https://rrchnm.org/tags/wip/Recent content in Wip on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New MediaHugoen-usWed, 10 Aug 2022 10:41:21 +0000https://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/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/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>