Center for History and New Media

Center for History and New Media
Name	Center for History and New Media
Founded	1994
Founder	Dan Cohen
Location	Fairfax, Virginia
Parent institution	George Mason University

Center for History and New Media

The Center for History and New Media is a digital history research center founded in 1994 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. It produces software, exhibits, and scholarship that intersect with World Wide Web, digital humanities, public history, museum studies, and archival science. The Center has collaborated with institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Archives and Records Administration while influencing projects across Europe and the United States.

History

The Center was established by Dan Cohen amid the rise of the World Wide Web and shortly before the expansion of Internet Archive and JSTOR initiatives. Early staff included scholars connected to Yale University, Columbia University, and University of Virginia networks, and it operated alongside digital innovators at MIT and Stanford University. In the 1990s the Center released pioneering efforts during the same era as Project Gutenberg, Perseus Project, and Europeana, and later engaged with debates sparked by the Digital Public Library of America and the creation of Omeka-compatible exhibitions. Over the 2000s and 2010s the Center expanded partnerships with the New York Public Library, the British Library, and the German National Library, while its staff presented at conferences including American Historical Association, Society of American Archivists, and Association of College and Research Libraries.

Mission and Activities

The Center's stated mission emphasizes building tools for historians and public audiences, echoing goals of Humanities Commons and archival advocacy groups such as Society of American Historians and Council on Library and Information Resources. Its activities range from software development to digital pedagogy and online exhibitions, often coordinating with repositories like the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Harvard Library. Programmatically the Center has addressed topics tied to collections at the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, and Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, and has contributed to discussions on copyright alongside Creative Commons and legal frameworks such as the Copyright Act of 1976. Staff have testified before panels convened by the National Endowment for the Humanities and engaged with policy conversations involving the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Major Projects and Tools

The Center developed widely used platforms and resources that sit in a lineage with MediaWiki, Drupal, and DPLA technology stacks. Notable projects include Omeka, a content management system used by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, and many university libraries; Zotero, a citation management tool adopted by scholars at Oxford University, Princeton University, and University of Chicago; and digital exhibits that have been hosted by the New York Historical Society and the Museum of Modern Art. The Center also produced pedagogical tools that accompanied initiatives like National History Day and supported crowdsourcing projects modeled after Transcribe Bentham and Zooniverse. These tools have been compared with commercial and open-source projects such as WordPress, Moodle, and GitHub in terms of impact on scholarly workflows.

Educational Programs and Outreach

Educational work includes workshops for faculty and archivists in partnership with American Association of Museums, summer institutes mirroring programs at Digital Antiquity and Institute for Historical Studies, and online tutorials used by students at Columbia University School of Professional Studies and University of Michigan. The Center's outreach reached K–12 teachers through collaborations with National Council for the Social Studies and supported digital scholarship courses aligned with curricula from Common Core State Standards Initiative and university programs at George Washington University and Rutgers University. Public-facing exhibits were produced with partners such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while podcasts and webinars were presented in venues like C-SPAN and TEDx-affiliated events.

Partnerships and Collaborations

Collaborations span cultural heritage and academic sectors, including long-term ties to the Library of Congress, project partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution, and research alliances with University of Oxford and University College London. The Center engaged grantmakers such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and coordinated projects with aggregators including HathiTrust and OCLC. It has also worked with technology companies and open-source communities associated with Mozilla Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Linux Foundation to ensure interoperability and standards compliance.

Impact and Reception

Scholarly reviews and press coverage in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, and The Guardian have documented the Center's influence on digital scholarship, citing widespread adoption of its tools at institutions including Yale University Library, University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University. Historians at the American Historical Association and archivists at the Society of American Archivists have praised its contributions to access and preservation while critics in forums connected to Information Today and TechCrunch have debated sustainability and funding models. The Center's work has been recognized in awards and case studies by the Digital Preservation Coalition and incorporated into textbooks used by students at University of Pennsylvania and Brown University.

Category:Digital humanities Category:George Mason University