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With just a few days to go before the 10th Anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, cultural heritage institutions and the press have been doing a wonderful job of covering the complicated issues associated with preserving and presenting the history and memories of that day. At the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, we're pleased to be able to reopen the collecting portal for the September 11 Digital Archive as a way to contribute to this effort. With over 150,000 items, 911digitalarchive.org presents the public with one of the best ways to get a sense of how individuals have reflected on the tragedy of September 11th and its impact over the course of the last decade.

Much has changed in the world of digital archives and preservation since we embarked upon this work with our partners at the American Social History Project|Center for Media and Learning (CUNY) in 2002. As a result, we are embarking on the work of migrating the Archive to Omeka so that it will have a infrastructure that will improve both popular and scholarly access to the materials for years to come.

This work is being supported by a "Saving America's Treasures" grant administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Park Service. Unfortunately, the SAT program was a casualty of the most recent budget fights, and it will no longer be a route to preservation and stabilization for our cultural heritage materials. The funding for this type of work from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission is all similarly endangered in the current political environment.

Perhaps as we reflect on the meaning and impact of September 11th on our nation and our cultural life, we might all contribute a reflection to the Archive. Second, we might write to our Congressional representatives to tell them how essential it is that we maintain our commitment to the preservation and presentation of the cultural heritage materials that play such an important role in those reflections. That commitment demands continued public support for the grant making institutions that make our work possible.

As we approach the alpha launch of Scripto with the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 project, it seems appropriate to step back and consider why we at CHNM would be interested in building a tool to facilitate the crowdsourcing of documentary transcription.

A survey of the current landscape in public history, archive, and museum projects suggests that a tide of interest in crowdsourcing is building in the community. Just recently, the participants in the Digital Humanities API Workshop at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities produced an excellent summary of recent work and current needs. The list of projects launched recently is long and includes projects such as:

• Ben Brumfield’s FromThePage
• Transcribing Bentham
• WikiSource
• Rescript
• T-Pen
• Old Weather
• DigitalKoot

This ecosystem of relate projects all draw up on the interest and enthusiasm of members of the general public to advance the work of important intellectual ventures. In a sense, the participants in these projects work to support Clay Shirky’s thesis in Cognitive Surplus (2010) that new media is allowing individuals to redirect their free time away from passive consumption of media to active participation in social and cultural ventures that can be harness in positive ways. Shirky’s work is somewhat utopian, but we at CHNM share his enthusiasm for the possibilities that community-wide collaboration might have for our work in public history.

Our enthusiasm for community participation in public history comes from the mission of the Center, which includes using “digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.” This impulse to provide open access to historical materials and to build open source tools also includes an interest in welcoming the wider public to join us in our work. In 1998 CHNM founder Roy Rosenzweig entitled his closing thoughts of The Presence of the Past (co-authored with David Thelen) “Everyone a Historian,” in an effort to indicate the very complex interpretations individuals who are not professional historians make of their encounters with history. We wish to encourage this historical work by providing everyone with access to historical materials and opportunities to participate in the work of history.

In addition to these general goals for members of the interested public, we have several specific goals for Scripto and its role in crowdsourcing documentary transcription for documentary editors.

1. For digital documentary projects, Scripto will allow users to provide text that is essential to improving the function of the archive’s search engine and the ability for users to locate the materials they need. As such we are not looking for perfect transcriptions, but rather the progressive improvement that users can provide over time. All of the text contributed by the crowd will provide more data to search, and will allow users to pursue topics and interests that might not be represented in the metadata created by project editors.
2. For documentary projects with the fiscal resources for professional transcriptions, we hope that this initial and imperfect transcription data will provide project editors with a first pass from which they can build more robust transcriptions for scholarly editions. To some small degree, user contributed transcriptions will allow projects to reallocate resources toward the value-added materials they bring to scholarly editions in the form of annotations, glossaries, and other contextual elements.
3. The landscape of documents that user choose to transcribe will provide documentary editors with vital insights about the topics and elements of their archives that are of interest to users. This information is central to informing future efforts at outreach and to prioritizing site enhancements, such as teaching materials and digital exhibits.
4. Opening up an archive to crowdsourced transcription provides projects with an opportunity to think seriously about fostering and maintaining a vibrant community of users. Public history is meant to be public, and Scripto will help editors focus on seeking out interested users for their important holdings.

