Research + Tools on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

American Religious Ecologies Team Completes Digitization

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:30:00 +0000

American Religious Ecologies 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’ 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.

Graduate Student Reflections: Sustainability Summer

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:40:25 +0000

This past summer I had the opportunity to work on RRCHNM’s sustainability team. Our work focused on flattening websites built with content management systems (CMS), 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 static site search for these flattened websites.

Report from the Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History

Tue, 13 May 2025 09:15:00 +0000

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.

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.

Celebrating Women's History Month

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:27:33 +0000

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 Who Built America? 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.

Teaching, Writing, and Research with AI

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:29:49 +0000

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).

Celebrating Black History Month

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:50:48 +0000

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.

Graduate Student Reflections: How Network Analysis Influenced My Research

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000

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.

Tropy 1.13 Release

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 12:00:00 +0000

The Tropy team is pleased to announce the release of Tropy 1.13. In addition to several performance and user interface improvements (see full release notes here), 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 Tropy blog post.

Introducing DataScribe 101

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 12:30:36 +0000

Fall workshops hosted by the DataScribe project team will further support user exploration of DataScribe 101’s capabilities.

Earlier this year, RRCHNM released DataScribe, a structured transcription module for the Omeka S platform. 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.