Upcoming ECHO workshop and ECHO Grants

Doing Digital History: An Introduction for Historians of Science, Technology, and Industry
July 12-15, 2007

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) announces two exciting opportunities for historians of science, technology, and industry.

This summer, CHNM’s ECHO project (http://echo.gmu.edu) invites scholars of the history of science, technology, and industry to our fourth annual workshop on the theory and practice of digital history. Participants will explore the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history; genres of online history and tools; website infrastructure and design; scholarly collaboration; digitization and online collecting; the process of identifying and building online history audiences; and issues of copyright and preservation. The workshop will be held at CHNM’s offices on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus, conveniently located outside metropolitan Washington, DC. Thanks to support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, there will be no registration fee, and a limited number of fellowships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars. As spaces are limited, please submit an application form by June 8, 2007 (available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/3601/) accepted participants will be notified by June 10th.

Also through the ECHO program, the Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the availability of a number of $1000 grants to fund current research projects involving the online collection of the recent history of science, technology, and industry. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ECHO offers consulting services to institutions and individuals with online projects or ideas. We tailor our advice to your project’s scope, focus, and budget to help you implement and build your digital history collection. We can help with strategic project planning, technology, website design, and outreach. In the past we have worked with the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and many individual researchers.

Examples of projects that employ ECHO’s methods and technologies to collect and present historical materials on the Web can be found at the ECHO collecting center (http://echo.gmu.edu) and include the September 11 Digital Archive(http://911digitalarchive.org/), a collection of over 200,000 stories, images, email, and documents from the attacks and their aftermath; the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Collecting and Preserving the Stories of Katrina and Rita (http://hurricanearchive.org/); A Thin Blue Line: The History of the Pregnancy Test Kit (http://history.nih.gov/exhibits/thinblueline/), a joint project by ECHO and the National Institute of Health; and Remembering Columbia STS-107 (http://history.nasa.gov/columbia/Introduction.html), an online exhibit by NASA.

Please submit a grant proposal of no more than 500 words and a C.V. to chnm@gmu.edu with the subject line, “ECHO grant proposal,” by 1 July 2007.