In the end, our work on Scripto and its implementation with the Papers of the War Department is an experiment in pursuing these goals. Eventually, editors from other digital documentary projects may wish to customized or extend Scripto’s functionality to serve the needs of their users and their collections, but these four essential goals will remain consistent across projects. As a free and open source tool, we have designed Scripto to be light-weight, flexible, and modular so that it represents a simple step forward for documentary editors.

[Cross-posted from the Scripto blog.]

After more than two years of planning and development, and six months of Alpha testing, CHNM is pleased to announce the public launch of Omeka.net Beta. Anyone may sign up for an account today.

Omeka.net is a hosted web service that brings standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Simply create a username and password at http://omeka.net, and your online collection or exhibition website is up and running. Similar to cloud-based content management services offered by WordPress.com, Blogger, and PBWorks—but geared to the needs of scholarship and cultural heritage—no server or programming experience is required to launch an Omeka.net website. With Omeka.net, users can build digital exhibits, map photographs, collect memories from web audiences, or publish new scholarship in a few easy steps.

Omeka.net will offer five plans for users that include a range of options from building one site using a few plugins and themes to deploying an unlimited number of sites that uses an extensive set of add-ons and designs. These plans, including a basic free option, are available to accommodate a variety of individual and institutional users.

Omeka.net is an outgrowth of the Omeka project, in partnership with Minnesota Historical Society and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Library of Congress, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

[Cross-posted from Omeka.net.]

CHNM is hiring a web developer to work on a wide range of exciting open source projects. Are you a creative programmer who is looking to work with an energetic and creative development team? Are you interested in working on the challenges presented by the effort to create usable, interactive, content-rich digital humanities projects? If so, this may be the opportunity for you.

This developer will work on a variety of digital humanities software applications and content-based Web sites in a nonprofit, academic environment that values openness, creativity, innovation and teamwork. They will contribute to project development paths and learn new skills as emerging projects require them. Finally, they will have the opportunity to work in a relaxed, fun environment with other designers, developers and humanists who strive to keep pushing forward the cutting edge of digital humanities work.

We are looking for a combination of the following:
• Strong object-oriented programming skills;
• Experience with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and XML;
• Standards-compliant CSS and HTML; and
• Experience with WordPress, BuddyPress and Drupal.

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and of award-winning history content on the Web (for example: Zotero, Omeka, teachinghistory.org and the Bracero History Archive). Each year CHNM's many project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research.

For full consideration, applicants must apply online at http://jobs.gmu.edu for position number 10398z; complete the staff application; and upload a cover letter, resume, and a list of three references with their contact information.

CHNM is pleased to announce two grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), during the May 2010 funding cycle. [Cross posted from the CHNM blog.]

First, NHPRC has awarded continued funding to the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800. This groundbreaking digital editorial project presents high resolution images of some 55,000 documents from the early War Department, which burned down in 1800. The collection has been carefully reconstructed through painstaking research in more than 200 repositories and more than 3,000 collections. This funding will allow the editorial team to dramatically improve the depth and quality of the metadata associated with the documents.

Second, NHPRC awarded its only grant in the "Strategies and Tools for Archives and Historical Publishing Projects" category to support the implementation, evaluation, and adaptation of CHNM's crowdsourcing documentary transcription tool. Designed to allow members of the online public to contribute transcriptions to documentary edition projects, the tool's initial development is being funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up Grant. The NHPRC funding will provide for expanded user interface research and evaluation, as well as the creation of a set of connector scripts that will enable the tool to plug into common open source content management systems such as Omeka, Drupal, and WordPress.

NHPRC, a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources, created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States.

Facing the close of the the first decade of the twenty-first century, those of us involved in higher education cannot help but admit that in some very important ways our system is broken. For students finishing graduate programs, the prospects of landing a traditional tenure-track position are slim (see the torrent of bad news from every discipline). For those already in traditional tenure track positions, the stakes for promotion are pinned on a system of academic publishing that is in financial collapse and that does a systematic disservice to mission of scholarly communication and exchange. Our academic societies are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with members openly begging for those organizations to provide them with convincing reasons to renew their memberships. And yet, when I look back to the moments in my own education that convinced me to pursue a career in academia, I have some hope for us going forward.

