CHNM was founded in the fall of 1994 by Roy Rosenzweig as a research center within the GMU Department of History and Art History. Its origins lay in Rosenzweig's work with Steve Brier and Josh Brown on a CD-ROM version of the American Social History Project's American history textbook, Who Built America? but as Rosenzweig was initially the only person at the center, it was located in his office.[3] He was joined in 1995 by Michael O'Malley, who became the center's Associate Director, and then-PhD-student Elena Razlogova, who became the center's first paid staff member. During office moves in 1997, the center expanded to two offices connected by a lobby with the department's computers and printer.[4] In 1999, it secured a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which allowed it to establish an endowment in support of the center.[5] This was followed in 2000 by a grant from the Alfred Sloan Foundation, which led to a major expansion of center personnel and its relocating to its own space, separate from the department.[4]
Renaming
In 2007, Rosenzweig died of cancer at the age of only 57.[6][7][2]Dan Cohen succeeded him as director and a second NEH challenge grant to build the center endowment provided the opportunity to rename the center in his honor.[8][9] On April 15, 2011, the Center for History and New Media became the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.[10]
After Roy Rosenzweig
In 2013, Cohen left the center to become the founding executive director of the Digital Public Library of America[11] and was succeeded as director by Stephen Robertson.[12]
In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education released a report on the top universities to receive funding from the NEH over the past years.[13] George Mason had the eighth highest funding amount nationwide, with 61% of that funding awarded to RRCHNM.[14] As the center is administratively part of the Department of History and Art History, the department considered by itself would have ranked at number thirteen on the nationwide list.[15]
In 2019, Robertson left the center and was succeeded as director by T. Mills Kelly.[16]
As of 2023, the director is Lincoln Mullen.[citation needed]
Open educational resources
The center's first projects were aimed at K-12 teachers and students and this remains a significant strand of work done at the center to the present day. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Rosenzweig continued work on the Who Built America? CD-ROMs before he transitioned to the then-new world wide web.[17] Early online projects included Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a history of the French Revolution;[18][19]History Matters, for use in American history survey courses;[20] and World History Sources[21] and Women in World History[22] for use in world history survey courses.[2] Other high profile NEH-funded projects include T. Mills Kelly's Making the History of 1989, created in collaboration with the German Historical Institute,[23][24] and Kelly Schrum's Children and Youth in History, created in collaboration with the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Its recent educational projects have focused on re-developing its open educational resources about world history.[27][28] One of its newest projects, in conjunction with the National Museum of American Diplomacy, involves the creation of three historical diplomacy classroom simulations for secondary education instructors.[29] CHNM is also involved with educational outreach with teachers in Virginia school districts.
In keeping with the center's commitment to democratize history, all web-based projects are open educational resources.
Digital collecting
Center for History and New Media Offices
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the center in partnership with the American Social History Project at the City University of New York organized the September 11 Digital Archive with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.[30][31] With the September 11 Digital Archive, CHNM and ASHP utilized electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the past, with a digital repository of material including more than 150,000 first-hand accounts, emails, images, and other digital materials.[3] It became the Library of Congress' first major digital acquisition.[32][33][34]
This project inspired the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which collected stories and digital objects related to the Hurricane Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.[35][36][37][38] The center also collaborated with the Jewish Women's Archive on Katrina's Jewish Voices, a virtual archive of stories, images, and reflections about the New Orleans and Gulf Coast Jewish communities before and after Hurricane Katrina.
The desire to avoid creating collecting websites from scratch each time a new collecting project began led the center to develop Omeka, which was first released in 2008. It continues to use Omeka to power its collecting projects, including recent projects on the COVID-19 pandemic, Pandemic Religion and Collecting these Times.[39][40]
The IMLS also provided initial funding in 2007 for Omeka, a content management system that uses the Dublin Core metadata standard to build digital collections and publish digital exhibits.[43] With funding from the NEH, the center also built the Scripto[44] and DataScribe[45] transcription modules on top of the Omeka platform.
