="https://www.dpaa.mil/">Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency</a> (DPAA) to host a new postdoctoral fellowship in digital military history here at our center. The DPAA is the Defense Department agency charged with providing the fullest possible accounting for America&rsquo;s missing military personnel to their families and the nation. Researchers and scientists from DPAA travel to wherever American military personnel have died or gone missing in order to provide accurate and timely information to the families of those who remain unaccounted for. Funding for this three-year fellowship will allow an emerging scholar to work directly with DPAA staff and scientists on a variety of digital military history projects that further the agency&rsquo;s mission.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-mack-receives-grant-for-project-on-universities-and-power/Thu, 29 Jul 2021 15:33:29 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-mack-receives-grant-for-project-on-universities-and-power/<p>Our postdoctoral fellow, <a href="https://rrchnm.org/author/jmack9/">Dr. Jessica Mack</a>, has received funding from the <a href="https://4-va.org/">4VA consortium</a> for her digital project <em>Mapping the University: A Digital Resource for Studying Virginia Campus Histories</em>. Her project is an interdisciplinary, collaborative research project that will analyze the histories of Virginia campuses using university archives, digital mapping, and aerial photographs.</p> <p><em>Mapping the University</em> is a timely inquiry into the planning, construction and expansion of the campus at George Mason and <a href="http://www.odu.edu">Old Dominion University</a>. In a collaborative effort that will prioritize building undergraduate and graduate research skills, students at the two universities will work with university archivists, historians, and digital scholars to better understand student life on campus, academic priorities, historical exclusions, and town-gown relations, and to contextualize recent discussions about building naming, monuments and memorialization on campus. In collaboration with Mason’s <a href="http://scrc.gmu.edu/about.php">Special Collections Research Center</a> at Fenwick Library, RRCHNM, the <a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/">Department of History and Art History</a>, the <a href="https://science.gmu.edu/academics/departments-units/geography-geoinformation-science">Geography and Geoinformation Science Department</a>, and colleagues at ODU, the project will provide training for students in archival research methods, digital history tools, and spatial analysis of materials such as maps, architectural plans, and aerial photographs. The result will be an open access, interactive website that will provide access to digitized archival documents alongside digital maps and interpretive content.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/lincoln-mullen-selected-for-library-of-congress-initiative/Tue, 06 Jul 2021 11:27:15 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/lincoln-mullen-selected-for-library-of-congress-initiative/<p>Professor Lincoln Mullen, Director of Computational History at RRCHNM, will join two other digital humanists at the Library of Congress as fellows working on the <a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2021/06/lc-labs-welcomes-computing-cultural-heritage-in-the-cloud-cchc-researchers/">Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud</a> initiative. Mullen will use this opportunity to extend the work he has done in his award-winning <em><a href="https://americaspublicbible.org/">America&rsquo;s Public Bible</a></em> project and will be applying lessons from that project to a wide range of digital collections at the Library. The CCHC initiative is a first foray by the Library into using AI tools to transform access to knowledge and we are very proud of our colleague for being selected for this prestigious fellowship.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/mills-kelly-honored-by-johannes-gutenberg-university-mainz-for-teaching-excellence/Wed, 30 Jun 2021 13:22:29 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/mills-kelly-honored-by-johannes-gutenberg-university-mainz-for-teaching-excellence/<p>Mills Kelly, the executive director of RRCHNM and a leading expert on the scholarship of teaching and learning for history, has been an <a href="https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2021/06/18/mills-kelly-traeger-des-gutenberg-teaching-awards-besucht-die-jgu/">honored guest</a> at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz the past two weeks. Kelly has been in residence at the university, and has been honored in a ceremony signing the university&rsquo;s Golden Book. The reception celebrated Kelly&rsquo;s previous receipt of the Gutenberg Teaching Award, which was rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/congratulations-to-dr-janelle-legg/Wed, 05 May 2021 10:35:38 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/congratulations-to-dr-janelle-legg/<p>Here at RRCHNM we are very proud of our former graduate research assistant and recent Mason PhD, Dr. Jannelle Legg who has just accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities at Gallaudet University where she will also be part of the team and the <a href="https://www.gallaudet.edu/drs-john-s-and-betty-j-schuchman-deaf-documentary-center/">Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center</a> beginning this fall. Jannelle, who defended her excellent dissertation last month, is an expert on the intersection of deaf history and digital humanities and we are looking forward to having her back in the greater DC area. Congratulations Jannelle!</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/come-work-with-us/Fri, 23 Apr 2021 13:37:31 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/come-work-with-us/<p>We are pleased to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is collaborating with the <a href="https://www.dpaa.mil/">Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency</a> (DPAA) to host a new postdoctoral fellowship in digital military history here at our center. The DPAA is the Defense Department agency charged with providing the fullest possible accounting for America&rsquo;s missing military personnel to their families and the nation. Researchers and scientists from DPAA travel to wherever American military personnel have died or gone missing in order to provide accurate and timely information to the families of those who remain unaccounted for. Funding for this fellowship, which may be renewed, will allow an emerging scholar to work directly with DPAA staff and scientists on a variety of digital military history projects that further the agency&rsquo;s mission.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/nmaahc-hbcu-access-consortium/Tue, 23 Mar 2021 14:56:06 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/nmaahc-hbcu-access-consortium/<p>We are very proud to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will be playing a lead role in the <em>HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium</em> announced today. The Consortium brings together the <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/">National Museum of African American History and Culture</a> and five Historically Black Colleges and Universities with the goal of making public the riches of the special collections and archives at these five institutions: Tuskegee University, Clark Atlanta University, Jackson State University, Florida A&amp;M University, Texas Southern University.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/material-histories-of-the-indian-ocean-world-1500-present/Thu, 18 Mar 2021 12:18:22 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/material-histories-of-the-indian-ocean-world-1500-present/<p>Join RRCHNM for an exciting new series, organized and hosted by Dr. Deepthi Murali, on &ldquo;<a href="https://iowmaterialhistorieswebinar.org/s/Material-Histories/page/home">Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present</a>.