Digital Technologies Grant

Integrating new technologies into a historic site is always a daunting prospect. But when handled sensitively interactive displays have the ability to make history accessible to new generations growing up on the I-pod and Wii. We were thrilled, therefore, to receive a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Funds were used to plan for the development of a highly interactive installation and web-based tool that uses the personal histories of our building’s original congregants to investigate broad economic, geographic, social and cultural themes. The end project – a white paper describing our process and results — will be shared throughout the field, enabling museums, historic sites, schools, and other community organizations to use our findings to develop their own tools to share their rich histories.

This project convened a team of humanities scholars, technology consultants, K-12 teachers, and partnering institutions:

Dr. Jeffrey Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva University

Dr. Thomas Kessner, Professor, Graduate Center of City University of NY, Ph.D. Program in History

Evan Kingsley, Executive Director, and Dr. Susan Malbin, Director of Library and Archives, at the American Jewish Historical Society

Dr. Joshua Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at The New York City Public Library

Karen Franklin, guest curator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and co-chair of the Board of Governors of JewishGen

Philip Tiongsen, Jared Schiffman, Caroline Brown, and Miranda Heineman of Potion Design

Roger Bell and Chris Willis of Footnotes.com

Carol Baldridge, 3rd-grade teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia, PA

William Ebert, 10th and 11th grade United States History teacher at the Timber Creek High School in Erial, N.J.