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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Jessica Pritchard of the American Historical Association blog reports on a panel at last month’s annual meeting that asked what it takes to be a public historian. Entitled “Perspectives on Public History: What Knowledge, Skills, and Experiences are Essential for the Public History Professional?” the panel was chaired by George Mason’s own Spencer Crew. Going [...]

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So long Netscape. You were a good friend (for a while). Though official support for the first widely used web browser ends next week, Netscape’s hapless stewards at AOL have kindly left us a lasting(?) memorial. The Netscape Archive offers a brief history of the browser and a download page for discontinued releases of the [...]

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Reading over my last post, it occurs to me that I should acknowledge a controversy swirling around the edges of the Cutline community. Earlier this year, some important figures in the WordPress leadership raised an alarm over what they called “sponsored themes”—themes that contain hidden paid links designed to game Google. Recently the flood of [...]

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I haven’t mentioned our Digital Campus podcast since Episode 2 in March, but Mills, Dan and I are still going strong. In my opinion, the last few shows have been among our best, featuring guests Jeremy Boggs and Bill Turkel in Episode 6 and Episode 7 respectively and an extended discussion of training for digital [...]

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One of the things I keep stumbling upon are amateur software histories told through series of screenshots. Here are a couple examples. The first is a slideshow from ZDNet—which strictly speaking isn’t an amateur publication at all, although as far as history is concerned I think it’s close enough—that provides a look back at Windows [...]

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It has been a while since I posted something in the Tops of All Time series, but I noticed two recent articles in PC World that fit the bill. The first is a wistful look back at the 10 Worst PCs of All Time. The second lists the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time, [...]

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If you haven’t subscribed already, Episode 2 of Digital Campus (“The Old and the YouTube”) is now available for your listening pleasure. Dan, Mills, and I chat about YouTube, Wikipedia, the Byzantine Empire, Cambodian wi-fi, and other hot topics in the world of digital humanities. Also ready for download from CHNM is Episode 4 of [...]

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One more amateur history of technology site and then we move on to other things. DigiCamHistory.com provides an enormous—if poorly organized and badly designed—wealth of annotated photos and links relating to the development of digital camera technology. Like the evolt.org Browser Archive, DigiCamHistory solicits user contributions, and although it is hard to say how much [...]

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Together with colleagues at CHNM, I have been working for several years now on ways to elaborate and extend the practice of online collecting, especially in the areas of history of science, technology, and industry. Some of the results of that work can be found at CHNM’s Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online website, where [...]

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