&rdquo;</p> <p>The<em>Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World</em>webinar brings together scholars from different disciplines that work primarily on the study of artistic materials produced, circulated, and used in and through the Indian Ocean World (IOW) post the advent of European mercantile powers in this part of the world. This webinar seeks to look at the study of transcultural and transoceanic objects, architecture, and material culture through an interdisciplinary perspective. Using their expertise in different types of materials, regions, and methdological questions related to the IOW, participants will discuss their own research experiences and methdological approaches while also providing insight into the challenges of such research. The series runs from March 24, 2021 - April 22, 2021.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-neh-chairmans-grant/Mon, 15 Mar 2021 11:26:29 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-receives-neh-chairmans-grant/<p>We are pleased to announce that RRCHNM has received an National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman&rsquo;s Grant. Funding from this grant will help us assist Dr. <a href="https://digitalpedagogylab.com/jewon-woo/">Jewon Woo</a>, Associate Professor of English at Lorain Community College (Ohio), with her digital project on the 19th-century Black press in Ohio. Her project, which is also supported by the NEH, is titled, &ldquo;Rhizomatic Democracy in the Nineteenth-Century Black Press of Ohio.&rdquo; Professor Woo will be using digital humanities tools to illuminate the distinctively collaborative editorship of these newspapers and through that research will help us better understand the complexity of 19th century African American communal life. We are pleased to be collaborating with Professor Woo on this exciting project and are very grateful to the NEH for making that collaboration possible.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/releasing-a-web-monetization-module-for-omeka-s/Tue, 09 Mar 2021 17:40:26 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/releasing-a-web-monetization-module-for-omeka-s/<p>Today RRCHNM is announcing the release of a <a href="https://github.com/chnm/WebMonetization-module">module for Omeka S</a> that will allow cultural heritage institutions to enable Web Monetization on their digital collections, so that users can stream micropayments for their support.</p> <p>That was a lot of jargon. Let&rsquo;s back up a few steps.</p> <p>First, a principle: We believe that cultural heritage institutions (like RRCHNM!) should align their mission with the users that they serve. It would be ideal, in other words, if what was financially good for an institution aligned with what was best for its constituents. It is very rarely the case, however, that providers of digital content are supported by their users. More often they have a different revenue stream. While this is not all bad, it can lead institutions to be funder-driven rather than mission-driven. And it does leave institutions vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of their funding.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/collecting-these-times-american-jewish-experiences-of-the-pandemic-invites-communities-to-contribute-to-collections-documenting-jewish-life-during-pandemic/Tue, 09 Mar 2021 16:11:23 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/collecting-these-times-american-jewish-experiences-of-the-pandemic-invites-communities-to-contribute-to-collections-documenting-jewish-life-during-pandemic/<p><strong>For Immediate Release</strong></p> <p>DATE 3/8/2021</p> <p>Contact: Jason Edelstein, 510-239-1102</p> <p><em>Collecting Projects Led by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Council of American Jewish Museums Are Accessible to All</em></p> <p>Washington, DC — A <a href="https://collectingthesetimes.org/s/collecting-these-times/page/home">new web portal</a> connects American Jews to Jewish institutions and collecting projects that are gathering and preserving materials related to Jewish life during the pandemic. The interactive website, <em>Collecting These Times: American Jewish Experiences of the Pandemic (</em><a href="https://collectingthesetimes.org/s/collecting-these-times/page/home"><em>CollectingTheseTimes.org</em></a>*),*was developed by the<a href="https://rrchnm.org/">Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media</a> (RRCHNM) at George Mason University in partnership with the <a href="http://www.cajm.net/http://www.cajm.net/">Council of American Jewish Museums</a>, the <a href="https://www.thebreman.org/">Breman Museum</a>, the <a href="https://capitaljewishmuseum.org/">Capital Jewish Museum</a>, <a href="http://www.htc.edu/">Hebrew Theological College</a>, the <a href="http://www.jtsa.edu/library">Jewish Theological Seminary of America</a>, and <a href="https://www.prizmah.org/">Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools</a>.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/collecting-these-times-rrchnm-gathers-and-interprets-covid-19s-impact-on-american-judaism/Mon, 08 Mar 2021 11:21:01 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/collecting-these-times-rrchnm-gathers-and-interprets-covid-19s-impact-on-american-judaism/<p><em>by Anne Reynolds</em></p> <p>From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) has worked to document the ways in which the virus has impacted religious communities through its <em>Pandemic Religion</em> digital collection. As part of this effort, <em>American Jewish Life</em> launched in July 2020 to document and interpret the experiences of Jewish individuals and communities.</p> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="http://collectingthesetimes.org" alt="" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="http://collectingthesetimes.org" alt="" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> <p>An interfaith Chavurah made up of members of Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, PA celebrates the fourth night of Hanukkah together over Zoom. A pandemic didn&rsquo;t stop this Chavurah&rsquo;s 20+ year tradition!</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-directions-at-rrchnm/Sun, 21 Feb 2021 14:40:15 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-directions-at-rrchnm/<p>Fifteen years ago a team of faculty, students, and developers here at RRCHNM began an ambitious new project. They wanted to create a browser plug-in that would allow users to capture and save things they were looking at online, but not just as a simple save of those items. They wanted to capture the metadata associated with those pages, images, datasets, .pdf files, and everything else the user was looking at, and to save it in ways that were searchable, shareable, and would allow all that data to be organized for research, writing, and teaching. In short, they wanted to kill the 3x5 card that had been the ubiquitous tool of scholars and students in the humanities (and lots of other disciplines) for decades. The result was <a href="http://zotero.org">Zotero</a>, possibly the most successful piece of open source software ever to come out of a humanities center.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/documenting-sharing-and-learning-from-jewish-life-during-the-pandemic/Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:50:58 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/documenting-sharing-and-learning-from-jewish-life-during-the-pandemic/<p><em>The Council of American Jewish Museums and George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Receive Grants for Major Archiving Project Led by Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah</em></p> <p>January 27, 2021 — The <a href="http://www.cajm.net/">Council of American Jewish Museums</a> (CAJM) and George Mason University’s <a href="https://rrchnm.org/">Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media</a> (RRCHNM) are launching two new collecting initiatives with support from a group of Jewish funders, the Chronicling Funder Collaborative, to document diverse Jewish experiences of the pandemic. The Rosenzweig Center received a grant to create a web portal that will serve as a digital content hub reflecting Jewish life during this time. The grant to CAJM enables it to partner with 18 member institutions to lead a broad-based oral history collecting initiative.