Author archives

Sharon M. Leon is Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. Her research interests include the history of religion in the U.S., especially Roman Catholicism, history of science and twentieth century cultural history. She received her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and her doctorate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her first book, An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2013.

The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation

[This is a working draft of a chapter in progress for an edited collection.] Data-Driven History Digital historians are well-familiar with notion that the larger community of historians generally has been skeptical of and cautious about data-driven scholarship. The controversies surrounding Robert Fogel and Stanley Engermanâ€™s 1974 work, Time on the Cross: the Economics of …

Getting Tenure in Digital and Public History, as a Non-Man

Earlier this week, the AHA’s Perspectives on History site published an article from LaDale Winling entitled “Getting Tenure in Digital History: How One Scholar Made His Case.” Dr. Winling presents arc of his career in the history department at Virginia Tech, from his hiring in 2011 to his tenure case in 2017. He suggests that …

Thinking with Linked Data; Representing History

In 2006, Tim Berners-Lee articulated vision for a web that was made of vast mesh of truly linked data connecting information across domains using a simple set of principles. Those principles included: Use URIs as names for things Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. When someone looks up a URI, …

Reviewing is an Act of Leadership

[At Jeff McClurken’s invitation, I was recently part of a panel focused on reviewing digital history at Organization of American Historian’s annual meeting. My portion of the discussion was to focus on reviewing digital public history projects, which have their own particularities that make them different that some other genres of digital history. I welcomed …

Activating Derived Historical Data in a Digital Environment

[This post is the third in a series of project updates about my work on the Jesuit Plantation Project, adapted from the talks I’m giving this spring at Northeastern University and at the Organization of American Historians meeting. If you haven’t yet, you might want to read the post about the 1838 sale, and the …