Found History

As an open source, not-for-profit, warm-and-fuzzy, community service oriented project, we don’t normally like to talk about market rivals or competitive products when we talk about Omeka. Nevertheless, we are often asked to compare Omeka with other products. "Who’s Omeka’s competition?" is a fairly frequent question. Like many FAQs, there is an easy answer and [...]

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As promised on Twitter, I’m sharing the report (with a few minor copyedits and corrections) I submitted this week to NEH on One Week | One Tool. This is an interim report, which means there are plenty of questions that remain unanswered. The grant continues for another year, during which time the One Week | [...]

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Over the past few months, several people—including several participants themselves—have asked me how we chose the One Week | One Tool crew. We had about 50 applicants. Nearly all of them were perfectly qualified to attend. This made the selection process exceedingly difficult. I have no doubt we could have ended up with another group [...]

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For all the emphasis on the tool itself, the primary aim of One Week | One Tool is not tool building, it’s education. One Week | One Tool is funded by NEH under the the Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities (IATDH) program. IATDH grants “support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars [...]

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Three days into One Week | One Tool, I’m beginning to see that one of the nice things about running an NEH Summer Institute as a practicum rather than a classroom is that the organizers learn as much as the participants. For me, this week has reinforced and clarified an important set of related lessons [...]

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The boards of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the National Council on Public History have approved a single set of best practices for evaluating public history scholarship in history departments. The advice is outlined in a new report [.pdf] entitled Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian. Acknowledging that [...]

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Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins are ruined. Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins. – Mark 2:22 Since the time of my first foray into digital humanities as a newly minted graduate working on a project [...]

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One of the things that people often notice when they enter the field of digital humanities is how nice everybody is. This can be in stark contrast to other (unnamed) disciplines where suspicion, envy, and territoriality sometimes seem to rule. By contrast, our most commonly used bywords are “collegiality,” “openness,” and “collaboration.” We welcome new [...]

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After giving my “groundrules” speech for a third THATCamp on Saturday, I realized I hadn’t published it anywhere for broader dissemination and possible reuse by the THATCamp community. So here they are, THATCamp’s three groundrules: THATCamp is FUN – That means no reading papers, no powerpoint presentations, no extended project demos, and especially no grandstanding. [...]

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Dan Cohen and I have been brewing a proposal for an edited book entitled Hacking the Academy. Let’s write it together, starting at THATCamp. And let’s do it in one week. Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a [...]

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