During the 2000s and early 2010s, the center distributed a series of digital tools for historians and teachers, including Web Scrapbook, Survey Builder, Scribe (a note taking application designed with historians in mind), Poll Builder, H-Bot (an automated historical fact finder), and Syllabus Finder, which allowed users to find and compare syllabi from thousands of universities and colleges on any topic, using the Google search engine. By the late 2010s, these tools were largely superseded by other free or freemium software by various corporations so the tools were discontinued.
Starting in 2015, the maintenance and development of center software was shared between RRCHNM and the Corporation for Digital Scholarship (CDS), which is run by former members of the center. In February 2021, RRCHNM announced that the projects Tropy, Omeka, and Zotero were in the process of being transitioned entirely to CDS.[49]
Scholarly communication
In 1999, American Quarterly collaborated with the American Studies Crossroads Project and the center to organize an experiment in hypertext publishing.[50] Four essays, covering such diverse topics as photos, as legal evidence, the Spanish–American War in film, early comic strips, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, offer contrasting approaches to using digital media for scholarly presentations.[51] Other early experiments in digital publishing include Imaging the French Revolution, a series of essays analyzing images of crowds in the French Revolution[52] and Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation,[53] a roundtable of historians brought together to discuss the translation and reception of the Declaration of Independence in Japan, Mexico, Russia, China, Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Israel.
In 2009, the center began to focus more on scholarly communication and community-building projects. Particularly notable projects from this era of the center included the NEH-funded One Week One Tool Summer Institutes;[54][55] NEH-funded Doing Digital History workshops for mid-career American historians;[56][57] the Mellon-funded THATCamp unconferences;[58][59][60] and the Sloan-funded PressForward, a WordPress plugin for online scholarly communication.[3] The PressForward project, in particular, led to the establishment of several experimental publications including The Journal of Digital Humanities, which ran from 2011 to 2014,[61] and Digital Humanities Now, which ran from 2009 to 2021.[62]
In 2017, the center held a Mellon-funded workshop to explore the role of argument in digital history scholarship. It subsequently published a whitepaper, "Argument and Digital History"[63][64] and ran a panel on it at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting.[65]
Public history
Many of the center's projects are public history projects with an explicit focus on broad, public audiences. After Rosenzweig's death, Tom Scheinfeldt finished the creation of Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, a web-based exhibit funded by NEH and developed in collaboration with the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, that provides a multifaceted consideration of the human struggle for survival in the Gulag, the brutal and often lethal Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps.[66][67]
Another high profile public project is Sheila Brennan and Sharon Leon's Histories of the National Mall, a website optimized for mobile viewing that allows visitors to the National Mall to view its history onsite.[68] The website won the National Council on Public History's award for outstanding public history projects in 2015.[69]
Hosted at the center until 2017, History News Network[70] features articles, placing current events in historical perspective, written by historians of all political persuasions.
Computational history
One of Rosenzweig's last NEH grants, continued by Cohen after his death, was to research, develop, and test tools for text mining.[71] Recent projects in the area of computational history include Sheila Brennan and Lincoln Mullen's NEH-funded Mapping American Elections;[72] Lincoln Mullen's American Public Bible, which builds on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America collection; and Jessica Otis' National Science Foundation funded Death by Numbers, on the early modern Londonbills of mortality.[73]
R2 Studios
CHNM began podcasting in 2007 with the Digital Campus TV project.[74] In 2021, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it formally created a podcasting division known as R2 Studios.[75] Recent podcasts include Abigail Mullen's Consolation Prize, which focuses on the history of early American consuls,[76] Kelly's The Green Tunnel, which focuses on the 100 years of history of the Appalachian Trail,[77] and James Ambuske's Worlds Turned Upside Down on the American Revolution.[78]
^Censer, Jack; Hunt, Lynn (February 2005). "Imaging the French Revolution: Depictions of the French Revolutionary Crowd". American Historical Review. 110: 38–45. doi:10.1086/531120.
