A conference celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media took place at George Mason University, November 14-15, 2014. The first day was an unconference format devoted to “Hacking the History of RRCHNM,” followed by a day of invited short talks and discussion grouped into two topics: “the future of DH Centers” and “the future of Digital History.”
Bethany Nowviskie has shared her comments from the session on DH Centers. In “Speculative Computing & the Centers to Come,” Nowviskie reflects on the history of RRCHNM and its role in shaping digital humanities centers, alongside her own background first at the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, and followed by her work at UVa’s Scholars’ Lab, noting “the founding and sustaining and continual renewal of a DH center is itself an active form of hope for the future.”
Also part of the conversation on DH Centers was a session on Gender and DH Centers, whose collaborative notes were shared by Sheila Brennan.
During the second part of the day, William G. Thomas III (University of Nebraska) delivered a talk on “The Future of Digital History,” in which heĀ calls for digital historians to “review more, interpret more, and reciprocate more,” in order to “reconstitute history for the digital age.”
In digital history we will do those computational things, of course, and we have for a long time, but our purpose is more radical, a reconstitution of history for the digital era in which a fully complex social reality of today, the present, meets or resides with and in relation to a fully complex social reality of yesterday, the past.
Other highlights from the conference include the Digital Campus Episode #109 podcast, which was recorded live from the conference:
Mills Kelly, Stephen Robertson, and Tom Scheinfeldt joined host Dan Cohen to recap the earlier sessions of the day, including discussions on failure, ECHO, History Makers, pedagogy, and digital humanities centersā websites.