In the mid-1990s, I spent my undergraduate career in the College at Georgetown University, a place where the values of a liberal arts education were front and center. This environment provided me with an orientation with a number of benefits. A core curriculum demanded significant work in a variety of disciplines in the arts, sciences, and social sciences. I fulfilled many of those requirements in a two semester interdisciplinary seminar on 19th century revolutions that was grounded in Western European History, Literature, Philosophy, and Theology. I found myself quite at home with this liberal focus and chose an interdisciplinary major in American Studies, where I had the freedom to define my own academic path.

The Idea of a University

When asked for a cogent argument about the value of this type of liberal arts education, more often than not members of the faculty and administration at my institution would point to the classic text by John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (1852 and 1858). Tasked with establishing a university for Catholics in Ireland, the Cardinal distilled his understanding of the university as a place for teaching, learning, and conversation where inquiry is pushed forward. Though Newman was focused on the undergraduate education of men by men, his insights hold import for all of us, including those of us with advanced degrees. In discussing the importance of exposing students to many perspectives, Newman argued:

the drift and meaning of a branch of knowledge varies with the company in which it is introduced to the student. If his reading is confined simply to one subject, however such division of labour may favour the advancement of a particular pursuit ... certainly it has a tendency to contract his mind. If it is incorporated with others, it depends on those others as to the kind of influence which it exerts upon him....

It is a great point then to enlarge the range of studies which a University professes, even for the sake of the students; and, though they cannot pursue every subject which is open to them, they will be the gainers by living among those and under those who represent the whole circle. This I conceive to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning, considered as a place of education. An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude. He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it resets, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that his education is called "Liberal." A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom (100-101).

Thus, this effort to produce well-rounded human beings rather than intensely specialized practitioners appeared to have significant benefits for both the students and the faculty.

For me, as an undergraduate, it made the task of course selection, after the initial introduction to the various disciplines, an adventure every semester. The habits of mind created through a liberal education rendered the world wide open to serve the needs of my curiosity. I approached the task of reading course descriptions and making my selections with the unrestrained hopefulness that each class held the promise of a new frontier. Sometimes these choices tied back into my interdisciplinary focus, but sometimes they simply did not. Nonetheless, as Newman suggests, the juxtaposition of Modern Foreign Government with the History of the American South, Contemporary American Literature, and Religions of the African Diaspora helped me form an intellectual perspective that privileged the integration of a wide range of materials and questions. Meanwhile, my work at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Cultural Studies began to provide me with a set of digital skills that opened still more possibilities for envisioning scholarly work.

This attraction to making sense out of disparate data and approaching inquiry questions from many perspectives led me to pursue an interdisciplinary graduate degree in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. There I focused on methodological approaches from intellectual and cultural history, anthropology, religious studies, and a smattering of critical and cultural theory. Needless to say, this choice of graduate study did not appear to be the smartest career move, given that individuals with disciplinary degrees were and are having a hard enough time finding traditional employment in the academy. There is little room for those who do not fit neatly within established departmental boundaries. Yet, it seemed like the most logical fit for the way that I'd learned to think and approach the world of scholarly endeavors.

Digital Humanities

While I may not have set myself up for a traditional academic career path, the eclectic nature of my interests and my willingness to apply a wide range of interpretive frameworks to those interests helped me launch an ideal alternative academic career doing digital humanities work. I jumped at the opportunity to work at the Center for History and New Media in part because I suspected that I would find myself quickly bored with the typical research, teaching, and service expectations of a tenure track job. And in many ways, work in the digital humanities embodies the ideals of liberal education that Newman set out in the middle of the nineteenth century, because it calls for us to be at the crossroads of many conversations.

First, current work in the digital humanities guarantees that we have access to the tools that make many methodological approaches not only possible, but relatively easy. In the last five years, we have made great strides in creating software platforms that allow scholars to engage in sophisticated geo-spatial, temporal, textual, visual, computational, and quantitative analyses. The increasing separation of structured data from operational interfaces also means that a scholar can frequently bring many of these perspectives to bear on a single corpus of data at the same time. Even more promising is that these platforms provide the possibility that other scholars can access the same data and the same tools to pursue new questions and create new models of critical inquiry.

