If you’ve been interested in CHNM’s Omeka software but would like to try it before you buy it (for $0 since it’s open source), there’s now a demo version for you to check out. While you can already find many examples of Omeka in action on the web, the sandbox allows everyone to play with the administrative interface behind Omeka, including collections management and exhibit construction. That back end is, of course, as well designed as the front end due to our great design and development team.

On this episode of the Digital Campus podcast we wrestle with how to keep open access/open source educational resources and tools sustainable for the long run. Mills elaborates on some of his ideas about a “freemium” business model for higher ed, and Tom and I explain the dilemma from the perspective of large academic software projects. We also debate whether laptops are a distraction in the classroom, among other topics in the news roundup and picks of the week. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

The Center for History and New Media has just publicly launched a massive, multi-year project and website: the National History Education Clearinghouse.

With major funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the Clearinghouse is designed to help K-12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom. The project builds on and disseminates the valuable lessons learned by more than 800 Teaching American History projects, which the Dept. of Ed’s Office of Innovation and Improvement underwrote to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge and understanding of traditional U.S. history. At the Center we have done five of these TAH projects, using new media to enhance and rethink the acquisition of historical knowledge and theory.

As you can see on the site, the Clearinghouse will cover not only rich, open-access historical content and learning modules, but also useful material for professional development, including best practices and policy briefs for teachers. CHNM has partnered with the Stanford University History Education Group to produce the Clearinghouse.

Congratulations to all of the CHNMers who have been burning the midnight oil and a lot of CPU cycles to get this beautiful and enormously helpful site up in only three months: Director of Education Kelly Schrum, Director of Public Projects Sharon Leon, Project Managers Lee Ann Ghajar and Teresa DeFlitch, Project Associate Jane Heckley Kon, Lead Web Designer Laura Veprek, Lead Programmer Jon Lesser, and of course our trusty (and overworked) Webmaster, Ammon Shepherd.

[N.B.: I accidentally leaked this launch notice a month ago for a few hours, so this post might look familiar to those who check their RSS reader frequently. The NHEC has now, truly, launched.]

Looks like a good and timely topic for this year’s Chicago DHCS Colloquium:

The goal of the annual Chicago Digital Humanities/Computer Science (DHCS) Colloquium is to bring together researchers and scholars in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research. In 2006, the first DHCS Colloquium examined the challenges and opportunities posed by the “million books” digitization projects. The second DHCS Colloquium in 2007 focused on searching and querying as tools and methodologies.

The theme of the third Chicago DHCS Colloquium is “Making Sense”- an exploration of how meaning is created and apprehended at the transition of the digital and the analog.

Brett Bobley announces a new program from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities: the Humanities High Performance Computing initiative. There was an inkling of this program at last April’s Digital Humanities Summit, when the Department of Energy noted it was willing to donate CPU cycles on its supercomputers for humanities scholars.

Last summer, a few blocks from my house, a new pub opened. Normally this would not be worth noting, except for the fact that this bar is staffed completely by pirates, with eye patches, swords, and even the occasional bird on the shoulder. These are not real pirates, of course, but modern men and women dressed up as pirates. But they wear the pirate garb with no hint of irony or thespian affect whatsoever; these are dedicated, earnest pirates.

At this point I should note that I do not live in Orlando, Florida, or any other place devoted to make-believe, but in a sleepy suburb of Washington, D.C., that is filled with Very Serious Professionals. When the pirate pub opened, the neighborhood VSPs (myself very much included) concluded that it was strange and silly and that it was an incontrovertible fact that no one would patronize the place. Or if they did, it would be as a lark.

We clung to this belief for approximately 24 hours, until, upon a casual stroll by the storefront, we witnessed six pirate-garbed pubgoers outside. Singing sea chanteys. Without sheet music. The tavern has been filled ever since.

Such an experience usefully reminds oneself that there are ways of acting and thinking that we can’t understand or anticipate. Who knew that there was a highly developed pirate subculture, and that it thrived among the throngs of politicos and think-tankers and professors of Washington? Who are these people?

My thoughts turned to pirates during my experience at a workshop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a week ago, which was devoted to the digitization of the unparalleled Southern Historical Collection, and—in a less obvious way—to thinking about the past and future of humanities scholarship. Dozens of historians came to the workshop to discuss the way in which the SHC, the source of so many books and articles about the South and the home of 16 million archival documents, should be put on the web.

I gave the keynote, which I devoted to prodding the attendees into recognizing that the future of archives and research might not be like the past, and I showed several examples from my work and the work of CHNM that used different ways of searching and analyzing documents that are in digital, rather than analog, forms. Longtime readers of this blog will remember some of the examples, including an updated riff on what a future historian might learn about the state of religion in turn-of-the-century America by data mining our September 11 Digital Archive.

