Kentucky Association of Teachers of History

In 2006, the Kentucky Association of Teachers of History, the Kentucky Historical Society and the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education’s Kentucky Virtual Library came together in 2006 to organize a new Humanities and Social Sciences Network (H-Net) network: H-Kentucky.  The H-Kentucky network focuses on “History, Heritage, and Culture in the Bluegrass State.” Today, H-Kentucky subscribers number over 350. Take a look: http://networks.h-net.org/h-kentucky.

H-Kentucky seeks to build a team of volunteers to serve as network editors and bloggers.  Editors will be trained to use the H-Net Commons, our content management platform since 2013, to moderate discussions or build digital projects for teaching and scholarship on the history, heritage, and culture in the Bluegrass State. The Commons offers a professional looking environment for publishing accessible, sharable and re-usable digital content.  Users of the Commons need not have advanced technical knowledge, and the interface enables editors to create custom pages that dynamically update with user-generated material.

Projects could include

• an annotated archive of syllabi, teaching guides, and reading lists (see for example H-Urban’s Teaching Center);
• an archives review and annotation project (see for example, the H-Sport archive project);
• a journal monitoring or publications update program (see for example, the H-Nationalism monthly publications update); or,
• a Kentucky-related Hub – aggregating all H-Net Commons content based on subjects frequently tagged by editors and subscribers who are contributing discussions or other kinds of content (see for example, the Digital Humanities hub and the Gender hub). The hub would not offer new content, but rather provide a way for people to connect across networks, with all the links leading back to the original creators of content in their own H-Net networks.

Other project suggestions are very welcome. To volunteer, please email a CV and brief letter of interest to H-Net Vice President for Networks, Patrick Cox. He and the H-Net staff will work with you and H-Kentucky network editor, Dr. Randolph Hollingsworth, to get you going on H-Kentucky and publishing original and creative work right away.

Qualifications: a graduate degree or equivalent in professional experience in the history or culture of Kentucky, broadly defined.  Publications (print or digital) and teaching experience are a plus. General facility with email, browsers, and social media is helpful. H-Net editors serve for two-year renewable terms and must be certified by the H-Net Council.

Dr. Andrea Watkins, a history professor at Northern Kentucky University, serves as the H-Kentucky Book Review Editor and she’s always looking for volunteers for book reviewers. Contact her via her H-Net profile page to find out more.

The founding Advisory Board for H-Kentucky established in 2006 that the goal of H-Kentucky is to create an online collaborative environment to facilitate communication and the exchange or scholarly and pedagogical ideas among teachers, researchers, scholars, advanced students, and related professionals (e.g. local historians, librarians, archivists, genealogists), all in an open, democratic, respectful and non-partisan manner. H-Kentucky especially welcomes those who are interested in Kentucky, as well as those in any history/humanities field who live and/or work in Kentucky. Today, the H-KY Advisory Board includes:

The H-Net Commons is a project-based, collaborative platform for publishing discussions, multimedia materials, and blogs through its many field-based networks in the social sciences and humanities.  Its materials are freely available under the Creative Commons 3.0 License. Learn more at http://networks.h-net.org/h-net. H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, is a nonprofit, tax-exempt international organization based in the History Department at Michigan State University.  For more information about its mission and structure, visit “About H-Net” in the Commons Headquarters.

For information on how to apply, please contact Dr. Randolph Hollingsworth, H-Kentucky network editor, at hollings@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

Randolph Hollingsworth, Ph.D.
H-Kentucky network editor
Adjunct History Professor and affiliate faculty in Gender & Women Studies
University of Kentucky
551 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington, KY  40506-0027
859-257-3027