Second, because the end products of digital humanities work are so varied in comparison to a print journal article or a traditional print monograph, we have a chance to make new modes of thinking integral to our daily work practice. Work for the web often calls for critical thinking about design, and the ways that visual rhetoric can facilitate a scholarly argument. Just like the process of creating a digital story, the act of designing (or helping to design) a website provides a powerful opportunity for scholars to step outside of the conventions of academic prose in a way that surfaces important insights that may otherwise be obscured by the traditional forms. Similarly, one does not have to be a proficient web developer to appreciate the ways that carefully constructed information architecture is a vehicle for scholarly arguments, or to recognize the elegant logic of code. Intimate involvement in the design and building of digital humanities projects allows scholars to participate in alternative ways of knowing, and to grow in a deep understanding of how those projects fully embody scholarly arguments.

Finally, digital work can be a deeply collaborative venture. As the Hacking the Academy collection and unconferences like THATCamp demonstrate, that collaboration does not necessarily need to be the kind that involves frequent face to face meetings. Though John Henry Newman was convinced that the University could only succeed if it was a physical place of community, we have come to know that the extended community of digital humanities scholars makes it possible for us all to shape one another through our thinking, writing, and production of digital work. Of course, some of us have the good fortune to work in centers and labs that are structured on the understanding that our work can proceed only with the input of a team of designers, developers, and content experts. Both of these types of collaborations result in a work that moves our collective understanding forward because it builds upon a host of different gifts, talents, insights, and proficiencies.

Take an Elective

On a given day, digital humanists in alternative jobs make up only a small percentage of the academy. Nonetheless, that work provides some models for how we might return to the core values of scholarly inquiry and exchange that should be at the heart of our work. If we are to consider how we might change the practices of the academy to help us begin to move past a place of systemic dysfunction, we have to propose solutions that seem realistic to both junior and senior faculty in more traditional positions. In that spirit, I have a small proposal for both junior and senior scholars: take an elective of your own design. Embrace eclecticism, and give yourself permission to dedicate some percentage of your week to learning or investigating something completely new, in the service of having more intellectual fun.

I suggest that everyone remember what it felt like to take an elective that truly excited you—remember the joy of doing something just because it was fun and challenging, in and of itself. Perhaps this is a scholarly version of Google's 80/20 Rule, where employees get one day a week to work on their own projects. But since as academics we are mostly self-directed, I'm suggesting that this time be dedicated to moving beyond the the core forms of individual work that are the benchmarks of disciplinary promotion and tenure. Consider a new methodological approach. Produce work that takes a non-traditional form. Work with colleagues from other disciplines. Then, step forward and proclaim the results as being central to the future health and welfare of the academy. This elective work has the potential to enlarge the way that we think about and evaluate scholarship. Thus, it can remind the academy as a whole that value of our work is not that it results in a monograph or a bevy of articles in major scholarly journals, but that it opens up new lines of inquiry and pushes our collective understanding of the world forward.

Take an elective: make Cardinal Newman proud.

Digital-JumpStart session at AAM2010

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of organizing and facilitating a Digital-JumpStart session with Michael Edson at the American Association of Museums meeting in Los Angeles. We were joined and assisted by 30 wonderful facilitators and well over 100 participants. For 2:45 minutes we worked together in unconference style to share our lessons learn, questions and struggles, and future plans for digital work in museums. Discussion sessions ranged from gaming to digital exhibits to social media to institutional strategy and our numbers ran the gamut from very experienced museum technologists to those working to launch new museums. In the next days and weeks facilitators and participants will be adding their notes to the wiki, forming our collective record of our time together and possibilities for our work in the coming year. Mike did a wonderful job of capturing the findings shared by facilitators with the entire group at the end of discussion period.

