Center for History and New Media
Encyclopedia
The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University
was established by Roy Rosenzweig
in 1994 to research and use digital media
and information technology
in historical
research, education, digital tools and resources, digital preservation
, and outreach.
, the Center for History and New Media in partnership with the American Social History Project at the City University of New York organized the September 11 Digital Archive with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation. With the September 11 Digital Archive, CHNM and ASHP utilized electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the past, with a digital repository of material including more than 150,000 first-hand accounts, emails, images, and other digital materials. This project has inspired a new project, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which is collecting the stories and digital artifacts related to the Hurricane Katrina
, Rita
, and Wilma
. CHNM continues to explore methods, tools, and technologies for archiving and preserving information, data, and documents digitally.
teachers, along with online resources about the French Revolution
. More recent projects have focused on developing online educational resources about World History
, and a project on historical thinking, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution
’s National Museum of American History
. CHNM is also involved with educational outreach with teachers in Virginia
school districts.
CHNM has also developed a number of online databases and other resources for historians and history teachers, including a listing of 1,200 history departments worldwide, a practical guide to Digital History, a collection of essays on history and new media. Another online database is Making the History of 1989, which chronicles the fall of communism
in Eastern Europe
. Created in collaboration with the German Historical Institute
and the National Endowment for the Humanities
, the 1989 Project is powered by CHNM's Omeka
software, and includes resources for teachers and students, ranging from lesson plans to an archive
of primary source
materials.
software projects: Zotero
and Omeka
. Zotero
is a Firefox extension that operates as reference management software
and entirely in the web browser. Omeka
is a web publishing system that uses the Dublin Core
metadata standard to build digital archives, and publish digital exhibits. Both projects are free, and reflect CHNM's dedication to democratizing the practice of history.
The Center for History and New Media also distributes a set of free additional digital tools for historians and teachers, including Web Scrapbook, Survey Builder, Scribe (a note taking application designed with historians in mind), Poll Builder, H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder), and Syllabus Finder, which allows you to find and compare syllabi from thousands of universities and colleges on any topic, using the Google
search engine.
in film, early comic strips, and Arnold Schwarzenegger
, offer contrasting approaches to using digital media for scholarly presentations.
Imaging the French Revolution is another experiment in digital scholarship. In a series of essays, seven scholars analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution. Offering the most relevant examples and comments from an on-line forum, those same scholars consider issues of interpretation, methodology, and the impact of digital media on scholarship.
Finally, Interpreting the Declaration of Independence
by Translation is a roundtable of historians brought together to discuss the translation and reception of the Declaration of Independence in Japan, Mexico, Russia, China, Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Israel. In addition to these reflections, the site includes actual translations of the Declaration into several different languages and "re-translations" back into English to illustrate the effects of translation on how a key historical document has been understood.
: Many Days, Many Lives is a web-based exhibit funded by NEH and being developed in collaboration with the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, will provide a multifaceted consideration of the human struggle for survival in the Gulag, the brutal and often lethal Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps. For Crossroads of War: Civil War and Homefront in Mid-Atlantic Border Region Crossroads, CHNM will assist in the design, production, and hosting of an online exhibition and archive on the American Civil War
in the mid-Atlantic border region for the Catoctin Center for Regional Studies at Frederick Community College
. History News Network
features articles, placing current events in historical perspective, written by historians of all political persuasions.
George Mason University
George Mason University is a public university based in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, south of and adjacent to the city of Fairfax. Additional campuses are located nearby in Arlington County, Prince William County, and Loudoun County...
was established by Roy Rosenzweig
Roy Rosenzweig
-References:* * * Memorial website-External links:* Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media**...
in 1994 to research and use digital media
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...
and information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
in historical
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
research, education, digital tools and resources, digital preservation
Digital preservation
Digital preservation is the set of processes, activities and management of digital information over time to ensure its long term accessibility. The goal of digital preservation is to preserve materials resulting from digital reformatting, and particularly information that is born-digital with no...
, and outreach.
Digital preservation
Following the September 11, 2001 attacksSeptember 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
, the Center for History and New Media in partnership with the American Social History Project at the City University of New York organized the September 11 Digital Archive with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan
Alfred P. Sloan
Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. was an American business executive in the automotive industry. He was a long-time president, chairman, and CEO of General Motors Corporation...
Foundation. With the September 11 Digital Archive, CHNM and ASHP utilized electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the past, with a digital repository of material including more than 150,000 first-hand accounts, emails, images, and other digital materials. This project has inspired a new project, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which is collecting the stories and digital artifacts related to the Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
, Rita
Hurricane Rita
Hurricane Rita was the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Gulf of Mexico. Rita caused $11.3 billion in damage on the U.S. Gulf Coast in September 2005...
, and Wilma
Hurricane Wilma
Hurricane Wilma was the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Wilma was the twenty-second storm , thirteenth hurricane, sixth major hurricane, and fourth Category 5 hurricane of the record-breaking 2005 season...
. CHNM continues to explore methods, tools, and technologies for archiving and preserving information, data, and documents digitally.
Educational resources
The Center for History and New Media worked in partnership with the American Social History Project (ASHP) at the City University of New York, to develop an online resource directed at American HistoryHistory of the United States
The history of the United States traditionally starts with the Declaration of Independence in the year 1776, although its territory was inhabited by Native Americans since prehistoric times and then by European colonists who followed the voyages of Christopher Columbus starting in 1492. The...
teachers, along with online resources about the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
. More recent projects have focused on developing online educational resources about World History
World History
World History, Global History or Transnational history is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective...
