Research Focus
I am a digital historian focused on environmental history, public history, and digital preservation. I am currently at work on two projects: a digital history of the Appalachian Trail, America’s oldest and most famous long-distance hiking trail; an effort to create digital tools to preserve America’s coastal historic sites that will be lost to inundation as the result of sea level rise. This latter project is a collaboration with colleagues in engineering. I direct the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the world’s first digital humanities center, founded at George Mason in 1994. Projects at our Center have generated more than $13 million in external funding in the past decade, and our websites are visited more than 30 million times each year.
Current Projects
■ “Appalachian Trail Histories” is a digital public history of the Appalachian Trail, America’s oldest long-distance hiking trail. The project includes data from more than two dozen archives and includes research by undergraduate students at George Mason.
■ “Beneath the Waves: Preserving America’s Coastal History” is a project designed to build the digital infrastructure needed to preserve America’s coastal historic sites in digital form before they slip beneath the waves forever. This project combines the techniques of geospatial humanities, citizen science methods, and digital preservation using UAVs, autonomous boats, and other mobile data gathering systems. It is still in the planning stages.
Select Publications
■ Kelly, M. Appalachian trail histories. http:// appalachiantrailhistory.org. (2017).
■ Kelly, M. The class of ‘51, Appalachia, forthcoming spring 2021.
■ Kelly, M. Teaching history in the digital age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (2016).
