Daniel J. Cohen
Education
Yale University (1992-1999)
- Ph.D. in History awarded 1999, winner of the George Washington Egleston Prize
- Dissertation Topic: “Symbols of Heaven, Symbols of Man: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Religion”
- M.Phil. awarded 1995
- Passed Oral Examinations with Distinction, 1994
Harvard University (1990-1992)
- M.T.S. awarded 1992
- Concentration in the History of Religion in the Modern West
Princeton University (1986-1990)
- B.A. awarded 1990
- Major in Religion
- Certificate in the History of Science
Publications
Books
Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Co-authored with Roy Rosenzweig.
Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Learning from the Blog: An Academic Approach to the Vernacular Web. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming.
Articles
“Engaging and Creating Virtual Communities,” Proceedings of the Cultural Heritage Online Conference (Florence: Italian Ministry of Culture, 2010), 29-32.
“Digital History Interchange,” Journal of American History 95 (September 2008), 1-40. Co-authored with seven others.
“Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem: Building Connections in the Zotero Project,” First Monday, August 2008.
“The Promise of Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship,” Perspectives, May 2007.
“No Computer Left Behind,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 February 2006, B6-8. Co-authored with Roy Rosenzweig.
“From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,” D-Lib Magazine 12 (March 2006).
“Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet,” First Monday 10 (December 2005). Co-authored with Roy Rosenzweig.
“Reasoning and Belief in Victorian Mathematics,” in Martin Daunton, ed., The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press/The British Academy, 2005), 139-158.
“The Future of Preserving the Past,” CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2 (Summer 2005), 6-19.
“By the Book: Assessing the Place of Textbooks in U.S. Survey Courses,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005), 1405-1415.
“History and the Second Decade of the Web,” Rethinking History 8 (June 2004), 293-301.
“Digital History: The Raw and the Cooked,” Rethinking History 8 (June 2004), 337-340.
Reviews
“Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA: A Documentary History,” Web site review, Journal of American History 94 (March 2008).
“Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley,” Web site review, Journal of American History 89 (December 2002), 1183-1184.
Awards and Fellowships
George Mason University Faculty Fellowship, 2007-8
American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2006-7 (inaugural recipient)
George Washington Egleston Prize, awarded for “Symbols of Heaven, Symbols of Man: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Religion,” 1999
Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1996-1997
Whiting Dissertation Fellowship winner, 1996
Pew Charitable Trusts Fellowship, 1996
Mellon Dissertation Research Fellowship, 1996
John F. Enders Grant, 1995-1996
Yale University Fellowship, 1992-1997
Harvard University Fellowship, 1990-1992
Grants
Digital Methods Training at Scale: Leveraging THATCamp Through a Regional System, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $264,000, Co-Primary Investigator, 2010-2012.
Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, $100,000, Primary Investigator, 2010-2011.
National History Education Clearinghouse, funded by the Department of Education, approx. $7,000,000, Co-Executive Producer, 2007-2012
Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research With Text-Mining and Analysis Tool, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, $340,000, Primary Investigator, 2008-2010
Zotero Commons (zotero.org), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $514,000, Lead Primary Investigator, 2008-2009
Zotero 2.0 (zotero.org), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $890,000, Lead Primary Investigator, 2006-2008
Zotero 1.0 (zotero.org), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, $250,000, Co-Primary Investigator, 2006-2007
Echo 2 (echo.gmu.edu), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, $700,000, Co-Director, 2004-2008
Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (hurricanearchive.org), funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, $250,000, Co-Director, 2006-2008
Preserving the Record of the Dot-Com Era, funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, $143,000 (part of a larger grant to the University of Maryland), Director, 2006-2008
Scholarly software for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ EDSITEment project, funded by NEH, $150,000, Co-Director, 2005-2007
September 11 Digital Archive (911digitalarchive.org), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, $750,000, Co-Director, 2002-2004
Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online (echo.gmu.edu), funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, $720,000, Co-Director, 2001-2004
Academic Experience
2008-Present George Mason University
- Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and Director of the Center for History and New Media
2003-2007 George Mason University
- Assistant Professor, Department of History and Art History, and Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media
2001-2003 George Mason University
- Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow at the Center for History and New Media
- Graduate Courses: Science and Modern Life from Frankenstein to the Atomic Bomb Europe, 1800 to the Present Readings in the History of Science
- At the Center for History and New Media: Co-Director of the September 11 Digital Archive (www.911digitalarchive.org) and the Echo project (echo.gmu.edu)
1997-2001 Yale University
- Lecturer, Department of History
- Taught Directed Studies, Yale’s Western Civilization/great books survey, for three years
- Seminars: Science in Culture, 1800-1914 Religion in Modern Europe, 1900 to the Present Liberal and Radical Thought in Modern Britain The Conservative Tradition in Modern Britain Victorian Britain Faith and Reason in the Nineteenth Century
- Mellon Forum (senior thesis discussion program) director for Branford College
- Senior thesis advisor freshman and sophomore advisor
- Elected as Fellow of Branford College
1993-1996 Yale University
- Teaching Fellow
- Led sections in American Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century European Thought and Culture from Rousseau to Nietzsche Europe, 1648 to the Present The Holocaust in Historical Perspective
Selected Presentations and Papers Given
“The Perfect and the Good Enough in Digital Humanities,” Stanford Humanities Center, May 4, 2007.
“Emerging Themes and Methods of Humanities Research,” Panelist, Annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies, Montreal, May 11, 2007.
“Can Today’s Scientific Data Be Preserved? The Specter of a ‘Digital Dark Age,’” Information Science and Technology Colloquium Series, NASA Goddard, Greenbelt, MD, April 11, 2007.
“Introduction to Zotero,” Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, November 5-6, 2006, Rosslyn, VA, August 4, 2006.
“Possibilities and Problems of Digital History and Digital Collections,” Society of American Archivists conference, Washington, DC, August 4, 2006.
“Using New Media in Historical Study,” American Historical Association summer meeting for administrators, August 3, 2006.
“Digital Tools at the Center for History and New Media,” Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries, conference sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Washington, DC, October 2005.
Speaker at the Scholarly Communications Institute, sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Mellon Foundation, Charlottesville, VA, July 2005.
“Adding the Web to the Historian’s Research Toolkit,” The New Web of History, conference sponsored by the Dibner Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2003.
“Making Digital Collections Available Online,” New Media Pioneers panel, National University Telecommunications Network Annual Conference, Washington, DC, June 2002.
“Victorian Mathematics,” The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain Conference, sponsored by the British Academy and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Cambridge University, May 2002.
“The Historian’s Toolkit,” Coalition for Networked Information Meeting, Washington, DC, April 2002.
“Exploring and Collecting History Online: Science and Technology,” Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, San Jose, CA, September 2001.
“God and Mathematics in Nineteenth-Century Academia,” American Society of Church History Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, January 1999.
“Unitarianism and the ‘Ideality’ of Mathematics in the Nineteenth Century,” Pew American Religious History Conference, New Haven, CT, May 1997.
