Of late the Internet has spawned some very interesting historical hoaxes. My current favorite is Boilerplate. Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century. Another recent example is the Old Negro Space Program documentary about America’s now forgotten Blackstronauts. I think it’s easy to imagine a student finding his or her way to one of these websites…
Rewriting a mission
Here at George Mason University we are in the process of splitting our College of Arts and Sciences in two, thereby creating a College of Mathematics and Science and a College of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CLAHS). The reasons for this are long and not so interesting. What is interesting is that for…
Open Classrooms
One of the central tenets of faculty practice is that we generally keep what happens in our classrooms to ourselves. Beyond the occaisonal visit by a colleague and the anecdotes we love to share about our students, only rarely do we open our classrooms up to public inspection. Given our mania for peer reviewed publications,…
Visualizing Information
Of late my graduate students have been wrestling with what constitutes “digital scholarship” in history. In our discussion we talked a good bit about how information that is not quantitative can be displayed online in ways that take advantage of the capabilities of digital media. Among the examples I showed them are several that have…