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.

Sharing Lessons Learned in Digital Public History Work

If you are a member of the National Council on Public History, you might have noticed that RRCHNM’s project Histories of the National Mall has been named the 2015 Outstanding Public History Project (pdf). As co-directors of the project, Sheila Brennan and I are really very honored by the award. The folks at NCPH are …

Users, Visitors, Community Members?

I’ve been steadily making progress on my current project for about 8 weeks now, and I find myself writing a lot about the people who use digital public history websites and applications. The problem is, I can’t figure out what to call those people. The traditional options include user, visitor, and audience. To me, user …

User-Centered Digital History: Doing Public History on the Web

(… or what I’m doing with my sabbatical. I’d be quite pleased for comments and/or tips on publishers who would like to manage a review process on project with an open-access web scholarship component.) The Need The work of public history calls for taking good history scholarship into the world to meet the needs and …

Beyond Browse

A talk given for the Catholic University of America’s Department of Library and Information Sciences Fall Colloquium. As usual, it’s all pictures, but there will be a video eventually.

Data Curation for Research in History and Public History

{This is a piece that I wrote in 2011 for an IMLS funded project on data curation. It seems unlikely that it will ever be published through that venue so I offer it here for what its worth as an artifact of that time and place.} Introduction The notion of data curation may not be …