Library Guides: Digital Humanities: Projects

English Projects

Willa Cather Archive (Nebraska-Lincoln)
The Willa Cather Archive includes digital editions of Cather texts and as well as born-digital scholarly content.
Walt Whitman Archive (Nebraska-Lincoln)
The Walt Whitman Archive includes Whitman's published works, as well as many of his manuscripts and letters. It also includes a gallery of images of Whitman and some audio recordings.
Shelley-Godwin Archive (NYPL)
"The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft."
Mark Twain Project (California Digital Library)
The goal of the Mark Twain Project "is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote."
Women Writers Project (Northeastern)
"The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader."
Modernist Journals Project (Brown and University of Tulsa)
"The Modernist Journals Project is a major resource for the study of modernism in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. Our primary mission is to produce digital editions of culturally significant magazines from around the early 20th century and make them freely available to the public."
Blue Mountain Project (Princeton)
"The Blue Mountain Project is a digital thematic research collection of art, music and literary periodicals published between 1848, the year of the European Revolutions, and 1923 – a functional boundary for works presumed to be in the public domain."
Understanding Shakespeare (JSTOR and Folger Shakespeare Library)
Understanding Shakespeare is "a research tool that allows students, educators and scholars to use the text of Shakespeare’s plays to quickly navigate into the scholarship written about them—line by line. Users simply click next to any line of text in a play and relevant articles from the JSTOR archive immediately load."
Quijote Interactivo (National Library of Spain)
Written in Spanish, this site offers an in depth look at the well-known novel Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes.
Emily Dickinson Archive (Multiple Institutions)
"Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA) provides high-resolution images of manuscripts of Dickinson’s poetry, along with transcriptions and annotations from selected historical and scholarly editions."
Annotated Books Online (Multiple Institutions)
"Historical readers left many traces in the books they owned. Names, notes, marks, and underlining provide unique evidence of how generations of readers used their books. Annotated Books Online gives full open access to these unique copies, focusing on the first three centuries of print."

History Projects

In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust
In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust. Yale Fortunoff Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Yale Fortunoff Archive, 2021)
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From the creators: This project was built in collaboration with the Yale DH Laboratory and the Yale Fortunoff Archive. It uses state-of-art digital technology (data mining, corpus and computational linguistics and visualisation) to build a digital archive that documents the Holocaust from the victims’ perspective.

Please check the website and watch a short research video, which was published and sponsored by Europeana as part of its video series showcasing cutting edge projects and collaborations:

https://pro.europeana.eu/page/research-community-video-series-in-search-of-the-drowned-testimonies-and-testimonial-fragments-of-the-holocaust
Valley of the Shadow (UVA)
One of the earliest DH projects, The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive from two communities, one Northern and one Southern, during the Civil War.
The Lost Museum (CUNY)
Another early DH project, The Lost Museum is a 3-D recreation of P.T. Barnum's famous American Museum from the mid-nineteenth century.
What Middletown Read (Ball State University)
"What Middletown Read is a database and search engine built upon the circulation records of the Muncie (Indiana) Public Library from November 5, 1891 through December 3, 1902."
Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 (Harvard)
Created by Vincent Brown, "this animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire."
Bracero History Archive (George Mason, Smithsonian, Brown)
"The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964."
Mining the Dispatch (University of Richmond)
Created by Robert K. Nelson, Mining the Dispatch uses the MALLET application to analyze the frequency of certain topics mentioned in the Richmond Daily Dispatch from 1860-1865.
Kindred Britain (Stanford)
"Kindred Britain assembles and visualizes records of nearly 30,000 individuals, mainly (but not exclusively) British."
The Roaring 'Twenties
Created by Emily Thompson and Scott Mahoy, The Roaring 'Twenties is an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City. It was published by Vectors in 2013.
Texas Slavery Project (UVA)
"Centered on a database of slave and slaveholder populations in Texas during the Republic era (1837-45), the Texas Slavery Project offers a window into the role slavery played in the development of Texas in the years before the region became part of the United States."
Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project (UVA)
The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project consists of an electronic collection of primary source materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 and a new transcription of the court records.
Atlas of Early Printing (University of Iowa)
"The Atlas of Early Printing is an interactive site designed to be used as a tool for teaching the early history of printing in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century."

Performing Arts Projects

Ensemble (NYPL)
An archive of around 1,000 early twentieth-century theater programs.
American Theatre Archive Project
"The American Theatre Archive Project (ATAP) supports theatre makers in archiving records of their work for the benefit of artists, scholars, patrons, and the public."
Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive
A digital archive of videos from America's longest running dance festival.

Crowdsourcing Projects

Book Traces (University of Virginia)
"Book Traces is a crowd-sourced web project aimed at identifying unique copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books on library shelves."
DIY History (University of Iowa)
DIY History is a digital archive of handwritten diaries, letters, and text from the University of Iowa's Library. The project relies on volunteers to help transcribe these materials, which cover many different topics and time periods.
Transcribe Bentham (University College London)
Transcribe Bentham aims "to engage the public in the online transcription of original and unstudied manuscript papers written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the great philosopher and reformer."
What's On the Menu? (NYPL)
What's On the Menu relies on volunteers to help transcribe some of the 45,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present owned by the New York Public Library.
Building Inspector (NYPL)
Building Inspector uses crowdsourcing to "extract, correct and analyze data from historical maps" in the New York Public Library collection.
Smithsonian Digital Volunteers
"The Smithsonian Transcription Center seeks to engage the public in making our collections more accessible. We're working hand-in-hand with digital volunteers to transcribe historic documents and collection records to facilitate research and excite the learning in everyone."
Making History Searchable (University of Texas)
The Making History Searchable project relies on volunteers to help transcribe diaries, letters, business cards, petitions, military documents, and more from the Briscoe Center for American History.
Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive (Northeastern)
"Our Marathon is a crowd-sourced archive of pictures, videos, stories, and even social media related to the Boston Marathon; the bombing on April 15, 2013; the subsequent search, capture, and trial of the individuals who planted the bombs; and the city’s healing process."

Digital Humanities: Projects

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English Projects

History Projects

Performing Arts Projects

Crowdsourcing Projects

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