Many Found History readers will know that I have recently moved full-time to Connecticut, working remotely and traveling to Fairfax four or five days each month to meet with the gang at CHNM. Since moving north, I have been lucky to make a slew of new friends and colleagues in the bustling New England public history and digital humanities communities. Several new collaborations are percolating, and CHNM is now seeking a post-doc to help lead one of these, with the Connecticut Humanities Council.

Here’s the advertizement. I hope to see your application.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

The George Mason University, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) within the Department of History and Art History is seeking a full-time Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will work closely with CHNM’s Managing Director and colleagues at the Connecticut Humanities Council (CHC) on a new collaboration to create a central online resource for Connecticut state history. Based in Middletown, CT., near the campus of Wesleyan University, the Postdoctoral Research Fellow will provide primary project leadership, produce extensive historical content, and manage staff in close coordination with colleagues at CHNM and CHC. This is a unique opportunity to make a substantive leadership contribution to an innovative, high-visibility online resource in a relaxed but performance-centered environment with a team of humanists, designers and developers working at the cutting edge of digital humanities.

We are looking for someone who has earned a doctoral degree in history or a closely related field, and hands-on experience in digital humanities work. Priority will be given to candidates who have a track-record of conceiving, managing and completing Web-based and other public humanities projects. Writing experience for a production-oriented publication (e.g., a blog or newspaper) and familiarity with Wikipedia community norms and practices are preferred.

For full consideration, applicants must apply online at jobs.gmu.edu for position number F8860z; complete the faculty application; and upload a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and a list of three references with their contact information. We will begin considering applications on 9/13/11.

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and historical content on the Web (e.g., zotero.org, omeka.org, teachinghistory.org and gulaghistory.org). Each year CHNM’s award-winning project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors and over a million people relay on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research.

CHC is a public foundation incorporated in 1973 as a state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. CHC produces and funds public humanities programs that bring together people of different viewpoints, ages and backgrounds to explore issues of vital concern, share new ideas and perspectives, and experience the cultural richness around them.

A few years back I had the bright idea to launch a second podcast (Digital Campus being the first). It languished. In fact, I only ever managed to record three episodes. The last one was recorded in February 2008.

It’s time to retire the website, but I don’t want to lose what I believe is some valuable content, especially the conversation I had with friends shortly after Roy’s death. So, here it is. The entire run of History Conversations, “an occasional dialogue with historians and history lovers about their interests, their ideas, and their lives in history,” in a single post.

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Hello, World

In this pre-inaugural episode of History Conversations, Tom tests out his software and explains a little of the rationale behind the show. Join us in a couple weeks for our first conversation.

Running time: 4:41
Download the .mp3

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Episode 1 – Peter Liebhold

Tom kicks off the podcast with a conversation with Peter Liebhold, Chair and Curator of the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tom asks Peter about his daily work at the Museum, his straight and not-so-straight road into history, and the role of public history … and pledges not to go another four months between episodes.

Running time: 29:29
Download the .mp3

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Episode 2 – Roy Rosenzweig, In Memoriam

In Episode 2 we remember Roy Rosenzweig, friend, colleague and pioneer in all manner of public history. Guests Mike O’Malley (co-founder of the Center for History and New Media and Associate Professor of History at George Mason University), Steve Brier (Vice President for Information Technology and External Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center and co-founder the American Social History Project), and Josh Brown (Executive Director of the American Social History Project and Professor of History in the Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center) join Tom for a conversation about Roy’s life, work, and long commitment to democratizing history.

Running time: 32:22
Download the .mp3

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Episode 3 – A Look Back at Braddock

This month the volunteer historians of the Look Back at Braddock project join Tom for a conversation about the challenges and opportunities posed by local history. Located near the center of Fairfax County, Virginia, Braddock District has changed rapidly in the 20th century, and members of the community have taken it upon themselves to document the changes. Working largely without funding, John Browne, Mary Lipsey, Gil Donahue, and their colleagues have produced a rich oral history collection, a successful book, and a new website. What does it take for a group of committed amateurs to launch and sustain a multi-year history project and what keeps them going? Find out here in Episode 3 of History Conversations.

Running time: 31:42
Download the .mp3

Here is a partial list of places an easy workday’s drive from Pensacola, FL:

• Athens, GA
• Atlanta, GA
• Auburn, AL
• Baton Rouge, LA
• Beaumont, TX
• Biloxi, MS
• Birmingham, AL
• Chattanooga, TN
• Gainsville, FL
• Hattiesburg, MS
• Huntsville, AL
• Jackson, MS
• Jacksonville, FL
• Knoxville, TN
• Lake Charles, LA
• Macon, GA
• Memphis, TN
• Mobile, AL
• Montgomery, AL
• Nashville, TN
• New Orleans, LA
• Orlando, FL
• Oxford, MS
• Savannah, GA
• Shreveport, LA
• Tallahassee, FL
• Tampa, FL

If you live in or near one of these places, or if you plan to be at the National Council on Public History Annual Meeting next month, or if you just happen to be in Pensacola on the 5^th  of April, then you should come to THATCamp NCPH. It is open to everyone—not just people attending NCPH and not just public historians. Anyone with an interest in the humanities, technology, or both can attend for lots of creative unconference goodness. Registration closes tomorrow (March 15^th), so hurry up and nab your seat.

Things are looking up for digitally minded public historians. At least six new media focused tenure-track academic public history positions are open this fall, including:

• University of Central Florida, Director of Public History/Tenured Senior Associate or Full professor
• University of Central Florida, Assistant or Associate Professor in Digital and Public History
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Assistant Professor, Public History
• Loyola University Chicago, Assistant Professor, Public History
• American University, Public History, Assistant Professor
• UNC Greensboro, Public History, Assistant Professor

Happy hunting!

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.