Found History

Scholars may not like it, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the 21st century’s fragmented media environment, marketing and branding are key to disseminating the knowledge and tools we produce. This is especially true in the field of digital humanities, where we are competing for attention not only with other humanists and other [...]

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Along with “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” “release early and often” is something of a mantra around CHNM, especially when it comes to software and web application development. For a variety of reasons, not least the invaluable testing and feedback projects get when they actually make it into the wild, CHNM has [...]

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Showing extreme negligence earlier in the week, I somehow forgot to mention the opening of applications for THATCamp 2009. Last year’s event was great. This year will be (a little) bigger and better. Another late entry: Our colleagues at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities have launched their spring series of Digital Dialogues. [...]

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Nat Torkington at the O’Reilly Radar blog has news this morning that George Oates, Senior Program Manager in charge of Flickr Commons and an original member of the Flickr design team, has been laid off by Flickr’s parent company Yahoo! As the person at Yahoo! responsible for bringing together the energy and cultural resources of [...]

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The Oral History Association has launched a new and improved website, including a social network and an instructional wiki. Jim Spadaccini has a great post about the special kind of planning involved in building museum and other cultural heritage websites that incorporate social networking features. Jim writes, “While the standard methods of web design—such as [...]

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Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb continues his must-read series on design process for digital humanities with some notes (and code) for Front End Development. Again on front ends and again via Clioweb, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has unveiled a new “dashboard” user interface, a numerical, widgetized overview of how IMA’s online collections, programs, and social [...]

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Many thanks to Elisabeth Grant and Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association for mentioning my recent post on “Making It Count” in the latest edition of their “What We Are Reading” series. Elisabeth and Rob make the great suggestion of reading a new report from the American Council on Education alongside my post. Entitled [...]

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Over the summer there was much discussion among my colleagues about making digital humanities work “count” in academic careers. This included two fantastic threads on Mills Kelly’s Edwired blog, a great post by Kathy Davidson, and an informal chat on our own Digital Campus podcast. As usual the topic of tenure also undergirded discussions at [...]

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There has been a useful discussion on Twitter (of all places!) among some of the THATCamp participants about how to write a good help wanted ad for programmers for digital humanities projects. Here are a few of the suggestions, mostly from the programmers in the bunch: “All depends on what you’re looking for: a real [...]

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Last week CHNM hosted the inaugural THATCamp to what seemed to me like great success. Short for “The Humanities and Technology Camp,” THATCamp is a BarCamp-style, user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities. Structurally, it differs from an ordinary conference in two ways: first in that its sessions are organized by participants themselves (ahead of time through [...]

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