digital stuff geek out

Been getting excited about a whole range of digital tools and ideas recently. Here's a sample of some of my favorite recent finds:

1)The Parallel Archive. A project of the Open Society Archives at Central European University. It offers scholars and other a platform and site for uploading, organizing, and discussing archival documents. Its not meant as a primary repository for documents, but rather a site where folks can upload just specific documents or set of documents for use and discussion; this is the "parallel" aspect of the thing. As with many digital tools, i think its hard to see all the various uses that this kind of platform could have until it gets used more, but they suggest that, among other things, it could be used as a location where authors of scholarly articles could send readers of their work to see the documents upon which they are basing their analyses. Go check it out, here.

2)History Research Hacks. A blog by historian Shane Landrum. I met Shane at a Legal History Institute at the New-York Historical Society a few years ago; he's pretty rad, was (is?) working on a dissertation that will offer historical perspective to questions about identity documents and transgender lives. I'm excited about it. But this blog is where he discusses digital tools and whatnot, and its pretty useful. It just alerted me to the existence of Protovis, for instance, which seems to offer tools for representing data visually. Useful for us history-writing-types. Check out History Research Hacks here.

3)The National Security Archive's Unredacted Blog. Fighting for government transparency and accountability through FOIA and other Sunshine strategies. The NSA main website is here, Unredacted is here. And then there's its legal action relative, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. LOVE.

4)HERB, the American Social History Project's newest portal for historical primary documents. Named for Herbert Gutman, tagline, "Social History for Every Classroom. Teachers everywhere, take note. Here.

That's four that I <3333333. I'll prolly post more later.