Those findings spoke to a variety of issues, questions, and concerns, but many of them echoed the sentiments expressed by Douglas Hegley in summarizing the discussions about institutional strategy: We all have organizational mission statements and those statements should be the starting place for our thinking about digital work and kinds of technologies we need to put into place to serve those mission goals. I think that Douglas' statement holds with respect to our organizing and planning for the session. I view Digital-JumpStart and similar collaborative unconference ventures as specifically being in service of both the Smithsonian and the Center for History and New Media's institutional missions. The Smithsonian Institution was famously made possible by the generosity of James Smithson's bequest to the United States government expressly for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge." The Center for History and New Media was founded with the goal of "democratizing history." That basic goal has evolved into an institutional commitment to Open Access and Open Source as a philosophy--a way of working that honors constructive collaboration and giving back to the community. Digital-JumpStart embodies these aims in its structure and practice by bringing together individuals who are interested in doing digital work and supporting them in moving their projects forward in practical ways. The sessions are low in overhead and high on productive exchange; anyone can come, everyone can contribute, and we all walk away having learned something. That sounds like the democratic increase and diffusion of knowledge to me.

At the close of the session, Mike urged everyone in attendance to "just go for it!"--to take the steps necessary to start innovating in their institutions and their local communities. I share his enthusiasm for pushing forward with this important work. Thus, I invite everyone who was at the session, and everyone who was not, to use the wiki and to consider running a Digital-JumpStart session at your next professional conference.

CHNM is pleased to announce an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities to support the design and development of a tool for crowdsourcing documentary transcription. The $49,215 award will enable CHNM's dev team to to build an open source tool to enable researchers to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, thus harnessing the power of the community of users to improve the discoverability and usefulness of the archive.

[cross-posted from CHNM News]

Digital archives and documentary projects need a viable solution that lowers both the cost and the investment of staff time involved with transcribing of large numbers of historical documents. There will be significant benefits for both the editorial staff and for interested users, whether they are scholarly researchers, students and teachers, or members of the general public. This tool will help to address some of the long-term resource challenges facing many digital documentary editing projects.

We will use the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 as a test case for the tool development. The end result of the project will be a generalized tool that can be modified to work with a host of different content management systems, such as Omeka, WordPress, or Drupal. Please contact Sharon Leon if you would like to volunteer to test the tool.

This project is part of the We the People program, which encourages the teaching, study, and understanding of American History and culture.

On Saturday, March 13, 2010, the CHNM’s Bracero History Archive <http://braceroarchive.org> received the National Council on Public History’s award for “Outstanding Public History Project.”

The award recognizes excellence in work completed within the previous two calendar years that contributes to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or that serves as a model of professional public history practice. Sharon Leon and other project staff, including Peter Liebhold (NMAH), Kristine Navaro (UTEP), Mireya Loza (Brown), and Alma Carillo (Brown), were on hand to accept the honor from NCPH President Marianne Babal at the annual awards luncheon.

The Bracero History Archive is a landmark venture in collaborative documentation. With major partners at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, and dozens of other small cultural heritage and community organizations around the country, the project has worked to collect and make available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Bracero History Archive is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Preservation and Access division.

Cross-posted from CHNM

Reblogged from Omeka.org:

If you have been waiting to try Omeka, today's the day.

Today the Omeka team at CHNM and our growing developer community are celebrating the release of Omeka 1.0. This production-grade release marks the completion of Omeka's basic requirement set. Maintaining our commitment to serious web publishing for scholarship and cultural heritage, Omeka 1.0 incorporates unqualified Dublin Core metadata for organizing and displaying collections; support for extensible element sets; robust, flexible theme and plugin APIs; and plugins for Zotero compatibility, static page creation, and building sophisticated online exhibitions.

New with Omeka 1.0 is an improved exhibit builder; support for associating and displaying file-type icons; JPEG2000 support; and new import plugins, including a CSV importer and an OAI-PMH harvester. Moreover, with the addition of an OAI-PMH repository plugin, Omeka can now serve as an OAI provider. Best of all, Omeka 1.0 maintains its five minute setup, its intuitive user interface, its easy design theme switching, its many site enhancing plugins, and its free support resources.

This is a major milestone for Omeka, and we are very grateful to the many supporters, evangelists, open source developers, forums contributors, funding agencies, and friends who made it possible. Over the next several months, the Omeka team will continue to release bug fixes, minor improvements, and additional plugins and themes. But most of our energy will be devoted to making Omeka available as a hosted web service, allowing Omeka users the choice of downloading and hosting their own installation of Omeka, or signing up for a hosted account at Omeka.net. Stay tuned.

Download Omeka 1.0 today.