Serendip-o-matic Seeks to Replicate Thrill of Archival Discovery Online

by Michelle Moravec

A week ago today, twelve strangers showed up at George Mason University and in five days, going at it around the clock, as humanities people often do, they created a new digital humanities research tool. With almost every day seeming to offer yet another news piece questioning the value of the humanities, One Week | One Tool (OWOT) offers a tangible answer. Funded by an National Endowment for the Humanities grant and organized by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, OWOT created Serendip-o-matic, a “serendipity engine” that searches for “unexpected connections between the material you already have at hand, and the universe of sources beyond your fingertips.”

Stephen Robertson, digital-history expert to lead new-media center

Stephen Robertson, an associate professor of history at the University of Sydney, will be the new director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Mr. Robertson, 45, was a postdoctoral fellow in George Mason's department of history and art history from 1998 to 1999. He will begin his new job in July.Among Mr. Robertson's collaborative works is Digital Harlem, an interactive account of everyday life in that neighborhood in the early 1900s. The project won the American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2009 and an online-history award from a division of the American Library Association in 2011....