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 public history work is generally and unfairly overlooked in academic settings, the report provides practical advice to review committees on how best to consider public history and to candidates on how best to conduct and present public history in the tenure and promotion process. A supporting white paper [.pdf] by the report’s authors provides background and discusses the issues presented in the report in greater detail. Yours truly contributed a “case study” on digital history to the white paper, which suggests a set of both internal (audience, content, design, and process) and external (funding, publications, reviews, and awards) criteria for evaluating history websites.

A knowledge of digital history theories and methods is quickly becoming essential for public historians. More and more, digital history is a required part of the public history graduate curriculum. A panel at the (now-not-so-recent) meeting of the National Council on Public History featured public history students engaged in this new digitally-infused curriculum.

Organized and chaired by our very own Jeremy Boggs, the panel included one student from American University’s M.A. Concentration in Public History, Leah Suhrstedt, and two students from New York University’s M.A. in Archives and Public History program, Adina Langer and Lauren Gutterman. I was lucky to be asked at the last minute to provide a brief comment on what turned out to be three inspiring presentations. Two things stood out in each talk, both of them relatively simple but important insights for faculty and administrators organizing public history courses or programs.

First, it was clear from the students’ experiences that teaching and learning digital history involve good measures of risk and trust on the part of both faculty and students. In teaching something as new, changeable, and diverse as digital history, faculty have to give students freedom to try new things and make mistakes, to challenge traditional modes of work, and experiment with new kinds of knowledge creation and dissemination. At the same time, students have to accept this risk and trust themselves and their potential to engage new technologies and master new skills. To paraphrase Langer’s presentation, “Its about leaving the gate open, about teaching students how to teach themselves.” In fact, this should be a comfortable role for seasoned public history instructors. As Suhrstedt suggested in her presentation, as professionals working in mostly small and underfunded organizations, we have all been asked at some point in our careers to do something for which we were completely unprepared by our graduate training. Public historians are already scholars, public intellectuals, fundraisers, teachers, community activists, therapists, and on and on. Becoming a digital public historian is really just adding another hat to the rack.

Second, teaching digital history is not just about teaching students how to build websites. New modes of publishing and the technologies and programming languages required to mount history on the web are important parts of the digital history curriculum. But teaching students to be digital public historians means teaching them when and how best to use digital technologies in all aspects of public historical work. It’s about teaching new pathways for the entire public historical endeavor, including exhibiting history online, but also how to use digital media for community outreach, fundraising, project management, and even advocacy, something Suhrstedt demonstrated in presenting her work with the National Trust’s social media campaign. Tellingly, Gutterman’s presentation of her work with OutHistory.org was almost exclusively about outreach. The lesson of these projects is that the digital should be taught not just as new mode of dissemination, but a new mode of engagement.

Both of these thoughts have rattled around in my brain for some time, but it was only with the help of Langer, Gutterman, and Suhrstedt that I can put them to paper (or pixels, as is really the case). Fortunately for public history faculty faced with incorporating digital history into their public history curricula, both insights point to digital history not being all that different from traditional public history. Risk, trust, and engagement are all very familiar concepts to veteran public historians, something that should give us confidence in weaving the new digital history more tightly into our programs.

The digital humanities are well represented this week at the National Council for Public History annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. By my count, fully nine of the approximately ninety sessions, workshops, working groups, and posters are either entirely or partially dedicated to the web and other digital outlets for public history. This equals the nine digital history sessions on the program at the much (many times) larger American Historical Association in January.

Here’s the list with times and titles. Please consult the full program online [.pdf] for room numbers and participants (and please contact me if I left anyone out!)

Thursday March 11, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Jump Start Your Digital Project in Public History

Thursday, March 11, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Digital Curricula in Public History

Thursday, March 11, 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
History 2.0: Engaging the Public in History through the World Wide Web

Friday March 12, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Issues in Historic Preservation (including Cara Kaser on “Using Digital Tools in Historic Resource Surveys: The Oregon Survey Program”)

Saturday, March 13, 8:00 am – 10:00 am
Publish, Share, Collaborate, and Crowdsource Collections: Zotero 2.0 For Public Historians

Saturday, March 13, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Community of Records in the Age of New Media: Family History as Public History

Saturday, March 13, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Poster – The Flushing Local History Project: A Digital Community Art Project and Archive

Saturday, March 13, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Poster – Yesteryear: Historical Blogs as Educational Tools

Saturday, March 13, 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Omeka: An Open Source Tool for Publishing Cultural Heritage Online

The Rosenzweig Forum for Digital Humanities returns this month with a program entitled “Negotiating the Cultural Turn(s): Subjectivity, Sustainability, and Authority in the Digital Humanities.” On Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Murray Room of Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, Tim Powell and Bethany Nowviskie will address and open a conversation about issues of cultural authority, intellectual property, innovation vs. sustainability, objectivity, and the need to think outside the academy’s walls.

