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As you can see on the site, the Clearinghouse will cover not only rich, open-access historical content and learning modules, but also useful material for professional development, including best practices and policy briefs for teachers.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.]

What began as a plucky “initiative” has now become a permanent “office.” The National Endowment for the Humanities will announce in a few hours that their Digital Humanities Initiative has now been given a full home, in recognition of how important digital technology and media are for the future of the humanities. The DHI has become the Office of Digital Humanities, with a new website and a new RSS feed for news. From the ODH welcome message:

The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) is an office within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Our primary mission is to help coordinate the NEH’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship. As in the sciences, digital technology has changed the way scholars perform their work. It allows new questions to be raised and has radically changed the ways in which materials can be searched, mined, displayed, taught, and analyzed. Technology has also had an enormous impact on how scholarly materials are preserved and accessed, which brings with it many challenging issues related to sustainability, copyright, and authenticity. The ODH works not only with NEH staff and members of the scholarly community, but also facilitates conversations with other funding bodies both in the United States and abroad so that we can work towards meeting these challenges.

Congrats to the NEH for this move forward.

It’s that time of year to help out open source projects you love by nominating them for the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC Awards), sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior recipients include beloved FOSS projects that have greatly benefited academia, including Moodle and Scriblio.

The deadline for nominations for the 2008 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC Awards) is April 14, 2008. The MATC Awards consist of up to ten $50,000 or $100,000 prizes, which a receiving institution can use in a variety of ways to continue its technology leadership. The awards honor not-for-profit institutions that have demonstrated exemplary leadership in the development of open source software for one or more of the constituencies served by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the arts and humanities in higher education; research libraries, museums; performing arts organizations; and conservation biology.

Awardees are selected by a distinguished committee of technology leaders, including Mitchell Baker, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, John Seely Brown, Vint Cerf, John Gage, and Tim O’Reilly. Previous winners include higher education institutions, libraries, and museums from North America, Europe, and Asia.

An online nomination form and more information may be found at http://matc.mellon.org.

From the beginning of the Zotero project, I’ve said that we have bigger fish to fry than citation management, although Zotero does that quite well, thank you very much. (Case in point: Zotero recently beat Endnote, RefWorks, and all of the other big citation managers in head-to-head competition at CiteFest.)

Zotero aims to be a digital research platform, and an extensible one at that. That’s why it’s gratifying and exciting to see the brilliant and incredibly useful Vertov plugin for Zotero. Vertov allows Zotero users to cut video and audio files into clips, annotate the clips, and integrate their annotations with other research sources and notes stored in Zotero. It has terrific functionality and should be ideal for use in the classroom as well as by film scholars and other researchers.

Congrats and many thanks to Concordia University’s Digital History Lab, led by Elena Razlogova, for conceptualizing and executing this great plugin.

And since it’s been a little while since I’ve done shameless cheerleading for Zotero, it’s humbling to get the recognition from PC Magazine that Zotero has, for the second year in a row, been declared one of the best free software applications.

A couple of years ago I first heard from Ross Scaife in a lengthy and incredibly intelligent response to a post on this blog. A few months later I met him—and befriended him—at a digital humanities conference, and we have had spirited conversations about scholarship and digital media ever since.

Very sadly, I learned today on the Stoa Consortium blog (which Ross founded) that Ross had finally succumbed to cancer this week at the heartbreakingly young age of 47.

Like my friend and colleague Roy Rosenzweig, who passed away five months ago from cancer, Ross approached his series of painful treatments with a bravery and even nonchalance that is frankly unfathomable to me. Until fairly recently he was still sending me upbeat, hilarious notes via email, and talking about hunting and fishing on Facebook.

In the digital world it’s sometimes easy to lose track of the real humans on the other side of the network. That was never the case with Ross. His humanity, kindness, and enthusiasm was instantly apparent to everyone he spoke to online and off.

I’ll miss him greatly.

[An announcement from Matt Kirschenbaum and our good friends at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.]

This spring the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities is pleased to present:

Ken Price on “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Ken’s abstract:

What are the implications of the terms we use to describe large-scale text-based electronic scholarship, especially undertakings that share some of the ambitions and methods of the traditional multi-volume scholarly edition? What genre or genres are we now working in? And how do the conceptions inhering in these choices of language frame and perhaps limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Drawing on a range of resources including the Walt Whitman Archive, I consider how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure our collective enterprise. In addition, I’ll use the final term, thematic research collection, to discuss yet-to-be-developed parts of the Whitman Archive dealing with place-based cultural analysis and translation studies as a way to illustrate the expansive possibilities of this new model of scholarship.

Our speaker will be Professor Kenneth Price, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Price received his B.A. from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and then earned both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. He is University Professor and Hillegass Chair of Nineteenth-Century American literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he also serves as co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Price is the author of over forty articles and author or editor of nine books. His most recent book is co-edited with Ed Folsom and with Susan Belasco, Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). His other recent books include Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work , co-authored with Folsom (Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and To Walt Whitman, America (University of North Carolina Press 2004), a main selection of The Readers Subscription, a national book club.

