🗺️ 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.
If you open the item there is a print option under File in the menu - or if its stored on your computer you can control/right click the file in list view and choose Show in Finder and then open and print the pdf
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
To come, comparisons of Pinkerton undercover investigations of murders, burglaries, robberies, and thefts...to be presented in our panel on New Histories of Undercover Investigation at the Organization of American Historians conference in April 2026: www.oah.org/conferences/...
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.
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
No AI, but my “Properties of Digital History” (2022) is an overview of developments in what has been done - and is open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Launching an interactive digital map and database of Detroit’s historic Black-owned businesses. Check it out at freedomenterprise.org
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
I'd been looking forward to the digital version of the book - is that still coming?
Been hearing about the horrific climate Harvard U Press for some time: www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
A watercolor of a thin waterfall in the mountains, and an associated rainbow emerging from the mist
“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...
It’s a solution but the “neatest” solution would be a digital monograph which could incorporate the data. These are beginning to appear for just this reason, that print formats no longer fit our research
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
This is really useful. I’m trying to work out where LinkedIn fits in all this. I’ve never taken it seriously but various institutional activities have pushed me to be present there and it does seem active in some way?
Reposting this for all the new arrivals
Page one of a handwritten letter by Benjamin Curtis (1886)
Transcription of a handwritten letter by Benjamin Curtis (1886) completed by ChatGPT
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...
A conference poster about the digital monograph Harlem in Disorder including a diagram of the 3 layers of the monograph and the links between them.
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