, and a project on historical thinking, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
’s National Museum of American History
National Museum of American History
The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...
. CHNM is also involved with educational outreach with teachers in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
school districts.
CHNM has also developed a number of online databases and other resources for historians and history teachers, including a listing of 1,200 history departments worldwide, a practical guide to Digital History, a collection of essays on history and new media. Another online database is Making the History of 1989, which chronicles the fall of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
in Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
. Created in collaboration with the German Historical Institute
German Historical Institute
German Historical Institute are five independent academic research institutes situated in Rome, London, Washington, D.C., Warsaw and Moscow, dedicated to the study of historical relations between Germany and the host countries in which they are based, along with four other institutions, in Paris,...
and the National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...
, the 1989 Project is powered by CHNM's Omeka
Omeka
Omeka is a free, open source web publishing system for online digital archives, and uses an unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard. Completely web-based, it allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with...
software, and includes resources for teachers and students, ranging from lesson plans to an archive
Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
of primary source
Primary source
Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines to describe source material that is closest to the person, information, period, or idea being studied....
materials.
Software resources
CHNM is responsible for the development of two notable open sourceOpen source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
software projects: Zotero
Zotero
Zotero is free, open source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials . Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors...
and Omeka
Omeka
Omeka is a free, open source web publishing system for online digital archives, and uses an unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard. Completely web-based, it allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with...
. Zotero
Zotero
Zotero is free, open source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials . Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors...
is a Firefox extension that operates as reference management software
Reference management software
Reference management software, citation management software or personal bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations . Once a citation has been recorded, it can be used time and again in generating bibliographies,...
and entirely in the web browser. Omeka
Omeka
Omeka is a free, open source web publishing system for online digital archives, and uses an unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard. Completely web-based, it allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with...
is a web publishing system that uses the Dublin Core
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata terms are a set of vocabulary terms which can be used to describe resources for the purposes of discovery. The terms can be used to describe a full range of web resources: video, images, web pages etc and physical resources such as books and objects like artworks...
metadata standard to build digital archives, and publish digital exhibits. Both projects are free, and reflect CHNM's dedication to democratizing the practice of history.
The Center for History and New Media also distributes a set of free additional digital tools for historians and teachers, including Web Scrapbook, Survey Builder, Scribe (a note taking application designed with historians in mind), Poll Builder, H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder), and Syllabus Finder, which allows you to find and compare syllabi from thousands of universities and colleges on any topic, using the Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
search engine.
Scholarship
Projects like Zotero provide tools for historians to research and analyze the past. But will digital media change the nature of scholarly argument, communication, and publication? In order to encourage experimentation in this arena, American Quarterly in collaboration with the American Studies Crossroads Project and CHNM organized an experiment in hypertext publishing. Four essays, covering such diverse topics as photos, as legal evidence, the Spanish-American WarSpanish-American War
The Spanish–American War was a conflict in 1898 between Spain and the United States, effectively the result of American intervention in the ongoing Cuban War of Independence...
in film, early comic strips, and Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....
, offer contrasting approaches to using digital media for scholarly presentations.
Imaging the French Revolution is another experiment in digital scholarship. In a series of essays, seven scholars analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution. Offering the most relevant examples and comments from an on-line forum, those same scholars consider issues of interpretation, methodology, and the impact of digital media on scholarship.
Finally, Interpreting the Declaration of Independence
Declaration of independence
A declaration of independence is an assertion of the independence of an aspiring state or states. Such places are usually declared from part or all of the territory of another nation or failed nation, or are breakaway territories from within the larger state...
by Translation is a roundtable of historians brought together to discuss the translation and reception of the Declaration of Independence in Japan, Mexico, Russia, China, Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Israel. In addition to these reflections, the site includes actual translations of the Declaration into several different languages and "re-translations" back into English to illustrate the effects of translation on how a key historical document has been understood.
Public outreach
CHNM has also developed some projects with an explicit focus on broad, public audiences. GulagGulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
: Many Days, Many Lives is a web-based exhibit funded by NEH and being developed in collaboration with the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, will provide a multifaceted consideration of the human struggle for survival in the Gulag, the brutal and often lethal Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps. For Crossroads of War: Civil War and Homefront in Mid-Atlantic Border Region Crossroads, CHNM will assist in the design, production, and hosting of an online exhibition and archive on the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
in the mid-Atlantic border region for the Catoctin Center for Regional Studies at Frederick Community College
Frederick Community College
Frederick Community College is a community college in Frederick, Maryland.-Clubs:FCC offers 33 different clubs on campus. To name a few...* Anime* Theater* Republicans* Democrats* Education* Spanish* Math* Newspaper* Tom's Shoes...
. History News Network
History News Network
History News Network is a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Although the HNN resides on GMU's server, it operates independently of the university as a non-profit corporation registered in Washington State...
features articles, placing current events in historical perspective, written by historians of all political persuasions.
See also
- Digital historyDigital historyDigital history is the use of digital media and tools for historical practice, presentation, analysis, and research. It is a branch of the Digital Humanities and an outgrowth of Quantitative history, Cliometrics, and History and Computing...
- Documentary CenterDocumentary CenterThe Documentary Center is a part of The George Washington University in Washington, DC, USA, devoted to teaching documentary film production theory and techniques and to creating documentary films for national audiences...
- National History Education ClearinghouseNational History Education ClearinghouseTeachinghistory.org, also known as the National History Education Clearinghouse , is a website that provides educational resources for the study of U.S...
Further reading
- Cohen, Dan, and Rosenzweig, Roy. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. University of Pennsylvania Press.