Established 1994 Founder Roy Rosenzweig Phone +1 703-993-4585 | Website chnm.gmu.edu Founded 1994 | |
Location Fairfax, Virginia, United States Affiliations George Mason University Address 4400 University Dr, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA Similar George Mason University, EagleBank Arena, Rappaha River Parking D, Fenwick Library, Chick‑fil‑A | ||
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), formerly the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) is a research institution in the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia specializing in history and information technology. It was established by Roy Rosenzweig in 1994 to research and use digital media and information technology in historical research, education, digital tools and resources, digital preservation, and outreach.
Contents
Digital preservation
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Center for History and New Media 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. 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. This project has inspired a new project, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which is collecting the stories and digital artifacts related to the Hurricane Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. CHNM continues to explore methods, tools, and technologies for archiving and preserving information, data, and documents digitally.
Scholarship
Projects like Zotero provide tools for historians to research and analyze the past. But will digital media change the nature of scholarly argument, communication, and publication? In order to encourage experimentation in this arena, American Quarterly in collaboration with the American Studies Crossroads Project and CHNM organized an experiment in hypertext publishing. 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.
Imaging the French Revolution is another experiment in digital scholarship. In a series of essays, seven scholars analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution. Offering the most relevant examples and comments from an on-line forum, those same scholars consider issues of interpretation, methodology, and the impact of digital media on scholarship.
Finally, Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation is 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 addition to these reflections, the site includes actual translations of the Declaration into several different languages and "re-translations" back into English to illustrate the effects of translation on how a key historical document has been understood.
Public outreach
CHNM has also developed some projects with an explicit focus on broad, public audiences. Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives is a web-based exhibit funded by NEH and being developed in collaboration with the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, will provide a multifaceted consideration of the human struggle for survival in the Gulag, the brutal and often lethal Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps. History News Network features articles, placing current events in historical perspective, written by historians of all political persuasions.
Name change
On April 15, 2011, the Center for History and New Media became the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, in memory of its founder.