Tag Archive

digital history

Subjecting History: Launching a digital open review process

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magnifying-glassThe recent History@Work post postulating the importance of peer review and its possibilities in digital form challenges us to rethink more traditional methods of scholarly review. History@Work’s inaugural year demonstrates that the uptick in attention to public history’s products and projects in academic, international, and other circles is pushing and pulling us in new directions.  Read More

Does the “Ken Burns Effect” work in an age of social media?

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Early last year, the NBC television show Community produced an episode entitled “Pillows v. Blankets.“ The episode depicts a pillow fight that reaches epic brother-against-brother proportions by involving the entire Glendale Community College campus. It very cleverly relates the war’s progression through text messages (complete with emoticons), emails, and Facebook updates. Read More

Project Showcase: Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey Online

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typed index cardThe Newberry Library’s Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture is pleased to announce the release of a new historical web resource, the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, a collection of translations of approximately 50,000 newspaper articles originally published in Chicago’s ethnic press between the 1860s and the 1930s. Read More

Project Showcase: Exploring the Medical Heritage Library

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The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a virtual gateway to tens of thousands of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals and films contributed by several of the world’s leading medical libraries.  Open access to these materials through the Internet Archive enables scholars and the general public alike to explore the “interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.” Read More

Project Showcase: MNopedia

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web pageMNopedia is a new born-digital, open-access encyclopedia of Minnesota. It is a project of the Minnesota Historical Society, one of the largest and oldest historical societies in the nation. Funding so far has come from a special statewide fund established in 2008 by the taxpayers of Minnesota, the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund (ACHF), a portion of which is specifically dedicated to projects that preserve Minnesota’s historical and cultural heritage. Read More

Every tool is a weapon: Why the digital humanities movement needs public history

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keyhole imagePublic history has been at the forefront of democratizing historical knowledge and utilizing nontraditional modes of inquiry—from oral history to personal archives—since its inception. In that time, it—we—have substantially affected the larger practice of history in the academy.[1]  But, to vastly oversimplify, the promises and possibilities of the digital have risen as a challenge to all historians to rethink how we disseminate our work and, at the same time, to spur conversations that question and critique the role of technology in the 21st century. Read More

Project Showcase: "History of Medicine in Oregon" website

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The History of Medicine in Oregon Project launched a website this month. The project was created by the Oregon Medical Education Foundation in 2001, and joined in succeeding years by Oregon Health & Science University and The Foundation for Medical Excellence, to document and interpret the history of medicine in what is now the state of Oregon and to present that history to the medical community as well as the general public. Read More

Help wanted: Thoughts on the recent boom in academic public history jobs

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people looking aheadIn recent years, the number of tenure track academic jobs in history has dropped to some of the lowest levels in 25 years. In response, Anthony Grafton, James Grossman and Jesse Lemisch have suggested that historians shift their attentions outside of the ivory tower, with Grafton and Grossman encouraging PhDs to get jobs in public history and Lemisch calling for historians to create new public history opportunities. Read More