ECHO Exploring and Collecting History Online

2008 is off to a good start: The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has just (re)launched its ECHO project–Exploring and Collecting History Online. Here’s what they say about it: “a directory to 5,000+ websites concerning the history of science, technology, and industry.” It is searchable or browsable by category, and each website is annotated and occasionally reviewed. I searched one category, “computers and information technology” for RACE and found a lot of hits, including one called RaceSci out of MIT: “a resource for scholars and students interested in the history of “race” in science, medicine, and technology. RaceSci is dedicated to encouraging critical, anti-racist and interdisciplinary approaches to our understanding of the production and uses of “race” as a concept within the history of science. Instead of assuming race as a natural category that science then uncovers, this site assembles scholarly works that look at how cultural processes of racialization have profoundly shaped knowledge about humanness, health, and even our understanding of “nature” itself.” The website sounded useful, but I couldn’t get there from ECHO.
I searched WOMEN and came across oral histories by suffrage activists at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library (although the link was broken.) When I searched ARCHITECTURE, I only got four pages of hits, including hits that referred to computer architecture. Still it looks like Happy Hunting.