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-mack-clah-2021/Fri, 08 Jan 2021 10:13:08 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/jessica-mack-clah-2021/<p>Dr. Jessica Mack, a postdoctoral fellow at RRCHNM, will chair and present in a panel titled &ldquo;Building Modernization: Urban Megaprojects in 20th Century Latin America&rdquo; at the Conference on Latin American History&rsquo;s 2021 annual meeting. Dr. Mack will present her work titled &ldquo;Building the Lettered City: Planning and Construction in Ciudad Universitaria, 1950-54.&rdquo; You can <a href="https://clah.lasaweb.org/?selectedDay=2021-01-10">watch the panel online</a> on Sunday, January 10, at 4:30 p.m.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/phd-students-brannan-and-hubai-accepted-as-hastac-scholars/Fri, 18 Dec 2020 14:08:10 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/phd-students-brannan-and-hubai-accepted-as-hastac-scholars/<p>Two PhD students in GMU&rsquo;s Department of History and Art History, <a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/lbranna">Laura Brannan</a> and <a href="https://historyarthistory.gmu.edu/people/jhubai">Janine Hubai</a>, have been accepted as <a href="https://www.hastac.org/initiatives/hastac-scholars">HASTAC Scholars</a>. The HASTAC scholarship program supports graduate students across many colleges and universities who are working at the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities, and sciences. The scholars accepted to the program join a cohort across the more than two hundred institutions that participate worldwide. Brannan and Hubai are both working on a digital project around Black Lives Matters and the racial reckoning of the United States. They have worked with GMU&rsquo;s Professor Spencer Crew, interim director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, on building a digital history project that will help contextualize the racial history of statues that are currently contested. Their project focuses in particular on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia—one of the nation’s hubs for protests around Confederate statues—as well as on statues of Ulysses S. Grant. This work in progress will be part of their participation in the HASTAC program, and both will also have opportunities to extend their professional and interdisciplinary connections.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/muralis-visualizing-the-interwoven-world-receives-grants-from-aiis/Fri, 18 Dec 2020 13:32:51 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/muralis-visualizing-the-interwoven-world-receives-grants-from-aiis/<p>Dr. <a href="http://www.deepthimurali.com">Deepthi Murali</a> has received a Digital India Learning Scholarship grant from the <a href="https://www.indiastudies.org">American Institute of Indian Studies</a> in support of a new digital art history project. <em>Visualizing the Interwoven World of Eighteenth-Century Indian Textiles</em> will collate and analyze more than five hundred images and associated metadata of South Indian textiles from publicly accessible museum collections to produce a searchable aggregated database on these textiles, the first of its kind. The project will also publish interpretive results on patterns of use, circulation routes of textiles and merchant communities, and centers of production. Digital output will include data visualization in the form of interactive maps, visual charts, blogs, and audio recordings. This is a pilot project for a larger born-digital project on the material histories of Indian Ocean World with a focus on South Asia. The work for this project will take place over 2020 and 2021. After receiving her PhD in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dr. Murali joined RRCHNM as a postdoc. She is an expert on the history of the art in India, and she has contributed to a number of digital art history and digital history projects at RRCHNM and other institutions, including World History Commons, the Masala History Podcast, the Humanities Without Walls Consortium Podcast, and the Consolation Prize Podcast. <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="textile.png" alt="An image of a textile from India" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <figcaption class="mt-2 px-1 text-sm text-stone-500"> Hanging Depicting a European Conflict in South India, before 1763, southeast India (for the British market), Cotton, plain weave (drawn and painted, mordant and resist dyed), 296.5x261.6cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 2014.88). </figcaption> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="textile.png" alt="An image of a textile from India" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> <p class="mt-3 text-sm text-white/80 text-center max-w-2xl">Hanging Depicting a European Conflict in South India, before 1763, southeast India (for the British market), Cotton, plain weave (drawn and painted, mordant and resist dyed), 296.5x261.6cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 2014.88).</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/40000-documents-from-religious-bodies-census-digitized-nearly-a-century-later/Mon, 14 Dec 2020 10:19:00 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/40000-documents-from-religious-bodies-census-digitized-nearly-a-century-later/<p>Today the <em>American Religious Ecologies</em> project is releasing the <a href="https://omeka.religiousecologies.org/s/census-1926/">initial version of a website</a> that makes available tens of thousands of documents from the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies. These schedules, or forms, describe religious congregations from the early twentieth century from a wide range of religious traditions. These documents are freely available to scholars, students, and local historians, who can browse or search for them by location or by religious identification. For the first half of the twentieth century, the U.S. Census Bureau collected remarkably detailed information about American religious institutions. The Bureau undertook this survey every ten years, from 1906 until 1946. In 1926, the Bureau tabulated 232,154 congregations, including groups such as Roman Catholics, Baptists, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Jews, and over a dozen relatively new Pentecostal denominations. For each congregation, the Bureau collected a schedule (or form) detailing information such as its membership by sex and age, its buildings and finances, and its location. The schedules from the other religious bodies censuses have been lost or destroyed. Only the schedules from the 1926 census survive. These schedules are a treasure trove of information, the single richest historical source of data about American congregations. Until today, however, these documents have been available only in an uncatalogued collection housed at the National Archives. With the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, historians on the <em>American Religious Ecologies</em>project have been photographing and cataloging this collection. The initial release of the collection features schedules from over 40,000 congregations across the country. Users can find schedules by religious identification, by state and county, or by browsing them on a map. The project staff will continue to add schedules to the website on a rolling basis, as well as eventually adding transcriptions of the data contained in the schedules. All materials created by the project are either in the public domain or released under an open-access license, and they are thus free for use by scholars, educators and students, and local historians and genealogists. For additional background information, you can read about the <a href="https://religiousecologies.org/blog/religion-and-the-u.s.