“History isn’t rocket science.” I distinctly remember Frank Turner, my mentor at Yale, saying that to me in 1995 over a beer on Charlotte Street in London after a day looking at documents in the Royal Society archive. “What did you see?” What I had seen was a number of documents showing a famous mathematician trying to solve religious problems using equations. “Well, then that’s what you have to write about.”

Frank suddenly passed away today from a stroke at 66—devastating, incredibly sad news. I’ll miss him for so many reasons—most of all, he was just such a nice, caring individual, and so whip-smart about many things. I’m still deeply influenced by his pragmatic view of history, not as a complex theoretical realm but quite frequently as a process of simply recognizing what’s in front of you.

Frank’s body of work showed the power of simply recognizing what was in front of you. His first book vaulted past stale discussions about the war between science and religion in the Victorian era by showing that there were many intellectuals caught between the two supposed poles—something that should have been obvious to any close reader of Victorian thought but which had been denied by decades of “war between science and religion” talk.

A word that Frank used a lot was “unnoticed”—that is, the past is often lying in plain sight, but our preconceptions prevent us from seeing it. In his groundbreaking essay “The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith That Was Lost,” he noticed that this crisis began during an intensification of religion through evangelicalism, the language of which (a return to purity, an emphasis on reform) was soon turned against existing faith. In other works he noticed the strong effect that debt and bankruptcy had on the supposedly detached thought of Victorian thinkers—they were human, after all.

Frank had seriously good taste in the important things in life: ideas (Hume), art (J.M.W. Turner), architecture (Louis Kahn), the landscape (rural New England, the Cotswolds), wine (BurgundyBordeaux), dogs (English setters). But he approached these pleasures not as landed gentry or a stereotypical Yale professor but as someone who had come from modest means in Ohio and had stumbled, almost giddily, on the joys of history and the senses. He had a historic 300-year-old saltbox in Guilford, Connecticut, that he had tastefully modified (just before the preservationists disallowed such changes) to hold a substantial personal library and writing room, and a large kitchen for dinner parties. Frank had a great laugh, and was not stingy with it. He could tell you rather specifically why a painting was great and then just stand back and smile at its greatness.

Frank was so shrewd about so many things—he had a deft understanding of Victorian history, of modern intellectual history, the workings of the academy, human nature. He also had several major phases to his career, including a stint as provost and more recently the director of the Beinecke rare books library at Yale. Just two months ago he was appointed the overall University Librarian.

I had been talking to him for the last few years about the future of libraries and the humanities in a digital age. A decade ago I think he was slightly depressed that I had veered into the digital humanities. But he called me after seeing Google Books for the first time—what was in front of him—and immediately got that this was something he had to understand better. I have no doubt that he would have been an incredible librarian who would have honored tradition while also moving one of the world’s great library systems forward; yet another facet to this tremendous loss.

This fall Frank and I were having a long back-and-forth about the future of peer review, some of which I may redact and publish in this space. I wish we could have finished that discussion, and that I could have gotten more of his advice, on this and so many other topics.

For now, I just want to honor Frank Turner, may he rest in peace. He was a great mentor, scholar, and friend. I will deeply miss him.

I’m hopeful that one of the readers of this blog will fit the bill for this critical job on the Zotero team. Please think about joining us at the Center for History and New Media, a vibrant, fun place to work.

Hopefully it doesn’t sound this way to our audience, but it’s harder than one might imagine to put together a regular podcast. Due to our very busy schedules and some happy and sad events over the past few months, Mills, Tom, and I just weren’t able to find the time this summer to record a Digital Campus. But we return with renewed energy this week with episode 43 of the podcast, covering a lot of news and views. Get ready for commentary on the Google Books settlement, Google Wave, new ebook readers, and the real-time web as the Digital Campus podcast sharpens its #2 pencils for the new school year. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

I’m giving the plenary at the “Future Perfect” conference today in Waco, TX. For the audience, here are some links:

• You can send me comments or questions live via Twitter. Send a reply to @dancohen and it will pop up on my screen.
• Introduction to Digital History: The Advantages and Disadvanges of Digital Media and Technology
• The September 11 Digital Archive
• Flickr Commons
• Skype/Call Recorder
• Mapping What Americans Did on September 11
• Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
• Preservation chapter of Digital History
• Domesday Book/Domesday Project

Here in Washington, the compound adjective of the moment is “shovel-ready.” That’s the description of stimulus projects that are ready to go on the day President-elect Obama takes office. For the most part, as the term implies, it refers to large infrastructure projects like the building of new roads or bridges.

