Tom Scheinfeldt, co-director of the Omeka project along with Sharon Leon, shares the good news of a major upgrade to both the code and the website for the Center for History and New Media‘s online collection and exhibit software on Omeka’s blog.

The new version of Omeka has an even easier way to build an exhibit, wrap it in a design theme, and extend your site with plugins. Improved documentation and user support will help you along the way. For developers and geeks, the revamped theme API and plugin API make it simple to extend Omeka, or you can get involved with the project in other ways. And the Omeka team is about to make it a snap to import digital objects from a variety of repositories and other software.

You can find all of this goodness on the beautiful new Omeka site (below). Congrats to the hard-working Omeka team: Tom, Sharon, Jeremy Boggs, Jim Safley, Kris Kelly, Sheila Brennan, Dave Lester, and Ken Albers.

After nearly six months of extensive testing and tweaking, and with countless bug fixes done in progression with the movements of the Firefox 3 team, I’m pleased to report that the first version of Zotero that synchronizes with the much-awaited Zotero Server has been released for trial by the general public. Yes, you can now access your Zotero collection from anywhere and synchronize it across multiple machines (of any operating system). And of course the copy of your collection on our server means that you now have a free automatic backup of your Zotero library data.

[Long-time readers of this blog and my writing elsewhere know that this major update to Zotero was due some time ago; all I can say in my defense is that: 1) Firefox 3 was also supposed to be released last fall but finally was released at the end of June (and we needed Firefox 3 for the server versions of Zotero); 2) we've continued in the meantime to add dozens of new features and hundreds of new supported sites suggested in our forums to the "classic" version of Zotero; 3) synchronization of digital collections across multiple machines and our server is an outrageously difficult task (ask your local computer science guru); 4) we've also used the additional time to add functionality to Zotero 1.5 and subsequent versions that we believe will keep it far ahead of any commercial alternatives, and that will begin to enable Zotero's communication with the Internet Archive. OK, enough of the mea culpas. Let's get back to the exciting news.]

Although Zotero 1.5 maintains its easy-to-use iTunes-like interface, behind the scenes it includes a complex, robust communications and synchronization layer that provides the foundation for all subsequent releases of the software and our soon-to-come Zotero website and services, including public and private groups, collection sharing, and recommendations. This new layer also means that Zotero can begin to synchronize and link to other repositories, services, and applications on the Web. Although we have already gotten a lot of interest from outside software developers in creating extensions to Zotero, the new 1.5 will be another leap forward in allowing these developers to combine Zotero with whatever scholarly software or collections they are working on.

Other goodies we’ve thrown in (beyond this list of additions ported from 1.0) simply because we listen to our users and like to make them happy:

• Even though Zotero has beaten Endnote in head-to-head competition, one point of comparison that some people thought Zotero was inferior on was its lack of the thousands of citation styles available on that commercial program. We still believe that the open source style system we have adopted, CSL (created by Bruce D’Arcus), is far more flexible and robust than the citation style systems of Endnote and other tools, and when you really look at the supposed “thousands of Endnote styles” they are really just many of copies of a limited number of styles with different journal names stuck on. Nevertheless we decided to make this point of comparison moot. Zotero users can now use Endnote styles as well as CSL styles, although we still plan to aggressively build out from the dozens of CSLs currently available and strongly encourage the creation and use of CSLs.
• We have added preliminary support for ZeroConf. Let me translate the tech-speak: underneath the hood, Zotero now has the ability to broadcast collections over a local network, without going through the Zotero server. This means that a group of students in a classroom or academics at a conference can enable sharing and see and grab references or links from other users, much the same way that you can share your iTunes music library with others nearby. We plan to expand support for this feature in subsequent releases. (For now, it’s a bit hidden for testing.)

As always, when I use “we” in posts about Zotero, I mean our incredible team: the Center for History and New Media‘s Director of Research Projects Sean Takats (who has succeeded me in that role), Lead Developer Dan Stillman, Connie Sehat (former CHNM senior staffer who has just been hired as Emory‘s Director of Digital Scholarship), Zotero community liaison Trevor Owens, and the core developer team of Simon Kornblith, Jon Lesser, Michael Berkowitz, and Raymond Yee.

Why not take Zotero 1.5 for a spin (we include the normal caveats about beta software on our site, but in my experience it’s rather stable), extend it with plugins, or develop your own software for the Zotero platform?

I’m at the Center for History and New Media this weekend for our first annual THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp, a spontaneous, participant-generated 48 hours of collaborative advancement of the art of digital humanities. It has started off with a bang: almost 30 ad hoc sessions have been planned, ranging from search technologies to interface design to civic engagement.

Unfortunately we had enormous interest in THATCamp and had to limit the size of this year’s edition, but those who can’t be here can follow the proceedings live on Twitter (follow @thatcamp or my Twitter feed @dancohen), IRC (irc.freenode.net, port 7000, room thatcamp), or on Flickr (the THATCamp set).

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.