Since 1995 Price has served as co-director of The Walt Whitman Archive an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. The Whitman Archive has been awarded federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the U. S. Department of Education, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The Whitman Archive has received many honors, including the C. F. W. Coker award from the Society of American Archivists and a “We the People” grant from the NEH to build a permanent endowment to support ongoing editorial work.

We will meet on Tuesday, March 11 fom 4:00-6:30 PM in the McKeldin Special Events Room (6th floor, room 6137), McKeldin Library, on the University of Maryland campus in College Park. There will be an informal dinner downstairs in MITH after the forum, at a cost of $10 per person. Please RSVP to Matt Kirschenbaum (mgk[at]umd[dot]edu) by March 7, 2008 if you would like to have dinner (money will be collected at the door–please have cash).

Co-sponsored by the Center for History & New Media (CHNM) at George Mason, the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Rosenzweig Technology and Humanities Forum explores important issues in humanities computing and provide an opportunity for DC area scholars interested the uses of new technology in the humanities to meet and get acquainted.

McKeldin Library is located at the top of McKeldin Mall at the center of the University of Maryland, College Park campus. There is free shuttle service to campus from the College Park Metro station (Green line). Best parking for visitors is the lot next to Stamp Student Union, less than five minute walk to the Library.

The Digital Media and Learning Competition, administered by HASTAC and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, has announced the winning projects for 2007-2008. Projects include virtual worlds, social networking sites, fair use advocacy, gaming, and even homebrew science.

Today the Center for History and New Media launches another major software platform that we hope will be of great help to universities, libraries, museums, historians, researchers, and anyone else who would like to put a collection or exhibit online. It’s called Omeka, from the Swahili word meaning “to display or layout goods or wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack.” The public beta released today was underwritten by the generosity of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

I’ll get to the details momentarily, but I’ve found that it’s often helpful to brashly distill years of careful thought, design, and programming into a handy catchphrase that anyone can understand and pass around. For Zotero, it’s “like iTunes for your references and research”; for Omeka, think “WordPress for your exhibits and collections.”

As with Zotero, Omeka grew organically out of a strong need that we identified at CHNM over the last decade, as we built a series of projects that presented, and in some cases collected, historical artifacts. Projects such as the September 11 Digital Archive and associated work with institutions such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress made us realize how much work—and how much money—it takes for institutions (and individuals) to mount high-quality and flexible exhibits online, and to manage the underlying collections.

Omeka aims to simplify this entire process, save valuable resources, and create a free and open platform that the museum and library community, and anyone else, can enrich to by developing themes and plugins. The 150 institutions already using Omeka as part of our pre-beta, ranging from the small (North Carolina’s The Light Factory and Cultural & Heritage Museums‘ River Docs exhibit) to the large (the New York Public Library) have already responded to the ease-of-use and power of the platform.

[River Docs exhibit, powered by Omeka]

Not only can Omeka provide a high-gloss front end for an exhibit, but it also provides an equally nice-looking and flexible back end that hews to critical standards (such as Dublin Core). Here’s a sneak peek:

The Omeka start page.

Adding items is a simple process, but collections conform to library and museum metadata standards, and you can also use tags.

The theme-switching process and plugin architecture at the heart of Omeka will be familiar to users who are accustomed to working with popular blogging software, but Omeka includes a number of features that are directed specifically at academic, museum, and library use. First, the system functions using an archive built on a rigorous metadata scheme, allowing it to be interoperable with existing content management systems and all other Omeka installations. Second, Omeka includes a process for building narrative exhibits with flexible layouts.

The layout of your site can be changed with a single click.

These two features alone provide cultural institutions with the power to increase their web presence and to showcase the interpretive expertise of curators, archivists, and historians. But Omeka’s plugin architecture also allows users to do much more to extend their exhibits to include maps, timelines, and folksonomies, and it provides the APIs (application programming interfaces) that open-source developers and designers need to add additional functionality to suit their own institutions’ particular needs. In turn, a public plugins and themes directory will allow these community developers to donate their new tools back to the rest of Omeka users. The Omeka team is eager to build a large and robust community of open-source developers around this suite of technologies.

You can learn much more about Omeka on its website. Credit goes to the fantastic Omeka team: directors Tom Scheinfeldt and Sharon Leon; developer and manager Jeremy Boggs; manager Sheila Brennan; and developers Kris Kelly, Dave Lester, Jim Safley, and Jon Lesser.

Joining the growing network of CHNM podcasts (which includes Digital Campus, Tom Scheinfeldt’s History Conversations, and occasional podcasts from our many online projects) is THAT Podcast: The Humanities and Technology Podcast. The podcast, available in both video and audio, is the brainchild of CHNM’s Creative Lead, Jeremy Boggs, and one of CHNM’s crack web developers, Dave Lester.

And what an incredible way to start the podcast: Jeremy and Dave interview Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress. Matt has a number of interesting observations about the role of blogs in academia and how to run a successful open source software project. Jeremy and Dave also demonstrate how to install their ScholarPress Courseware course management plugin, which can be used to set up a course website and blog.

It was nice to see the Zotero project covered on the front page of the Washington Post yesterday in the article “Internet Access Is Only Prerequisite For More and More College Classes.” Also nice to see a quotation at the end of the article from yours truly about the movement in higher ed toward open tools and resources.