-census/">history of the Religious Bodies censuses</a>, about what we have <a href="https://religiousecologies.org/blog/how-the-the-religious-bodies-census-was-first-digitized-...-in-the-1920s/">learned about the Census Bureau’s efforts to count religion</a>, or about <a href="https://religiousecologies.org/blog/what-can-you-learn-from-a-census-schedule/">what you can learn from a Religious Bodies census schedule</a>. <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="https://omeka.religiousecologies.org/s/census-1926/page/home" alt="Screenshot of the website that hosts the digitized census documents" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="https://omeka.religiousecologies.org/s/census-1926/page/home" alt="Screenshot of the website that hosts the digitized census documents" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> <em>Cross-posted from the</em>*<a href="https://religiousecologies.org/blog/40000-documents-from-religious-bodies-census-digitized-nearly-a-century-later/">American Religious Ecologies blog</a>.*</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-publication-model-editor-for-current-research-in-digital-history/Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:57:40 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/new-publication-model-editor-for-current-research-in-digital-history/<p>For the past three years, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has been publishing a peer-reviewed journal, <em>Current Research in Digital History</em>. Over those three years, our mission for <em>CRDH</em>has been consistent. We think that digital history needs more scholarship that makes <a href="https://rrchnm.org/argument-white-paper/">interpretative or argumentative claims</a> within specific fields of history. Digital history methods, in other words, ought to produce new historical insights, and those new historical insights ought to be shared with, say, scholars of American legal history or of Ottoman culture. <em>CRDH</em> exists to provide a home for—or sometimes a waypoint to—such scholarship. We publish short-form essays of about 3,000 words. We have built a platform which we will continue to expand that can host whatever kind of digital history content an author can imagine. We publish the articles open access. And we envision this as a place where scholars can either write up the interpretative aspects of a digital history project or publish a brief version of an idea that they will develop more fully elsewhere. Part of that is that we publish quickly: less than a year from submission through peer review to publication, and faster if we can. <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="https://crdh.rrchnm.org" alt="Covers of CRDH" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="https://crdh.rrchnm.org" alt="Covers of CRDH" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> For the first few years we published <em>CRDH</em> in conjunction with an annual conference that we held at RRCHNM in Virginia. The purpose of the conference was to bootstrap the journal, by helping provide guidance to digital historians who were applying their digital methods to argumentative history for the first time. We have found CRDH to be a modest success. A number of scholars have seen how we are trying to enable their work and have taken advantage of the venue. We are especially pleased that the journal has been a useful home for graduate students and early career scholars who want to publish work in digital history. Today we published the 2020 issue, but we are also making a step to a new publication model. We will begin accepting and publishing submissions on a rolling basis. In other words, instead of waiting to publish all the articles we receive all at the same time, we will publish them as they become ready for publication. And the journal will now be completely decoupled from the conference, which we will no longer hold. We are making these steps for two reasons. First, there were always scholars who could not attend the conference, and we will be able to draw from a wider pool of scholars now. And second, we like to keep the <em>current</em> in <em>CRDH</em>, and this move will allow us to publish articles faster. If <em>CRDH</em> sounds like a venue in which you could publish your work, we encourage you to <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/submissions/">send submissions</a> or even just questions to the editors. We have another important piece of news about <em>CRDH</em> as well. For the past three years, <a href="http://gretakswain.org">Greta Swain</a> has been the journal&rsquo;s editorial assistant. No one has done more for the success of the journal—or of its authors—than Greta. Starting now, she will join the journal as an editor alongside Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen. She is a gifted scholar of early Americas and of digital history, and will bring a keen eye for both historical argumentation and the craft of digital history to editing the journal. As a PhD candidate at George Mason University, she will also be a part of the journal&rsquo;s strategy in reaching out to graduate students and early career scholars. We are grateful that Swain is taking on this new role as the journal transitions to a new publication model. While <em>CRDH</em>is finalizing its editorial board, we are grateful that the following scholars have agreed to join the editorial board. All of them have been long-time supporters of the journal&rsquo;s mission, and they will bring their wide-ranging experience to bear in helping us accomplish that mission.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/current-research-in-digital-history-2020/Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:55:18 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/current-research-in-digital-history-2020/<p>Today RRCHNM is publishing the third issue of our open-access, peer-reviewed publication <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/"><em>Current Research in Digital History</em></a>. This issue features <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/volume/2020/">six essays</a> on topics ranging from the <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v03-01-bridge-between-two-worlds/">Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) national network-based infrastructure</a>, <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v03-03-mapping-commercial-currents/">maritime mobility in mid-nineteenth century Puget Sound</a>, and <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v03-06-tale-of-three-valleys/">reimagined regional identities of Colorado and New Mexico’s San Luis Valley</a>, to <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v03-05-silent-no-more/">women’s key roles as mediators in Ottoman-Algerian socio-political networks</a>, a <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v03-02-whats-on-history/">critique of History’s (formerly The History Channel) nominally historical programing</a>, and the <a href="https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v03-04-news-diets/">&ldquo;news(paper) diets&rdquo; served up to early-twentieth-century American readers</a>.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/from-historical-sources-to-datasets-a-preview-of-datascribe/Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:10:54 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/from-historical-sources-to-datasets-a-preview-of-datascribe/<p><strong>Updated November 11: The <a href="https://github.com/chnm/Datascribe-module/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta">beta release</a> is now available for <a href="https://github.com/chnm/Datascribe-module/releases/download/v1.0.0-beta/Datascribe-1.0.0-beta.zip">download (zip file)</a>.