New in Current Research in Digital History: Kimberley Connor's "Unexpected Origins: Mapping Assisted Female Immigrants to New South Wales" - crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v09-0... @rrchnm.bsky.social

🗺️ Visualization: "How Fast Was the Mail?": cblevins.github.io/mail-time/ ✏️ Post: "Bottlenecks, Side Quests, and the Calculus of Historical Research": cblevins.github.io/posts/bottleneck-side-quests/ 💻 Code and Dataset: github.com/cblevins/mail-time/

Applications are open for the 2026 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History, the signal prize in the field. Due May 15. www.historians.org/award-grant/...

A few months ago I realized my rare and valuable skill—writing code as a historian—was still valuable but no longer rare. Now I'm thinking about what it means when the technical barriers to digital history drop away.

@kmcdono.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social and I have a new OA article out: eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A... It’s about the fragmented landscape of historical data, and what we can do about it to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse.

Grateful for two recent prizes for Harlem in Disorder: - 2025 Ángel David Nieves Book Award for Best Monograph, American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus - Honorable Mention, 2025 Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize, American Society for Legal History

Back from presenting an early prototype of a new project mapping early 20th century undercover investigations at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History - including this poster.

Great news! This is out: Opening the black box of EEBO academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-...

CRDH Vol. 8: New research from Fabio Gigone, Natacha Klein Käfer, Natália da Silva Perez, Nadav Borenstein, Miara Fraikin, Sanne Maekelberg, and Anna McGee explores topics from royal iconography to AI-powered print analysis, midwifery education to palace networks. Read here: https://crdh.rrchnm.org

Launching an interactive digital map and database of Detroit’s historic Black-owned businesses. Check it out at freedomenterprise.org

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Been hearing about the horrific climate Harvard U Press for some time: www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

“When Information is Networked” — My tribute to Clifford Lynch, who sadly passed away last week. Cliff saw before anyone else how digital technology would enable new forms of research and learning, and completely transform the production and dissemination of knowledge

Last week we learned that 6 of our active NEH awards—totaling $789k in unspent funds—were immediately terminated by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.This is obviously a blow, and a serious one, to our work.But we will carry on. To see our terminated grants rrchnm.org/news/carryin...

Y'all. I get that a small scholarly org can be nimble and take on a lot of quick, grassroots work. It's super important and exciting. But that should not encourage you to insult the hardworking professionals who are keeping large scholarly orgs moving in astonishingly difficult circumstances.

@historians.org & the AHA Digital History Working Group are applying for an NEH digital humanities grant. Historians, please take this quick 2-question survey about your interest in digital tools & methods for research/teaching. Help shape future DH workshops & share with interested colleagues.

In the era of AI, perhaps we need to return to the term the AHA used instead of digital historian in 1999: the proposal for the e-Gutenberg project aimed for publications "without elaborate links to documents and databases, or “bells and whistles,” according to the jargon of the e-people."

Why do people transcribe @librarycongress collections? What do volunteers get out of crowdsourced transcription? Our article "Giving back, learning, relaxing, & having fun: personal motivations & impacts of a virtual volunteer transcription program" is out now! rdcu.be/dXXRs @tjowens.bsky.social

Reposting this for all the new arrivals

New post, “A Large Language Model Walks Into an Archive…” explores how historians can use off-the-shelf LLMs to work with primary sources 📜 cblevins.github.io/posts/llm-pr...

Just back from presenting my digital monograph, Harlem in Disorder, at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History - including this poster, which I hope helps convey the multilayered format of the publication as well as its arguments about the legal aftermath of the disorder.

My friend Leah Meisterlin shared with me a new, collaborative 3D mapping project: Exploring Seneca Village depicts the African-American village destroyed by NYC to make way for Central Park envisioningsenecavillage.github.io See also her team's 🏆🤩 Mapping Historical NY atlas: mappinghny.com

Soft launch on a Friday afternoon, but I’m too excited to wait—we finally have a new database providing search & download access to the Viral Texts Project’s "speculative bibliographies" of C19 newspaper reprinting Huge thanks to iSchool PhD student Daniel Evans for making the impossible possible!

