History Bloggers at the OAH!

I am packing right now for the Organization of American Historians annual conference. This year it is in Seattle and I am on a panel. (Two panels, actually, more on that later.)

On Friday, March 27, at 1:45 I will be on a roundtable titled Blogging History: Explorations in a New Medium. Here is our abstract:

One of the most active new avenues of digital history is the history blog. At their best, history blogs can present new research and ideas to a larger and more diverse audience than most scholarship ever reaches, can foster extended conversations, can rally support for important initiatives, and form an extended and diverse historical community where academics exchange ideas with teachers, archivists, and the general public. This round table will explore some of the possibilities of history blogging by way of examples from six well-established and popular blogs. The diverse panel includes academic historians, public historians, archivists and an independent scholar, each of whom will demonstrate a unique approach to history blogging.

The panelists are J. L. Bell, whose institutional affiliation is Friends of the Longfellow House and whose blog is Boston 1775; Mary Schaff, who runs the Washington State Library blog; William Turkel of the University of Western Ontario who recently retired his blog Digital History Hacks; and Ari Kelman from the University of California-Davis who is one of the bloggers at Edge of the American West. Our chair, the man trying to organize five bloggers, is J. William T. Youngs of Eastern Washington University. (Our proposal included T. Mills Kelly of the George Mason Center for History and New Media and the blog EdWired, but he can't make it.)

We will be keeping our presentations short to allow lots of audience participation. So please come on by and say hello and add your two digital cents to the conversation.