</strong> Scholars in history and related humanities fields are increasingly turning towards data analysis and visualization in order to understand the past. Historians have of course long used sources with quantitative informations, such as probate records, tax lists, bills of mortality, censuses, and the like. The mass digitization of historical records has only made those types of sources more readily accessible. And yet there is a huge gap between having a historical source (even a digitized one) and having a dataset which can be analyzed. By analogy, you can think of the difference between having an image of a manuscript and having a text transcription of that document. But with datasets, the problem of transcription is even more difficult, because data has structure. For example, historical documents may have many small variations in how they are laid out, but when transcribed they should all use the same variable. Or it may be important to standardize the transcription of a set of categories. Historians and scholars who are creating their own datasets have been transcribing them in software not really designed for the purpose, perhaps in spreadsheets. But those ad hoc approaches have many limitations. (Believe us, we&rsquo;ve run into them many times!) And those limitations great affect the speed, accuracy, and usability of the datasets that are transcribed. Enter <a href="https://datascribe.tech">DataScribe</a>. In September 2019, the NEH&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh">Office of Digital Humanities</a> awarded RRCHNM a <a href="https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx?f=1&amp;gn=HAA-266444-19">grant</a> to develop software to tackle just this problem. We have been diligently—but quietly—developing this software over the past year. As we approach our initial round of  testing outside of RRCHNM, we are ready to start giving you previews of what this software will be able to do. DataScribe is built on the Omeka S platform. Many, many humanities projects are already using Omeka S to describe and display collections of historical sources. You will be able to add the open-source DataScribe module to Omeka and use it to transcribe historical sources. You can define what a dataset should look like: the variables you are going to transcribe and the types of data (numeric, categorical, textual, as well as custom data types) that go into those variables. Teams of people will then be able to transcribe the sources, and we are building in a workflow for reviewing and managing transcriptions. Transcribers will see the historical sources side by side with the fields they need to transcribe, and managers will be able to see the status of the project. While this software is in very rapid development and will continue to change, you can get a sneak preview of what it looks like in the screenshots at the end of this post. So, when can you get your hands on DataScribe? The answer is soon. DataScribe is currently alpha software, and you can follow its development and open issues at our <a href="https://github.com/chnm/Datascribe-module">GitHub repository.</a> On November 11 we will move into our first round of public beta testing. If you are interested in testing DataScribe—or even just want to receive periodic updates about the project—<strong>please fill out this <a href="https://forms.gle/rvPUPrxysiujW8H46">very brief form</a>.</strong> We will add you to a mailing list to keep you up to date about the project, and if you indicate an interest in testing we will be back in touch with the details. Our <a href="https://datascribe.tech">project website</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/chnm/Datascribe-module/wiki">draft documentation</a> are also great ways to learn about the project. One of the ways that humanities discipline is moving forward is by creating (and sharing) new datasets. Very few historians working with data are dealing with off-the-shelf datasets which are already ready to be analyzed or visualized. To create new historical or humanities knowledge, scholars need to be able to create new datasets. And that is what DataScribe will help them do.   <em>Screenshots of the DataScribe module (click for full resolution images)</em> <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="datascribe-transcribe.png" alt="Datascribe&#39;s transcribe view" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <figcaption class="mt-2 px-1 text-sm text-stone-500"> DataScribe allows users to see the documents they are transcribing, to enter the transcription into fields that ensure data accuracy and consistency, and to manage the workflow of the project. </figcaption> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="datascribe-transcribe.png" alt="Datascribe&#39;s transcribe view" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> <p class="mt-3 text-sm text-white/80 text-center max-w-2xl">DataScribe allows users to see the documents they are transcribing, to enter the transcription into fields that ensure data accuracy and consistency, and to manage the workflow of the project.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/consolation-prize-a-new-podcast-from-rrchnm/Mon, 28 Sep 2020 07:52:18 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/consolation-prize-a-new-podcast-from-rrchnm/<p>When you think of the most exciting, controversial, or salacious moments in American history, your first thought probably isn’t the story of a U.S. consul. Consuls were charged by the U.S. State Department with reporting American trade in cities across the world, as well as taking care of Americans abroad, but they had little official diplomatic power. They weren’t negotiating treaties or starting wars; they weren’t leading charges into battle or changing the political landscape. Or were they? The responsibility for the United States’ reputation in other parts of the world often fell squarely on the shoulders of consuls, who were the first ones called in when Americans got themselves in trouble or were mistreated while they were abroad. How they interpreted their duties sometimes got them involved in all kinds of complicated circumstances. And often, their actions on a personal level had ramifications far up the chain, even making a difference in national politics or international relations. The stories of these consuls deserve to be told. Here at RRCHNM, we’re starting a podcast to tell them. <a href="https://podcasts.rrchnm.org/show/consolation-prize/">Consolation Prize</a> is a narrative-style podcast, hosted by Abby Mullen, who talks to scholars across the historical discipline about consuls and their world. You’ll also hear the voices of these consuls, their colleagues, and their enemies, telling their own stories. In this season, you’ll hear about rhinoceroses, and coffee trading, and hymn writing; you’ll hear about imprisonment, slavery, and oppression. You’ll hear stories of revenge, humiliation, and bitter feuds, but also stories of triumph, joy, and delight. You’ll go places as close to home as Vera Cruz, Mexico, and as far away as Canton and Zanzibar. Please join us as we travel the globe with nineteenth-century consuls! You can <a href="https://podcasts.rrchnm.org/show/consolation-prize/">visit our website</a> for more info, including where to subscribe so you don’t miss any episodes. You’ll also find our show notes there, which include transcripts of the episodes, bios of our experts, further readings, and so much more. You can also follow us on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/ConsolPrize">@ConsolPrize</a>, or join our Facebook group, to get more resources and behind-the-scenes content. Episode 1 of Consolation Prize takes us to Vera Cruz, Mexico, where we investigate what happens when personal affairs and official duties intermingle; in Episode 2, we head to Liverpool during the height of the impressment crisis before the War of 1812. Episodes post every three weeks on Tuesdays.