ScholarPress: Open Source Digital Tools for Teaching and Research
Project Item Type Metadata
Title
ScholarPress: Open Source Digital Tools for Teaching and Research
Description
ScholarPress is a suite of tools that will enable humanities scholars far more control of how they teach and present their research. We will develop three tools: Courseware, Researcher, and Vitaware. Courseware will allow instructors to easily publish course websites that incorporate digital resources and encourage critical analysis that is central to the humanities. Researcher will help humanities scholars collaborate by making it easy to aggregate and cite resources from various online collection services. Vitaware will provide scholars with a “live” feed of their traditional and digital scholarship. These tools will help manage digital identities—scholarly production that is visible online through course websites, blogs, and CVs—that are becoming more central to work in the humanities. In short, ScholarPress will lower the intimidating technical barrier for humanists to thoughtfully engage with new media and to facilitate digital discourse in the humanities.
The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University proposes to create an online exhibit that uses the contours and major events in Martha Washington’s life to introduce visitors to the experiences of women’s lives during the 18th century, including women’s access to property and education, their role in the Revolution, their thoughts on the promises of rights called for in the founding documents, as well as their everyday experiences of marriage, motherhood, labor, sickness, and death. In each case, these issues will be explored through the documents, artifacts, and events of Martha Washington’s life and the lives of the women she lived, socialized, and corresponded with. An interpretive web exhibit will draw a whole new universe of users to Mount Vernon’s materials. The estate draws visitors from around the nation, but with every season only a limited number of Americans can make the journey to Virginia to view the mansions, the gardens, and the museum and education center. This site will reach out to history enthusiasts, teachers and students, and members of the general public to introduce them to often overlooked aspects of the Colonial and Early American experience.
To mark the 400th anniversary of the English settlement of Jamestown, CHNM has created Virginia 400, a portal for finding, teaching, and learning about Virginia History on the web. Pulling from the extensive resources of award-winning projects such as History Matters, Exploring US History, and the September 11 Digital Archive, and building on lessons learned working directly with Virigina teachers on several Teaching American History grants, VA 400 provides one-stop shopping for teachers, including more than two dozen lesson plans and teaching modules, student polls, and an automated “Syllabus Finder.” VA 400 also offers guidance for more casual visitors, including a directory of nearly one hundred websites and reviews of the best online resources for Virginia History.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution
Project Item Type Metadata
Title
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution
Description
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION provides an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution as well as an extraordinary archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs.
Women, World History, and the Web: Teaching and Learning Through Online Primary Sources
Project Item Type Metadata
Title
Women, World History, and the Web: Teaching and Learning Through Online Primary Sources
Description
Women, World History, and the Web creates an online curriculum resource center to help high school and college world history teachers and their students locate and analyze primary sources dealing with the history of women around the world. The materials in this project will encourage more teachers to integrate the latest scholarship in the history of women and world history into their courses and will give students a more sophisticated framework for understanding global women’s history.
Start Date
07/01/2003
End Date
06/30/2006
Proposal Co-Authors
Roy Rosenzweig
Director(s)
Mills Kelly
Kelly Schrum
Manager(s)
Sharon Leon
Kristin Lehner
Web Designer(s)
Stephanie Hurter
Paula Petrick
Programmers
Rikk Mulligan
Staff Members
Rustin Crandall
Katharina Hering
Content Experts
Peter Stearns
Jean Allman
Antoinette Burton
Donna Guy
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Nora E. Jaffary
Nancy Wingfield
Judith P. Zinsser
Joan Bristol
Sumaiya Hamdani
Yevette Richards Jordan
Jitka Malekcova
Maureen Miller
Brian Platt
Dina M. Copelman
Beverly Mack
Marjorie Bingham
Marilynn Jo Hitchens
Heidi Roupp
Susan Gross
Tom Hatch
Mary H. Rojas
Patricia G. Avery
Bob Bain
Anne Chapman
Sara Evans
Gretchen Kreuter
Meryll Page
Margaret Strobel
Deliverables
1. Women in World History Curriculum Modules: Each online curriculum module will include the following: a) A brief contextualizing essay (ca. 1000-1500 words) that provides background and addresses issues of translation, and cross-cultural and time-period comparison. b) Eight to twelve primary source documents (including diaries, letters, photographs, artwork, news reports, public records, maps, speeches, songs, oral histories, and film), already translated by scholars. c) Probing questions that teachers and students can use to begin discussion of the documents and topics. Questions will emphasize strategies for reading the primary sources. d) Discussion questions that challenge students to think about the issues raised in a larger context of world history, with an emphasis on cross-cultural contact and globalization. These questions will highlight connections and comparisons with other modules and cross reference modules. e) A password-protected section of the site reserved for teachers will offer discussions of teaching strategies centered on the specific topics and primary sources as well as possible ways to answer the questions provided. f) Links to other relevant materials and resources on the web.