But one obvious project that’s also ready to go on day one is the scanning of the contents of the Library of Congress. Today there’s a ceremonial event at the LC to showcase the thousands of books already scanned as part of the LC’s partnership with the Internet Archive, and to highlight the potential of a mass digitization project. It goes without saying that this project could be extended easily to other cultural heritage institutions. IA already has a dedicated scanning center in the LC, and just needs the funds to expand its project.

Let’s all tell our representatives to support such an effort. Given that the “HYP Solution” I advocated last spring is now extremely unlikely to happen given the sharp downturn in university endowments, let’s do what should have been done in the first place. Let’s not leave mass digitization to Google. Scanning all public domain books in the Library of Congress is pocket change compared to other investment projects, and like roads, it is infrastructure that will have enormous utility for decades to come.

Shovel-ready, move over. We’re scanner-ready.

[Image credit: ethanz]

I wanted to mention (slightly belatedly) some exciting developments related to the award-winning Omeka platform for museums, libraries, and other scholarly content providers. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation has generously given the Center for History and New Media two grants to add functionality within and beyond Omeka, functionality that I believe says a lot about where both Kress and CHNM think technology is headed in 2009.

First, as we’ve been saying for the last two years on the Digital Campus podcast, we believe expansion into mobile technology is critical for universities, libraries, and museums. There’s still too great a focus on the (desktop/laptop) web. We’re going to do a thorough survey of the use of cell phones and other mobile devices in art museums, out of which will come a series of recommendations about the best use of mobile technology. Moreover, we’re going to produce a suite of prototypes and proofs of concept based on these recommendations.

The Omeka team is already moving full-speed ahead to enable Omeka installations to take advantage of the latest modes of mobile use. By this spring, any Omeka-based site will look great on iPhones and many other smartphones through built-in Mobile Safari and Opera Mini stylesheets. In addition, we’ll release a barcode plug-in to allow institutions to add cell phone readable barcodes to labels in physical exhibits. When visitors to these exhibit aim their camera phones at these barcodes, they will be taken to an Omeka page with more information on the object. Also on the docket are iPhone and Android applications for the Omeka administrative interface (manage and build Omeka items and collections from your handheld; summer 2009), and geotagging, geolocation, and GPS-related services.

We are obviously strong believers in the idea of plug-in architectures. (Firefox has benefited greatly from this ecology of “add-ons,” as has the Zotero project.) A second Kress grant will enable Omeka to add some helpful plug-ins to the dozen plug-ins that are already available. New plug-ins include a CDWA Lite (Categories for the Description of Works of Art Lite) harvester and implementation; Cooliris 3D visualization; and image annotation for MyOmeka, the plug-in that lets visitors save individual items to a personal collection.

The Digital Campus podcast team has a great time doing its second annual year-end review, looking back at 2008′s top ten trends in the intersection between technology and academia, libraries, and museums. And we look forward to 2009 with a set of broad and specific predictions. See if you can guess the top story of the year (this year with an excellent drum roll courtesy of our sound engineer, Misha Vinokur), and make your own 2009 predictions over at the Digital Campus site. You know you like year-end Top 10 countdowns; go check out the final Digital Campus for 2008! [Subscribe to this podcast.]

Looks like another great series of talks at the home of our friends on the other side of the beltway, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. I’m going to try to catch at least a couple of these “digital dialogues.”

The 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition proposals are due October 15. Run by HASTAC and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, this year’s theme is “Participatory Learning.” From the announcement:

Participatory Learning includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together.

Applications for the fourth competition for the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program are due on October 2. Run by the American Council of Learned Societies and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,

this program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. It is hoped that projects of successful applicants will help advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating further such works.

I was lucky enough to get one of these ACLS fellowships in the first year of the program, and it was invaluable for my work on the project that became Zotero.

Last March I was lucky enought to go to, and give a talk at, the 2008 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World in sunny Miami Beach, Florida. Speakers from the conference were asked to write up their talks for a special edition of First Monday, which is now out. If you want to get a sense of how Web 2.0 is starting to affect libraries, museums, and scholars, it’s worth reading. My contribution, “Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem: Building Connections in the Zotero Project,” focuses on the importance of the unglamorous but critical work of connecting digital tools and repositories together via APIs, standards, and openness.