A team of 12 digital humanists came together at George Mason University last week. In seven days, they built a new Web tool that lets users turn blog entries into an electronic book.
The creators intend their new tool, Anthologize, to make preparing a polished product—potentially for publication—a simple, quick process.
Anthologize is the product of the One Week, One Tool program, run by George Mason’s Center for History and New Media and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The program brought together people from a variety of disciplines, including professors in the humanities, instructional-technology staff, and Web developers, for a hands-on learning experience.
The new tool, Anthologize, is a free, open-source WordPress plug-in that lets users organize and edit work from one blog or from many. Users can then export the content as a printer-friendly PDF or in other digital formats. The tool’s creators have proposed several potential uses for Anthologize. For example, instructors might compile work from student blogs, or scholars could collect pieces on related topics and edit them into a digital publication similar to a journal.
Still, the new plug-in is not perfect: Its creators acknowledged that when they revealed Anthologize online on Tuesday afternoon. They plan to continue refining it over the course of the next year, and they encourage its users to join in, said the center’s managing director, Thomas Scheinfeldt, in the online announcement.