New to me as a way of promoting my digital monograph Harlem in Disorder - a reddit AMA (ask me anything) at r/AskHistorians (www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...) on October 17 - thanks to @dhowlett1692.bsky.social for the invitation - @stanfordpress.bsky.social 🗃️

I attended a meeting in May about the NYPL's Backlist Revival Project. They are working to make a lot of these titles available. See: networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

Really pleased to announce the launch of a thoroughly updated version of Locating London's Past: locatinglondon.org - new functionality, better mapping, cleaner data. @ihr.bsky.social @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrhistorylab.bsky.social

A hugely important issue for the future of historical research.

Looking forward to talking with Scott Berg about how you can use the digital medium not just to remediate a book but to extend it so the form fits your argument and offers the narrative of your research that footnotes no longer can: chr.gmu.edu/events/16028 (you can join us on Zoom)

Happy to announce the MLA’s new “Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship”: www.mla.org/About-Us/Gov.... It represents 2 years of work by our MLA Committee on Information Technology to revise the previous, narrower “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media.”

A lovely profile of Ken Cobb, Assistant Commissioner at NYC Department of Records. In 1997, Ken steered me to the papers of Mayor John Hylan, leading to my first published article. #archivistsrule 🗃️ 👑 magazine.columbia.edu/article/secr...

Looking forward to talking with Scott Berg about how you can use the digital medium not just to remediate a book but to extend it so the form fits your argument and offers the narrative of your research that footnotes no longer can: chr.gmu.edu/events/16028 (you can join us on Zoom)

I do like the new NEH logo, which trades in the starkly 'national' crest to return to an image more evocative of the 'humanities' - but its the seal with tagline that I need on a t-shirt right now. Hat-tip to whoever opted for "Democracy Demands Wisdom' from the choices in the founding legislation

If you’re teaching about Father Divine and the Peace Mission, check out my new Storymap that includes a map of almost 1000 members in 1940 Harlem and scores of Peace Mission businesses.

My book, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History, is out today! OA copy for download but also available to purchase in print if you don't fancy reading 400+ pages on screen. Discount code for Stanford UP in the blog post. eve.gd/2024/07/16/t...

"Antisemitism, U.S.A" is the most recent podcast from @rrchnm.bsky.social, launching at the end of June. Join us May 23 for a livestream event from the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History featuring leading scholars of U.S. antisemitism. theweitzman.org/events/antis...

Happy to have participated in an H-Diplo roundtable on Matthew Connelly’s excellent new book: The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets 🗃️ networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

The NSF Grad Research Fellowship funds at least 2,500 STEM *grad students* at approx $159k (to be used over 3 years). The NEH Fellowships for *faculty* funds an avg of 71 awards up to $60k for one year. There is 0 funding available for hum grad students. The imbalance is astonishing and harmful.

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"Our granular investigation and mapping of these events highlighted the risk of that simplified and selective approach for understanding something as multifaceted as collective racial violence. Details change the picture." @srober30.bsky.social discusses his new work on Harlem 1935

Today at 5 PM EST!

Register now for the online L. Dennis Shapiro and Susan R. Shapiro Digital History Seminar tomorrow to discuss my digital monograph Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 (harlemindisorder.org) and hear the comments of Jessica Marie Johnson

Registrations now open: Fitting Form to Argument: Developing a Digital Publication for the Complexity of Harlem in Disorder, online 3/21 @ 5 PM: www.masshist.org/events/fitti.... Join a discussion about using the digital medium to extend the form of the book to fit digital research & arguments.

Now published by Stanford University Press open access & online only: Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 - harlemindisorder.org. Learn more about the form of this multilayered, hyperlinked narrative on March 21: www.masshist.org/events/fitti...

Paper submitted - event in 3 weeks: www.masshist.org/events/fitti...

My digital monograph, Harlem in Disorder, now has a cover - & is on track to go live next month! Thanks @stanfordpress.bsky.social

Call for Applications: Gerda Henkel #Fellowship in #DigitalHistory 2024-25. Postdoctoral and advanced doctoral students based in Europe are invited to apply to spend a year working with us and the German Historical Institute. Applications are due February 4, 2024. rrchnm.org/news/apply-n...

Thrilled to have this opportunity to talk about my digital publication Harlem in Disorder - currently in production with Stanford UP - and many thanks to Jessica Marie Johnson for agreeing to comment