Scholars as Students: Outcomes from Doing Digital History 2014

During the summer of 2014, Sharon Leon and Sheila Brennan, joined by a team of graduate assistants and expert scholars, oversaw one of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s most recent efforts to offer professional development for mid-career scholars: the Doing Digital History (DoingDH) summer institute.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, the institute offered 23 American Historians an opportunity to undertake a two-week immersion in the theories and methods of digital history. The results of the institute were impressive, with participants increasing their technical skills, their digital literacy, and their comfort with evaluating digital work:

doingdh-eval

As a follow-up to the face-to-face institute experience, we are now publishing a whitepaper that lays out the pedagogical approach to DoingDH, evaluates the experience, and includes the detailed curriculum employed during the institute: Scholars as Students: Introductory Digital History Training for Mid-Career Historians (PDF).

This work builds upon over a decade of innovation and experimentation with professional development at RRCHNM. Just as our workshop sessions at disciplinary conferences, bootcamp sessions at THATCamp unconferences, and a range of longer training experiences have been designed to offer replicable models, we hope that DoingDH will be a jumping-off point for those working to build the digital capacities of our communities of practice. We invite you to review the work and outcomes of the institute and consider the ways that you might put these materials to good use in creating training opportunities for mid-career faculty, curators, librarians, archivists, and staff in your own institutions.

Finally, based on the success and lessons learned in the 2014 DoingDH institute, RRCHNM is offering another DoingDH institute in the summer of 2016, again with the generous support of NEH-ODH.  Soon, we will post a form for anyone interested in being notified when applications open for the 2016 institute. We will announce it on the RRCHNM blog and tweet it from @chnm.

DoingDH Tweets, Week Two

During two weeks of learning at the Doing Digital History institute, sponsored by NEH-ODH, hosted by RRCHNM and GMU, our participants put their Twittering skills to use, tweeting under the hashtag #doingdh14. In order to capture those conversations, we’ve used Storify to collect and present the tweets.

The archive represents only those tweets hand-chosen (due to the Storify interface) by Spencer or Celeste as they scanned the hashtag for each new, unique tweet. Generally, only tweets using the hashtag were collected.

The Storify for Week 1 can be found here.

For those interested in visualizing the content of our twitter conversations, here are two PDFs of the archive, one for Week 1 and another for Week 2.

Who is Ready to Do Digital History?

photoThe Doing Digital History team is excited to welcome approximately 25 historians who will participate in our two-week institute around using new media methods and tools to enhance their research and teaching practices. The institute is conveniently held at the GMU Arlington campus, which is walking distance to the hotel, restaurants, and local attractions. Our schedule which includes a list of daily readings, references, and, activities is now available online.

As the institute progresses we will use this website to share blog entries, daily notes, and other resources for the participants and anyone interested in the work we are doing. We also encourage those interested to follow along with our conversations via twitter using #doingdh14.

As a special note to our participants: we wish you a restful weekend and look forward to meeting on Monday!

Applications Open for Doing Digital History

neh_logo_horizontal_rgbJoin us August 4-15, 2014 for Doing Digital History, a summer institute for mid-career American historians, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, run by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History in New Media, George Mason University.

Doing Digital History is designed to fill a much-needed gap for 25 established historians who need instruction and a professional learning community to engage with new media methods and tools.

We seek applications from faculty, public historians, archivists, librarians, museum professionals, and independent scholars specializing in US history, who have had very limited or no training in using digital methods and tools, or in computing, and who lack a supportive digital community at their home institutions.

Take a peek at our proposed schedule, and apply today. Applications will be open until March 15, 2014.