Upcoming Institutes:
- Co-Director (PI), Doing Digital History: 2016. Doing Digital History is a reprise of the 2014 Institute for the Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities summer institute aimed at faculty, public historians, archivists, librarians, museum professionals, and independent scholars specializing in US history, who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions.
Previous Institutes:
- Co-Director, Building the Portfolio: DH for Art History Graduate Students,
- Co-Director (PI), Doing Digital History: A NEH Summer Institute,
- Co-Director, Rebuilding the Portfolio: DH for Art Historians,
Millions of people come to the Mall each year to visit and learn inside its museums and to gather outdoors at its memorials and monuments. By gathering at these places of memory, visitors share their understandings of our national values, rights, and obligations. In this way, the Mall is a place of ongoing conversations about what it means to be American. The Mall is also a part of the vibrant everyday life for the residents and workers of Washington, DC who call this city home. Histories of the National Mall is a mobile optimized website provides visitors with access to a rigorous interpretation of the history and culture of the National Mall as a space where national identity is built, negotiated, celebrated, protested, and remembered. Funding for the site has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Position: Co-Director (PI)
Awards: 2015 National Council on Public Historyâ€
s Outstanding Public History Project
Citation: Sharon M. Leon. “Layers and Links: Writing Public History in a Digital Environment.†in The Oxford Handbook of Public History, edited by Paula Hamilton and James B. Gardner (Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, January 2016).
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RRCHNMâ€s foray into community transcription with the Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 and the development of Scripto offers some significant lessons for cultural heritage institutions and professionals who want to engage with their constituents in meaningful ways. Primarily, we gained a dedicated and engaged audience for PWD, and a tremendous insight into their motivations. Equally important, the development process for the generalized tool, and its role in the larger ecosystem of open-source software that enables widespread user participation in cultural heritage projects, points to viable directions for the development of subsequent tools. Together this case study of PWD and the story of the creation of Scripto suggest that a wide range of cultural heritage organizations can launch and sustain lightweight transcription projects that encourage increased engagement with core audiences.
Citation: Sharon M. Leon, “Build, Iterate, and Generalize: Community Transcription of the Papers of the War Department and the Development of Scripto,†in Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, edited by Mia Ridge (Ashgate, 2014).
Download the PDF.
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The digital revolution has transformed research, exhibition, writing, review, participatory public engagement, and every other aspect of history practice. To consider the influence of these changes on The Public Historian, the journal has solicited the perspectives of six scholars with expertise on digital history to reflect on what the internet age affords TPH as a scholarly journal for the field of public history.
Citation: Sharon M. Leon, et al., “Imaging the Digital Future of The Public Historian,†The Public Historian 35:1 (February 2013) 8-27.
Download the PDF.
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Omeka is a free and open-source software that provides museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy to use platform for publishing collections and creating attractive, standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. Omeka is designed to satisfy the needs of cultural institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. Bringing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to small museum, historical society, and library websites, Omeka fosters the kind of user interaction and participation that is central the mission of those cultural institutions. Omeka was funded initially by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. In 2010, Omeka.net launched to provide an affordable hosted version of the software for those who did not have the technical skill or the means to host their own installations. Finally, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, development is underway on Omeka S, a multisite version of Omeka designed to meet the needs of large libraries and institutions with major collections and many users.
Current funded initiatives include:
- Principle Investigator, “Omeka Everywhere: Connecting online and in-person museum experiences with Omeka and Open Exhibits,†Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant for Museums. Total Awarded: $390,999. (October 1, 2014-September 30, 2017).
- Principle Investigator, “Opening Omeka Collections to Distant and Close Reading,†Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant for Libraries. Total Awarded: $247,926. (October 1, 2014-September 30, 2017).
- Principle Investigator, “Omeka S Extended.†Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Total Awarded: $135,000. (April 1, 2015-March 31, 2016).
- Principle Investigator, “Omeka S, Enhanced Description and Dissemination,†National Leadership Grant for Libraries, Institute of Museum and Library Services. Total Awarded: $249,336. (October 1, 2015-September 30, 2018).
Position: Director
URL:Â http://omeka.org
Awards: 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration.
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Anticipated release: Summer 2011.
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The Bracero History Archive is an effort to collect, aggregate and make publicly available the documents and oral histories of the bracero guest worker program between the United States and Mexico (1942-1964). The major content partners on the project are the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Smithsonian Institutionâ€s National Museum of American History, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University. The Bracero History Archive was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Position: Director
URL: http://braceroarchive.org
Awards: 2010 National Council on Public History’s Outstanding Public History Project
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