A vast, free historical archive has emerged on the Internet. New technology, together with millions of dollars in government and foundation funding, has democratized access to the historical record in ways unimaginable. The potential represented by this development has only been partially realized because most students lack the skills to decipher historical texts and to synthesize them into coherent narratives. Many teachers are similarly ill prepared.This project addresses the paradox of an abundance of historical texts and a dearth of students and teachers able to read these texts in sophisticated ways. Rather than seeing new technology as the problem, we want to make technology part of the solution. We want to develop web-based resources for teachers and students that will democratize historical understanding and promote core features of academic literacy. We propose a three-year project that will create resources for teachers and students in the basic U.S. history survey course taught regularly in high schools, community colleges, and colleges.
Start Date
01/01/2005
End Date
06/30/2008
Proposal Co-Authors
Roy Rosenzweig
Sam Wineburg
Manager(s)
Sharon Leon
Web Designer(s)
Stephanie Hurter
Programmers
Jeremy Boggs
Josh Greenberg
Rikk Mulligan
Staff Members
Meagan Hess
Content Experts
Michael O'Malley
Affiliates
Daisy Martin
Chauncey Monte-Sano
Avishag Reisman
Julie Park,
Brad Fogo
Deliverables
1. project ideas and website development - one-week intensive workshop, select and create materials, beta version of one complete module and outlines of the design and interface for three additional modules.
2. prototyping and testing the site with diverse groups of teachers and students (high school, community college, and public university levels. Continue work on modules, videotape classroom experiences. Complete beta versions of four modules.
3. complete site and gather formal evaluation information at the different sites. Dissemination through traveling graduate student, workshops, and additional networks.
Connecticut History is a project of Connecticut Humanities in partnership with CHNM and Connecticut Explored. The website is designed to serve as a home for stories about the people, traditions, innovations, and events that make up the rich history of Connecticut.
Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent
Project Item Type Metadata
Title
Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent
Description
The With Criminal Intent project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline–the history of crime–and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online. It will create a seamlessly connected environment, the Newgate Commons, in which scholars can use data mining techniques to select themed texts from the 120 million words of trial records contained in the Old Bailey, and employ these texts as the basis of a study collection in Zotero where they will in turn be available for analysis using TAPoR tools (including quantitative text analysis and visualization). In the process, this project will showcase the integration of online textual resources with bibliographical and analytical tools emerging from Digital Humanities.
Start Date
01/01/2010
End Date
03/31/2011
Director(s)
Dan Cohen
Tim Hitchcock
Geoffrey Rockwell
Staff Members
Sean Takats
Content Experts
Paul Carter
Hugh Couchman
Clive Emsley
Margaret Hunt
Michael Pidd
Jörg Sander
Robert Shoemaker
Kevin Sienna
Stéfan Sinclair
William J. Turkel
Deliverables
1. A tested model for how large‐scale data collection and visualization tools can interoperate.
2. Three model tools at different levels (corpus, collection management, and analytics) that can be used in new configurations by other projects.
3. A preliminary study in the history of criminality in Britain that exemplifies how the new research environment can be used.
The Lessons of History: Using EDSITEment to Teach American History
Description
Partner in project headed by David Jaffee (CUNY). Three software tools for the NEH’s EDSITEment web portal will include a “Text Collection and Annotation Tool,” an “Image Collection and Annotation Tool,” and an “Image Manipulation Tool.” These tools will be integral parts of the Lessons of History project, which will also include student interactive activities and lesson plans. The tools will enable the project’s focus on facilitating the close reading of important documents, visual and textual, of the American political past. Students will use these tools to gather and then closely analyze the online historical documents creating knowledge with the materials of history. The tools will allow for the modeling of good practice by educators as well as the creation of new knowledge by students.
Start Date
09/01/2004
End Date
08/31/2008
Proposal Co-Authors
David Jaffee
Deliverables
1. Text collection and annotation tool: This tool will allow students to easily gather primary sources (or sections of them) that they find online and save them in a personal folder. They will be able, then, to share their folders with other members of the class—for example, other members of an assigned group—and with the instructor. They will also be able to annotate the text document and share those annotations with other class members and the instructor. These annotations could include both general reflective comments about the document as well as more specific questions and comments tied to particular passages.
2. Image collection and annotation tool: This tool will be similar to the text collection and annotation tool and will, in fact, make use of a shared folder or scrapbook and will be fully integrated with the text tool. The differences obviously are that it will allow both the collection of images and their annotation. The tool will also allow students to present their findings with its exhibition building feature
3. Image manipulation tool: One of the key goals is to get students to slow down and look closely and carefully at historical sources. The image manipulation tool will encourage students to do that with historical images. It will allow students to take images that they find online and bring them into the virtual lightbox offered by the tool. Within that, they will be able to compare two images closely or blow up an image or specific parts of an image to look at it more thoroughly.
Funder
National Endowment for the Humanities
Funding Amount
$150,000
Partners
American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning