Digital Humanities: Projects

With a database of images, texts, charts and historical maps, Mapping Gothic France invites users to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries, considered in three dimensions. The Mapping Gothic France project was initiated by Stephen Murray, Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and Andrew Tallon, Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College and funded through the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Mapping Texts is a collaboration between scholars, staff and students at Stanford University and the University of North Texas. It is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project is aimed at experimenting with new methods for finding and analyzing meaningful patterns embedded in massive collections of digital newspapers. The newspapers, which were originally digitized for the Chronicling America project have yield two interactive visualization applications (Assessing Newspaper Quality and Assessing Language Patterns).

Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents. Its ultimate purpose is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote. MTPO is produced by the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library in collaboration with the University of California Press.

The Melville Electronic Library is projected to be the first born-digital online resource for Melville studies, texts, research, and teaching. Housed in Hofstra University’s server, MEL is organized by a group of internationally-known Melville scholars and digital specialists. With NEH funding, MEL’s primary focus in its first two years of development has been to establish scholarly “fluid-text” editions of three focal works: Moby-Dick, Battle-Pieces, and Billy Budd. MEL will provide scholars, critics, instructors, students, and general readers with a reliable “textual core” of all versions of all of Melville’s works in manuscript and print. MEL incorporates TextLab, which implements the editorial protocols of “Fluid Text” analysis, is a software program designed to help editors sort out a writer's revision process, and it enables users to “read” the writer's revisions in the order in which he or she wrote them.

The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalized) version. We also make available translations of his most important Latin religious texts.

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles is an online cultural history generated from the lives and works of over 1200 writers, and for readers with an interest in literature, women’s writing, or cultural history more generally. With almost eight million words of text, it is full of interpretive information on women, writing, and culture. Orlando currently features 1012 British women writers – listed twice in cases of multiple, shifting, or contested nationality; 13,495 free-standing chronology entries; 25,616 bibliographical listings; 2,438,588 tags; 7,861,990 words (exclusive of tags).

Hosted by the Department of the Classics at Tufts University, the Perseus Digital Library collects and presents materials covering the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. The Perseus Digital Library project is an open-source project providing a suite of services for interacting with textual collections.

Pleiades is a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places. The project gives scholars, students, and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create, and share historical geographic information about the ancient world in digital form. At present, Pleiades has extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world, and is beginning to expand into Ancient Near Eastern, Byzantine, Celtic, and Early Medieval geography. Pleiades is a joint project of the Ancient World Mapping Center, the Stoa Consortium, and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Users can explore via interactive maps, traditional search, and data visualizations.

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. The project includes court records, contemporary books, historical maps, biographical profiles, historical paintings and illustrations and a searchable database. From the University of Virginia.

The Shelley-Godwin Archive will provide the digitized manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, bringing together online for the first time ever the widely dispersed handwritten legacy of this uniquely gifted family of writers. The result of a partnership between the New York Public Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, in cooperation with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the S-GA also includes key contributions from the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Houghton Library. In total, these partner libraries contain over 90% of all known relevant manuscripts. The Archive will include tools designed to encourage collaborative humanities research, similar to collaborative public projects in the sciences.

Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory is designed as an experiment in digital history. Historian Anne Sarah Rubin is working on a project about the ways Americans have remembered Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864, and wanted to bring her work to a broader audience. Rather than build an archive of documents, images, and essays, she decided to take a more interpretive approach, and this site is the result. A generous Digital Innovation Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) allowed Dr. Rubin to collaborate with Dan Bailey and Kelley Bell (both of the UMBC Visual Arts Department and the Imaging Research Center).

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to have been as high as 12.5 million. The database and the separate estimates interface offer researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database comprises more than 35,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866.

The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive users may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. The Valley Project is a part of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia.

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman’s vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents. He left behind an enormous amount of written material, and his major life work, Leaves of Grass, went through six very different editions, each of which was issued in a number of formats, creating a book that is probably best studied as numerous distinct creations rather than as a single revised work. His many notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, and voluminous journalistic articles all offer key cultural and biographical contexts for his poetry. The Archive sets out to incorporate as much of this material as possible, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world. The Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).The Walt Whitman Archive is published by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

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. We support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship.

The World of Dante is a multi-media research tool intended to facilitate the study of the Divine Comedy through a wide range of offerings. These include an encoded Italian text which allows for structured searches and analyses, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams, music, a database, timeline and gallery of illustrations. Many of these features allow users to engage the poem dynamically through the integrated components of this site.

he Wright American Fiction online collection attempts to include every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875. This is a collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2,887 volumes included (2,463 unedited, 424 fully edited and encoded) by 1,387 authors. The Wright corpus is now full-text searchable in its entirety, comprised of edited, mid-level encoded texts and unedited, minimally encoded texts.