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/congratulations-to-capital-jewish-museum-on-groundbreaking-festival/Fri, 04 Sep 2020 16:46:32 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/congratulations-to-capital-jewish-museum-on-groundbreaking-festival/<p>Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, RRCHNM has been collaborating with a series of partners on its <a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/">Pandemic Religion</a> and <a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/s/american-jewish-life/">American Jewish Life</a> project. We have been very fortunate to have had the chance to work with these partners to collect and preserve sources about the impact the pandemic is having on American religion. One of our partners—and neighbors—is the Capital Jewish Museum, which has also accepted a GMU student as an intern. But the Capital Jewish Museum is not even officially open yet! The work they are doing is all the more remarkable, then, and we are all the more pleased to share this announcement of their <a href="https://capitaljewishmuseum.org/groundbreaking/">groundbreaking festival</a>, coming up on September 12 to September 18. <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="https://capitaljewishmuseum.org/groundbreaking/" alt="Poster for Groundbreaking Festival at Capital Jewish Museum. Celebrate a new museum breaking ground in Downtown DC with a live-streamed ceremony, family scavenger hunt, conversations with cultural leaders, film screenings and much more. Coming to a screen near you September 12th to September 18th. Register now at www.capitaljewishmuseum.org/groundbreaking" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="https://capitaljewishmuseum.org/groundbreaking/" alt="Poster for Groundbreaking Festival at Capital Jewish Museum. Celebrate a new museum breaking ground in Downtown DC with a live-streamed ceremony, family scavenger hunt, conversations with cultural leaders, film screenings and much more. Coming to a screen near you September 12th to September 18th. Register now at www.capitaljewishmuseum.org/groundbreaking" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> </p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/laura-brannan-speaks-at-african-american-museum-conference/Thu, 03 Sep 2020 11:20:52 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/laura-brannan-speaks-at-african-american-museum-conference/<p>In August, PhD student and RRCHNM graduate research assistant <a href="https://rrchnm.org/author/lbranna/">Laura Brannan</a> spoke at the annual meeting of the <a href="https://blackmuseums.org/">Association of African American Museums</a>&ndash;the organization&rsquo;s first ever virtual conference. Laura writes about her experience speaking at the conference: &ldquo;Recently, I virtually presented at the Association of African American Museums conference (AAAM). I admit I was a bit hesitant; this was my first virtual conference and I was unsure what to expect. Nevertheless, my experience at AAAM demonstrated the possibilities and slight limitations of presenting and attending a completely digital conference. The AAAM staff built the conference site from the ground up via the platform <a href="https://blackmuseums.org/aaam-pheedloop-interest/">PheedLoop</a>. This recreated the conference experience to the best of its abilities, with the user able to message and video chat with anyone in the virtual “lobby” room and access all recorded sessions after the fact. In this sense, the digital format was very helpful and made me feel connected to other participants. As a presenter, overall, I found that the various digital platforms helped me successfully prepare for my roundtable discussion. My co-panelists and I rehearsed beforehand via Zoom, shared notes via Google Docs, and communicated with our panel moderator during the presentation via the chat feature in Zoom. The roundtable was conducted as a Zoom webinar, where I was a panelist and could only see the tiles of my fellow panelists. Though strange and somewhat alienating to not see the faces of the audience members during the presentation, in a way the digital format actually helped me focus more easily on the conversation. Alongside members of the <a href="https://www.johnmitchelljrprogram.gmu.edu/">John Mitchell Jr. Program for History, Justice, and Race</a> from the School of Conflict, Analysis, and Resolution at George Mason, our session discussed the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) as a site of healing, pilgrimage, and controversies in the context of COVID-19 and the current racial reckoning in the U.S. today. As a scholar of race, gender, and public memory in the U.S., I pointed out the institutional legacies NMAAHC contends with as the first museum to exclusively center African, African American, and Black voices in the U.S. yet still be a part of the Smithsonian, an institution created in the mid-nineteenth century. In the current state of racial reckoning throughout the country, I also spoke of the importance for white people to visit museums like NMAAHC that center lives and stories different from theirs. Through exhibits and programming, Black-centered museums such as the NMAAHC encourage visitors to confront the history of oppression and racism in the U.S. while also serving as potential spaces to promote healing and reconciliation. Although AAAM was not a typical conference by past in-person standards, its success serves as a model for how virtual conferences can be typical in the world of COVID-19 and remote work. More importantly, AAAM showed how digital tools can facilitate important conversations between people in different parts of the world that would otherwise not be possible.&rdquo;</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-jewish-life-a-pandemic-religion-project/Thu, 23 Jul 2020 14:49:27 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/american-jewish-life-a-pandemic-religion-project/<p>Today the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is launching <em>American Jewish Life</em>, a digital collecting project that will document and interpret the experiences of individuals and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the Center&rsquo;s larger <em><a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/">Pandemic Religion</a></em> project, <em>American Jewish Life</em>has been created in partnership with the <a href="https://www.thebreman.org/">Breman Museum</a>; the <a href="https://capitaljewishmuseum.org/">Capital Jewish Museum</a>; the <a href="https://www.isjl.org/">Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life</a>;  <a href="http://www.htc.edu/">Hebrew Theological College</a>; the <a href="https://jewishstudies.rice.edu/houston-jewish-history-archive">Houston Jewish History Archive at Rice University</a>; and <a href="https://library.yu.edu/locations/archives">Yeshiva University</a>. The six Jewish institutions who have partnered with <em>American Jewish Life</em> are broadly representative of the geographic and theological diversity of American Judaism.   <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="https://pandemicreligion.org/s/american-jewish-life/page/home" alt="Screenshot of the American Jewish Life website" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="https://pandemicreligion.org/s/american-jewish-life/page/home" alt="Screenshot of the American Jewish Life website" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> Most of the initial items on <em>American Jewish Life</em>represent the prior collecting of our partner institutions. Others have been contributed by visitors to the <em>Pandemic Religion</em> site. You may wish to browse some of the items that have already been contribute:</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/pandemic-religion-digital-stories-fellowship-call-for-participants/Thu, 04 Jun 2020 12:36:40 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/pandemic-religion-digital-stories-fellowship-call-for-participants/<p><a href="https://religioninplace.org/blog/">Lived Religion in the Digital Age</a>, a project of St. Louis University, in partnership with the <a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/s/contributions/page/welcome">Pandemic Religion</a> project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, welcomes applications for a short-term Digital Stories Fellowship. The Digital Stories Fellow will work from the Pandemic Religion database to create, compose, and/or curate original material for the <a href="https://religioninplace.org/blog/digital-stories/">Digital Stories platform</a>. The fellowship carries an award of up to $1,500. <a href="https://religioninplace.org/blog/digital-stories/">Digital Stories</a> prioritizes the study and practice of visual, aural, multimodal, and other embodied storytelling techniques, particularly as they are shaped, transformed, or confronted by digital life and cultures. Preferred contributions include visual essays, short documentaries, soundtracks or podcasts, data visualizations, digital exhibits, multimediated content, and short essays, among other possible modes of public scholarship. The Digital Stories fellow will have expertise in religion, theology, American studies, performance studies, visual studies, or related fields or professions and will contribute a series of original entries to the site during the funding period. This fellowship is expected to begin immediately and be completed by December 31, 2020. To apply, please submit a letter of interest (1–2 pages), current CV or resume, and brief writing or multimedia sample (links to digital content are encouraged). Please submit fellowship application materials or general queries to LRDA Administrator Dr. Samantha Arten at <a href="mailto:livedreligion@slu.edu">livedreligion@slu.edu</a>. Applicants may also apply <a href="https://forms.gle/P9z25qXoGHc7AZCW6">through this form</a>. Applications received by June 15 will receive full consideration. In addition to this fellowship, Digital Stories welcomes contributions on a rolling basis. Please contact Digital Stories Editor, Dr. Adam Park (<a href="mailto:adam.park@slu.edu">adam.park@slu.edu</a>) for questions and submissions. <a href="Pandemic-Religion-Digital-Stories-Fellowship-Call.pdf"><strong>Download this CFP as a PDF.</strong></a></p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/acls-digital-extension-grant-for-world-history-commons/Wed, 03 Jun 2020 17:00:02 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/acls-digital-extension-grant-for-world-history-commons/<p>The <a href="https://www.acls.org/home">American Council for Learned Societies</a> has awarded our World History Commons project a <a href="https://www.acls.org/Recent-Awardees/ACLS-Digital-Extension-Grants">digital extension grant</a>. &ldquo;<em>Expanding the Commons: Supporting Emerging World History Scholars and Community Colleges through the World History Commons OER.</em>&rdquo; This grant will extend the reach and impact of <a href="https://worldhistorycommons.org/">World History Commons</a>, which provides valuable resources to teachers, students, and researchers, including scholarly essays, teaching materials, historical thinking strategies, and curated primary sources. <em>Expanding the Commons</em> expands on the current project in two key ways. The first is by recruiting early career scholars to write new scholarly essays and incorporating their cutting-edge historical research into the project.  The second is by partnering with experienced community college faculty to connect World History Commons to the community college curriculum and to promote its use among community college world history teachers and students, increasing both access and visibility. Led by former <a href="https://rrchnm.org/author/kelly-schrum/">Kelly Schrum</a>, <a href="https://rrchnm.org/author/nathan-sleeter/">Nate Sleeter</a>, and <a href="https://rrchnm.org/author/jessica-otis/">Jessica Otis</a>, this project will provide a valuable resource to world history educators for many years to come.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-joins-nonprofit-finance-fund-cohort/Tue, 19 May 2020 13:40:48 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-joins-nonprofit-finance-fund-cohort/<p>We are pleased to announce that the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has been selected to join an <a href="https://mellon.org/">Andrew W. Mellon Foundation</a>-funded cohort of six digital humanities organizations in a three-year initiative focused on building financial resilience in the digital humanities. This initiative, managed by the <a href="https://nff.org/">Nonprofit Finance Fund</a>, will be structured around helping all six DH organizations become more adaptable and financially resilient while staying true to our individual  missions. Since our founding in 1994, RRCHNM has been committed to open access and open source, but these commitments make it challenging to create a business model that provides sufficient resilience in a rapidly changing world. Through the support of this project, we look forward to finding new ways to continue our mission of democratizing access to historical information while also strengthening our financial model and becoming a more adaptable organization. We are also very excited to be part of a cohort that includes the <a href="https://www.hathitrust.org/">Hathi Trust</a>, the <a href="http://hbculibraries.org/">HBCU Library Alliance</a>, <a href="https://hcommons.org/">Humanities Commons</a>, <a href="https://rhizome.org/">Rhizome</a>, and the <a href="https://www.saada.org/">South Asian American Digital Archive</a>. The best ideas in the world come from collaborations among diverse groups of people who bring new ideas and perspectives to the table. We couldn&rsquo;t be happier about being part of this cohort of such excellent organizations.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-to-create-classroom-simulations-on-history-of-diplomacy/Wed, 06 May 2020 11:00:16 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-to-create-classroom-simulations-on-history-of-diplomacy/<p>RRCHNM is excited to announce a new project with the National Museum of American Diplomacy (NMAD) made possible by generous funding from the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. This project will create three classroom simulations based on significant events in the history of U.S. diplomacy that teachers in high school and post-secondary can use with their students. These simulations will build on the success of <a href="ttps://diplomacy.state.gov/discover-diplomacy/about/">diplomatic simulations</a> previously developed by the NMAD and RRCHNM which explored present-day foreign affairs topics such as peacebuilding, wildlife trafficking, and crisis in the oceans, among others. The historical diplomatic simulations to be developed as a part of this project will include primary sources, interviews with historians to provide context, and an easy-to-follow guide for implementing the simulations with students. The project will conclude in January of 2022. The NMAD is dedicated to telling the story of the history, practice, and challenges of American diplomacy at the U.S. Department of State and also receives support from the Diplomacy Center Foundation.