Tim Powell directs digital archive projects for the Ojibwe Indian bands of northern Minnesota, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Tim will speak about a project entitled Gibagadinamaagoom (Ojibwe: “To Bring to Life, to Sanction, to Give Authority”) and how the focus on Ojibwe culture affects issues of intellectual property, open access, and the design of the interface, metadata, and database.

Bethany Nowviskie directs the University of Virginia Library’s efforts in digital research and scholarship, and is also associate director of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute. She will discuss a number of projects from UVA’s SpecLab, Scholars’ Lab, and NINES research groups related to the expression of subjectivity and perspective in interpretive digital environments.

Named in honor of our good friend Roy Rosenzweig, the Rosenzweig Forum is a collaboration of CHNM, the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland.

The annual meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) is only six weeks away, and CHNM will be there in force. On Thursday, March 11, we will be running a working group to help “Jump Start Your Digital Project in Public History.” On Saturday, March 13, we will be running a special workshop on getting started with Omeka.

NCPH is one of my favorite conferences of the year, attended by some of the most interesting people working in history today. Check out the full program online at NCPH’s slick, new, WordPress-powered website. See you in Portland!

For the past few years, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has undertaken a series of public-private digitization partnerships, especially with a company called Footnote.com. These partnerships provide NARA with free digitization services, and visitors to NARA’s reading rooms with access to the products, but allow Footnote.com and NARA’s other private partners to charge offsite users for online access public documents. I have never been particularly thrilled with this arrangement—charging the American people for access to their own records and all that—but in the past the projects have focused mainly on older document collections of mainly genealogical interest. Now NARA announces that online access to its collection of Holocaust-related material is being made available through Footnote.com, free for the month of October, but presumably for a fee afterwards. Something about this doesn’t sit right with me: should we really be limiting access to a history we desperately don’t want to repeat?

Another concern is Footnote.com’s extensive use of social media. Web 2.0 technologies provide tremendous opportunities for knowledge sharing and creating community around cultural heritage. But when dealing with topics as difficult as genocide, the values of sharing and openness need to be tempered by caution and sensitivity towards victims and their memory. For topics like the Holocaust, public tagging, spontaneous tweets, and YouTube mash-ups may not be the most appropriate or productive vehicles for public discussion and reflection. Indeed, this difficult question of how best to implement social media around topics of conscience is the premise behind CHNM and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s upcoming event, The Conscience Un-Conference, which remains open for applications until October 13, 2009.

Inspired in part by THATCamp, the Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Good is now open for applications. Co-hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Center for History and New Media, the Conscience Un-Conference is a free, one-day “un-conference” that intends to bring together interesting and interested people to talk about the problems, practicalities, and opportunities of using social media to further the missions of “institutions of conscience”—those concerned with violence and atrocities, human rights, and related issues. I feel very fortunate to be among the great group from USHMM planning the event.

The un-conference will be held on Saturday, December 5, 2009 from 8:30am to 5:30pm at USHMM in Washington, DC. To learn more and submit an application, visit http://www.ushmm.org/social/blog/.

The American Association of State and Local History (AASLH) provides cultural heritage professionals with some relevant information on surviving the economic downturn.

JISC provides advice on choosing (or not choosing) a Creative Commons license.

Missed it at the launch? Didn’t see the point? Don’t know where to start? Ars Technica has a nice reintroduction and tutorial for Yahoo Pipes, a visual web content mashup editor. Here’s an example of the kind of thing you can do very easily (20 minutes in this case) with Pipes: an aggregated feed of CHNMers’ tweets displayed on a Dipity timeline.

This year CHNM and the American Historical Association will be pleased to award the first Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History in memory of our late friend and inspiration, Roy Rosenzweig.

The American Association for State and Local History has launched a traveling exhibition directory for museums and other organizations looking to find and publicize traveling exhibitions.

Smithsonian Director of Web and New Media Strategy, Mike Edson, has posted his spot-on treatment of lingering concerns over social media and web technology among collections professionals and administrators. The presentation originally appeared at the recent WebWise conference in Washington, DC.

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 back a bit to the December issue of Code4Lib Journal, Dale Askey considers why librarians are reluctant to release their code and suggests some strategies for stemming their reluctance. I have to say I sympathize completely with my colleagues in the library; I think the entire Omeka team will agree with me that putting yourself out there in open source project is no easy feat of psychology.

The Bowery Boys, hosts of the excellent NYC History podcast, give us The History of New York City in Video Games, a thoroughgoing look of how New York has been pictured by game designers from the Brooklyn of the original Super Mario Brothers to the five boroughs of Grand Theft Auto IV’s “Liberty City.”

John Slater, Creative Director of Mozilla, rightly notes that, however unlikely, t-shirts are important to the success of open source software. In his T-Shirt History of Mozilla, Slater shows us 50 designs dating back to late 1990s.