The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement among interactive media producers. In January of each year, the Horizon Interactive Awards receives hundreds of entries from all over the world. A panel of industry professionals, from diverse multi-media, graphic design and marketing backgrounds, review the entries to determine the work that is to be recognized. Entries are given either a Gold, Silver, Bronze, and in some cases honorable mention award distinctions.

The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement

We are especially thrilled because after years of using Ruby on Rails just for database content management systems, ExploreThomasCole.org shows off the flexibility and power of Rails to organize and display thousands and thousands of rows of information in an attractive and easy maintained structure. While we have been big advocates of Adobe Flash, this site also represents a step for us in creating cleaner, more accessible semantic web content that uses Flash for just the pieces that are impossible or difficult to do efficiently in XHTML and CSS.

The latest crop of standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Opera) made development more fun, and a new version of Zoomify (our image magnification component) offered us some exciting new starting points for our Flash customization work. We did what we could to support IE 7 and 8, and are still working on “hacks” to get the site to work in those browsers. We also worked to get the major components of the site working on IE 6, but mercifully the proportion of visitors with that browser is dropping steadily.

We will be taking off the beta wrapper on the site when our browser testing and tweaking is complete, and when the rights and reproductions folks can sign off on permissions and high resolution images for the artwork. Check out the new project and drop us a line on what you think can be improved: www.explorethomascole.org!

The National Endowment for the Humanities supports Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran: A Digital Archive and Website at Harvard University. March 2009

The National Endowment for the Humanities has made a $346,733 grant to a team of Qajar historians. The purpose of this grant, which spans from May 2009 to June 2011, is to develop a comprehensive digital archive and website that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1785 – 1925) in Iran.

The Qajar dynasty is perhaps most notable for a series of intense interactions with Europe (Britain and Russia, in particular), many of which introduced cultural and political changes that still resonate in Iran today. The proposed archive will address a significant gap in the scholarship related to this important time in Iran’s history by making available personal documents, such as writings and photographs, created by, and reflecting the lives of, women during the Qajar era.

The team is composed of Afsaneh Najmabadi (PI, Harvard University), Nahid Mozaffari (New York University), Naghmeh Sohrabi (Brandeis University), and Dominic Parviz Brookshaw (University of Manchester, UK).

The technical producer for the project will be Charles Forcey of Historicus, Inc. His previous work includes the Visual Index to the Virtual Archive 1 & 2 (Skyscraper Museum at www.skyscraper.org), the Primary Source Investigator (McGraw-Hill Higher Education at psi.mcgraw-hill.com), and a prototype for Arts of the Islamic World (Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation at www.artsoftheislamicworld.org).

Digitizing and archiving activities supported by this grant will focus primarily on materials from the private family holdings and Iranian archival holdings. Harvard University already houses other digital archives related to history of modern Iran, such as the ‘Ali Khan Vali photograph album and the Iranian Oral History Project. The new project will make the University Libraries a very rich depository of archival material for study of modern Iranian history.

All the hard work of the past few years (sometimes with as many as 10 employees working full time) gave me a storehouse full of coding and historical primary source resources to work with this year, so new projects are moving right along with this smaller, dispersed, but more efficient team approach. This month we are working on a digital archive of Thomas Cole Hudson River School paintings (near and dear to all US historians and art lovers), several new projects for Cengage Learning, a MesoAmerican codex archive, and maintaining our recently launched Circopedia.org.

Last but not least, I have relaunched the Historicus, Inc. site on a web platform called SquareSpace. Our needs were a bit too simple for a full drupal CMS installation, but too dynamic and rapidly changing for a static HTML site.  Moreover, SquareSpace’s clean typography and layouts got under our skin in a good way.  Let me know what you think. I look forward to working and collaborating with some of you in 2009.