Found History

During a discussion of e-book readers on a recent episode of Digital Campus, I made a comparison between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPod which I think more or less holds up. Just as Apple revolutionized a fragmented, immature digital music player market in the early 2000s with an elegant, intuitive new device (the iPod) and [...]

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I’m very happy to report that CHNM has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities under its Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities program to do for the summer scholarly institute what THATCamp is doing for the scholarly conference. Under the banner of “better, faster, lighter”—as well as more pragmatic, [...]

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Via Mashable, yet another timeline service: Timetoast.
Many readers will have seen this already, but Robert Darton’s February piece in The New York Review of Books is the most readable discussion I have seen of the Google Books settlement.
Fresh + New(er), the Powerhouse Museum’s always interesting blog, describes that museum’s recent open house for local [...]

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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 [...]

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Ahoy, Mateys! Mills Kelly’s fall semester course “Lying about the Past” was revealed today in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read how Mills and his students perpetrated an internet hoax about “the last American pirate” and what they learned in the process. The Chronicle is, unfortunately, gated, but you can read more on Mills’ fantastic [...]

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Feeling increasingly alienated by commercial software companies and increasingly uncomfortable with my absurd level of Mac lust, I finally decided this weekend to get off the Apple train and make the switch to Linux.
Until I’m sure I’ve worked out all the kinks, I’m running a dual boot setup of Ubuntu 8.10b and Mac 0S 10.5 [...]

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Let me join the choruses celebrating WordCamp Ed, which makes its debut in Fairfax on November 22, 2008. Organized by CHNM and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown (but mainly by our own Dave Lester), WordCamp Ed will bring together teachers of all stripes to talk about educational uses [...]

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Congratulations to the Omeka dev team (especially Jeremy Boggs, Kris Kelly, Dave Lester, and Jim Safley), which today announced the release of version 0.10 alpha, the first major release of Omeka since February’s 0.9.0. For those of you who don’t know about Omeka, it is CHNM’s next generation web publishing platform for collections-based research, one [...]

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Listeners to the most recent episode of Digital Campus will know that I’m a fairly heavy user of Twitter, the weirdly addictive and hard-to-describe microblogging and messaging service. But anyone who uses the wildly popular service regularly will also know that the company’s service architecture has not scaled very well. During the last month [...]

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A few quick notes from the National Council on Public History annual meeting in Louisville, KY.
Bill Turkel has a terrific post on the nonlinear character of many academic careers, comparing planning our professional trajectories to solving nonlinear optimization problems in mathematics. “Nonlinear” definitely describes my own career path, and Bill provides his own poignant nonlinear [...]

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