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/pandemic-religion-to-document-changes-in-american-religion/Mon, 20 Apr 2020 12:56:14 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/pandemic-religion-to-document-changes-in-american-religion/<p>As the world undergoes wrenching changes—some temporary, some permanent—in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, religious communities in the United States have also been deeply affected. Many have hastily moved services online: a change which has been influenced by the hugely varying liturgical, theological, legal, and financial resources available to different groups. Of course a few religious groups have made it into the news by challenging government-mandated shutdowns. Some people are attending online services at communities that are not local and of which they are not members, perhaps to share an experience with family from whom they are distant. Others are finding their religious community in relatively new forms, such as Facebook groups. As the pandemic more seriously affects older people, religious communities have grappled with their ministry to the elderly and to the sick. The pandemic has disproportionately killed racial minorities and left them disproportionately unemployed: Black religious traditions are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/04/19/church-of-god-in-christ-pentecostal-coronavirus-kills-bishops/">no exception</a>. These changes have happened at the same time that Jews have celebrated Passover, Christians have celebrated Easter, and right before Muslims celebrate Ramadan. To document these changes, today the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is launching <a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/"><em>Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive</em></a>. This project will collect and preserves experiences and responses from individuals and religious communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. <figure class="bg-stone-50 border border-stone-200 rounded-lg p-3 my-8 mx-auto max-w-2xl" x-data="{ open: false }"> <img src="https://pandemicreligion.org" alt="Screenshot of the Pandemic Religion website" loading="lazy" class="rounded w-full cursor-zoom-in" @click="open = true"> <template x-teleport="body"> <div x-show="open" x-transition.opacity class="fixed inset-0 z-50 flex items-center justify-center bg-black/80 p-4 sm:p-8 cursor-zoom-out" @click.self="open = false" @keydown.escape.window="open = false"> <div class="relative max-w-5xl w-full max-h-[90vh] flex flex-col items-center"> <button @click="open = false" class="absolute -top-2 -right-2 z-10 bg-white/90 rounded-full p-1.5 text-stone-700 hover:text-stone-900 shadow" aria-label="Close"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="w-5 h-5" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M6 18L18 6M6 6l12 12"/></svg> </button> <img src="https://pandemicreligion.org" alt="Screenshot of the Pandemic Religion website" class="max-h-[85vh] w-auto rounded-lg shadow-2xl"> </div> </div> </template> </figure> We invite contributions from people of any religious tradition, community, or perspective. We encourage contributions either from your <a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/s/contributions/page/contribute-personal">individual perspective</a>, or documenting what is happening in your <a href="https://pandemicreligion.org/s/contributions/page/contribute-community">religious community</a>. We hope you will contribute items like these:</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-and-covid-19/Tue, 14 Apr 2020 15:00:26 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/rrchnm-and-covid-19/<p>Like every other organization everywhere in the world, here at RRCHNM we are feeling our way forward during this year of the Covid-19 virus. George Mason University is closed and we&rsquo;ve been booted from our offices, so we have moved to 100% remote work. Between the various virtual connections we have &ndash; Basecamp, Slack, WebEx, Zoom, email, and good old-fashioned phone calls &ndash; we&rsquo;ve managed to say connected and we continue to work on our many digital projects. I would be lying if I said that this transition has been seamless or easy for us. Each of us feels the stresses of this moment in different ways and at different times &ndash; sometimes several different ways on the same day. We&rsquo;re finding new locations in our homes where we can work, figuring out how to balance our own health with the needs of those we love, and trying to get used to never seeing one another except as little faces on a Brady Bunch style screen. None of us is old enough to have lived through a moment like this one, so we are creating new benchmarks on a daily basis. A few of us report being just as productive as ever, others less so.  For now, what we can do is what we can do. We are very thankful that our various external partners have been so flexible with their expectations of us and have been willing to accept adjusted work plans and in some cases to extend funding windows. Without that flexibility, we&rsquo;d really be struggling. With expectations adjusted, we are on schedule and on budget. In addition to keeping up with our existing work, we have our own responses to the Covid crisis. The first of those is that we are in the process of standing up a new collecting history project in the vein of past projects like the <a href="https://911digitalarchive.org/">September 11 Digital Archive</a> and the <a href="http://hurricanearchive.org/">Hurricane Digital Memory Bank</a>. The &ldquo;Pandemic Religion&rdquo; project will collect, preserve, and contextualize the major changes happening to American religious congregations and institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and grows out of the <a href="https://religiousecologies.org/">prior work in religious history</a> by RRCHNM Director <a href="https://lincolnmullen.com/">Lincoln Mullen</a> and our partner in crime, <a href="https://religious.gmu.edu/people/jturne17">Prof. John Turner</a> from Mason&rsquo;s Department of Religious Studies. We are also pleased to be providing back end support to the <a href="https://covid19.omeka.net/">Covid-19 Archive</a> project at Arizona State University. RRCHNM is assisting this excellent project with site planning, site hosting, and general project support as it gets off the ground and we are very happy to be collaborating with <a href="https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/2208788">Mark Tebeau</a> and his team. Finally, we are working hard to support K-12 and college teachers with the <a href="https://rrchnm.org/category/projects/content/teaching-resources/#projects">many educational projects</a> we have created over the years. Making history education resources available for free to a broad audience was how RRCHNM started 25 years ago. Who knew how important that mission would be today when students can only access learning resources online? When the new year began none of us could have predicted a moment like this. We&rsquo;re happy to be doing our part to help collect and preserve the history of this moment and to help teachers, students, and parents navigate a new world of online only learning.</p>https://rrchnm.org/blog/igorj2.sg-host-partners-with-shapell-manuscript-foundation-to-develop-teaching-materials/Mon, 02 Mar 2020 15:47:50 +0000https://rrchnm.org/blog/igorj2.sg-host-partners-with-shapell-manuscript-foundation-to-develop-teaching-materials/<p>RRCHNM is excited to announce an agreement with the Shapell Manuscript Foundation (SMF) to develop education materials that will make use of the Foundation’s rich and engaging digital collection. RRCHNM will create four teaching modules for secondary school teachers that will be hosted on the <a href="https://www.shapell.org/">Shapell Manuscript Foundation website</a>. Each module will feature teaching strategies including differentiation for diverse learners, a sample lesson plan, ideas for assessment, a Document-Based Question activity for AP courses, the national history standards met by each module, and links to related SMF resources. The Shapell Manuscript Foundation features an impressive collection of primary sources related to United States presidential history, the history of Israel and the Holy Land, as well as rare letters from prominent figures in American literature including Mark Twain and Herman Melville. The modules should be available for teachers by the end of the year.</p>