The most memorable response from the audience was from an award-winning historian I know from my graduate school years, who said that during my talk she felt like “a crab being lowered into the warm water of the pot.” Behind the humor was the difficult fact that I was saying that her way of approaching an archive and understanding the past was about to be replaced by techniques that were new, unknown, and slightly scary.

This resistance to thinking in new ways about digital archives and research was reflected in the pre-workshop survey of historians. Extremely tellingly, the historians surveyed wanted the online version of the SHC to be simply a digital reproduction of the physical SHC:

With few exceptions, interviewees believed that the structure of the collection in the virtual space should replicate, not obscure, the arrangement of the physical collection. Thus, navigating a manuscript collection online would mimic the experience of navigating the physical collection, and the virtual document containers—e.g., folders—and digital facsimiles would map clearly back to the physical containers and documents they represent. [Laura Clark Brown and David Silkenat, “Extending the Reach of Southern Sources,” p. 10]

In other words, in the age of Google and advanced search tools and techniques, most historians just want to do their research they way they’ve always done it, by taking one letter out of the box at a time. One historian told of a critical moment in her archival work, when she noticed a single word in a letter that touched off the thought that became her first book.

So in Chapel Hill I was the pirate with the strange garb and ways of behaving, and this is a good lesson for all boosters of digital methods within the humanities. We need to recognize that the digital humanities represent a scary, rule-breaking, swashbuckling movement for many historians and other scholars. We must remember that these scholars have had—for generations and still in today’s graduate schools—a very clear path for how they do their work, publish, and get rewarded. Visit archive; do careful reading; find examples in documents; conceptualize and analyze; write monograph; get tenure.

We threaten all of this. For every time we focus on text mining and pattern recognition, traditionalists can point to the successes of close reading—on the power of a single word. We propose new methods of research when the old ones don’t seem broken. The humanities have an order, and we, mateys, threaten to take that calm ship into unknown waters.

[Image credit: &y.]

We were incredibly lucky to get two of the most sophisticated programming gurus in the humanities, Bill Turkel and Steve Ramsey, on the podcast this week. Bill and Steve are both committed to teaching other humanities scholars how to get started with programming, and they provide a number of terrific points and insights into the process in our feature story. If you’ve ever wanted to pick up programming or know someone who does, it’s definitely worth a listen (or worth passing on the link). We also take a look at the launch of Google App Engine, which raises questions about outsourcing, and myLOC.gov, which raises questions about whether digital collections should have their own personalization tools. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

This is obviously a critical position at an incredibly important institution for the future of the digital humanities. I hope someone in the audience for this blog—or someone you know—is up to the task and the calling.

The Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) in the Center for the Study of the American South seeks a Coordinator of Oral History Digital Initiatives to oversee the SOHP’s participation in a three-year, cross-university collaboration focused on “the long civil rights movement,” stretching back to the 1940s and continuing with the extension of struggles for social justice into new arenas after the 1960s. Competitive applicants must demonstrate expertise in oral history research and the use of digital technologies in the humanities. Reporting to the SOHP’s Director and working alongside the Associate Director, the Coordinator will help to plan, supervise, and evaluate student fieldwork conducted throughout the project. The Coordinator will assume primary responsibility for the creative use of digital technologies and of new forms of collaborative research, interpretation, and ultimately publication. Tasks will include managing relationships with on-site and virtual scholarly collaborators and the selection, scholarly annotation, and contextualization of oral history materials for use in digital archives and other publishing experiments. In addition, the Coordinator will help to plan and implement a conference on the long civil rights movement in the spring of 2009. The ideal candidate will have both academic and administrative experience and must be able to work independently on long-term projects, while at the same time performing an array of short-term tasks in a collaborative setting. The position requires excellent oral and written, interpersonal, and organizational skills; familiarity with new media; and the ability to build cross- and off-campus partnerships. PhD in U.S. history preferred or MA and two years of relevant experience. Salary Range $50,000-$55,000. To begin fall 2008. Candidates should be aware that this is a time-limited position and funding is not assured for longer than three years. Please submit a letter of application, c.v, and three letters of recommendation to: Search Committee, Coordinator of Oral History Digital Initiatives, Southern Oral History Program, Love House and Hutchins Forum, 410 East Franklin St., CB# 9127, UNC-CH. Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127. Review of applications will begin March 15 and continue until the position is filled. UNC is an equal opportunity employer.

Take a look at this list of free and open textbooks. (Found this page a couple of clicks away from a helpful post at Peter Suber’s Open Access News.) Now note the stark imbalance between the number of science textbooks listed here and the number of humanities textbooks. Why is this?

It seems to me like there is a great opportunity here for funders, with potentially an incredible return on investment. Texas alone spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on textbooks like the U.S. History survey. For less than a million dollars a high-quality free and open textbook could be produced, with print on demand producing paper copies where needed and with a slight markup on those printed versions possibly covering ongoing expenses for updating the work.

[More on open source textbooks from Inside Higher Ed today.]

[Creative Commons image credit.]