WEBSIGHTINGS

Explorations in Digital History
Sean Martin, Western Reserve Historical Society

Reviewing the topics covered in this newsletter’s Websightings column reveals the startling diversity of our members’ interests. Topics highlighted have included children in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, children in film, children and war, museum exhibits on American children’s costume, child labor, encyclopedias, and disability history. The column has tended to the idiosyncratic as we make efforts to conform to the newsletter’s theme and highlight resources we feel might be especially important or useful for SHCY members.

With that in mind, I thought it might be best to take a step back and consider the broader picture of the way we use technology in our research and teaching by focusing on two websites sponsored by institutions that have taught us so much about the subject, the Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University (www.matrix.msu.edu) and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (www.chnm.gmu.edu).

Michigan State’s Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online is well known to SHCY members because of H-Net, perhaps the Center’s most visible project. Less well known are the dozens of other special projects the Center has developed, from African e-Journals to the National Gallery of the Spoken Word to the Oral History Tutorial. The Center offers projects that enable international networking, like H-Net, and others that serve as digital archives for a specific topic. Additionally, the Center offers free consultation sessions in web application programming, web design, and media digitization and editing. Understandably, many of the Center’s projects have a focus on Michigan, but this ability to serve both the local community and the worldwide network of scholars only attests to the vision of the Center’s founders.

George Mason’s Center for History and New Media is perhaps best known for its History News Network (www.hnn.us). CHNM’s own site should not be neglected, though. The site offers three portals for the visitor to explore digital history: collecting and exhibiting, research and tools, and teaching and learning. These seem to cover the various ways we use the web to improve our work. Under Collecting and Exhibiting, visitors to the site can access the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, in addition to sites on Russian history and labor and immigration history. Research and Tools will take the visitor to texts on digital history and the new media but also introduce them to unique applications like the Web Scrapbook (an online clipping service), Zotero (a service that gathers and organizes sources), and Omeka (a web publishing platform). Clicking on Teaching and Learning reveals a wealth of resources in both American history (Teach American History) and Western Civilization (the Western Civilization Webography Project). There are also significant resources for world history (World History Matters, World History Sources, and Women in World History). Also noteworthy is the site Making the History of 1989, about the revolutions in Eastern Europe of that year.

SHCY members will note with special interest a CHNM site still in preparation, Children and Youth in History. If like the other sites sponsored by CHNM, it’s certain to be an attractive and authoritative source for students and teachers. We look forward to featuring the site in a future Websightings column.