Digital Humanities: DH Projects

Ancient Lives is a collaborative effort to expedite the cataloging, identification and study of Greek papyri fragments, many of them found in Oxyrynchus, Egypt. The project posts images of the fragments and invites visitors to assist in transcribing and measuring them. The website includes a user tutorial and background information on the Oxyrynchus site. Ancient Lives, a collaboration between Oxford University and a variety of cultural organizations, is hosted by Zooniverse, which additionally hosts a variety of crowdsourced projects in the sciences.

APIS hosts information about and images of papyrological materials from collections worldwide. It contains physical descriptions and bibliographic information about its papyri and other written materials, as well as digital images and English translations of many texts. When possible, links are also provided to the original language texts. The APIS collection includes both published and unpublished materials; typically there is more information available for published materials. The Semitics/ICOR Library's papyrus collection is among those included in APIS.

The Carlyle Letters Online is a digital archive of collected letters between Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle. Produced by Duke University Press, and based on the (still-in-progress) Duke-Edinburgh print edition of the letters, this collection includes some 10,000 letters offering a perspective on life in 19th-century Scotland.

Daedalus serves as a dissemination point and/or informational page for Jeff Rydberg-Cox's projects in the area of digital humanities. Information about Rydberg-Cox's books relating to digital humanities is also available on this site.

The Digital Archimedes Palimpsest, developed under the management of the Walters Art Museum, contains encoded transcripts of the Archimedes Palimpsest manuscript, including several important works of Archimedes which had previously been lost. The Digital Palimpsest, which was completed in 2008, also includes representations of mathematical diagrams found in the manuscript as well as high-resolution images of the manuscript's pages and diagrams.

The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls are a collaboration between the Israel Museum and Google to make the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls available online. The initial release of the project includes scrollable, zoomable, high-resolution images of five of the seven Dead Sea Scrolls; users can also hover their cursor over the images to display transcriptions and translations. Each scroll is accompanied by a historical note and a commentary on the particular scroll, its contents and/or its translations.

The Digital Media Repository, run by Ball State University, provides online access to a variety of primary source materials, including photographs, oral history interviews, artwork, video and film footage, cartographic resources, architectural drawings, publications, and 3-dimensional objects. It serves to bring together the digital collections and activities of the Ball State University Libraries in a single, cohesive, and accessible Web-based environment which also provides access to external digital resources.

The goal of DIY History at the University of Iowa is to make historic artifacts more accessible – both by enhancing catalog records for greater ease in searching and browsing, and by engaging the public to interact with the materials in new ways. While typeset texts can be scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) technology to quickly and inexpensively add full text searchability, there’s no such easy fix for other primary source materials like handwritten documents or photographs. Making these items findable requires time-consuming manual labor to transcribe or describe each item – a process that doesn’t scale with traditional library workflows. By outsourcing this work to volunteers and attaching their contributions to the artifacts in our digital library, users can search on this added text to more quickly and easily find what they’re seeking. With DIY History, we’re also hoping to attract new users interested in more active engagement with the collections. By volunteering their time to help make these materials more accessible, participants can learn new information about past eras while assisting others, including researchers using the documents, as well as the original authors and photographers whose stories they're helping to preserve.

The Homer Multitext aims to present the textual transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework, by providing tools for reconstructing the many editions of Homer and tracking variations in the texts as reported by primary sources. The project website offers free access to a library of texts and images, with indexes, as well as tools to allow readers to discover and engage with the Homeric tradition. The project is run by Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC.

The Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) at University of Michigan coordinates the creation, delivery, and maintenance of electronic texts, and works to further the library community's capabilities in the area of online text. It collaborates with other units within the University of Michigan library, as well as outside groups, to create and deliver electronic resources including an online journal of book reviews, a catalog of electronic texts, a linguistics database, and collections of poetry and prose.

Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique and annotation of stable web documents, accomplished through a reputation-based system of peer review. Hypothes.is will work as a browser plug-in for Firefox, IE, and Chrome; copies of all its annotations will be stored in the Internet Archive.

InPhO is an attempt to model the discipline of philosophy using a process called "dynamic ontology." It is powered by a combination of expert feedback and text mining of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The entire taxonomy/ontology constructed by InPhO may be downloaded in OWL (Web Ontology Language) or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. Of particular interest to digital humanists is InPhO's API, which is made freely available through their website. Every idea, thinker and journal listed in InPhO's database may be retrieved in either human-readable or machine-readable format using this API, and easily integrated into digital humanities or other web projects.

The ISE, run by the University of Victoria, endeavors to present a variety of Shakespeare-related resources to a world-wide audience, including fully-annotated texts of his plays and poems, multimedia materials, records of his plays in performance, and thousands of searchable pages devoted to the history, arts, politics, society, and stage of Shakespeare's world, as well as biographical details of his life.

This project of Columbia University, also called The Papers of John Jay, is an image database and indexing tool comprising some 13,000 scanned documents from 85 collections worldwide, including letters, manuscripts, and other documents of and relating to Jay and many members of his family. Users may search the collection by author/recipient, date, keyword, or location of the original document(s). Each entry in the collection includes a brief abstract.

The Map of Early Modern London maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late 16th-century and early 17th-century London (1560-1640). Taking the "Agas" map of London as its platform, the project links encyclopedia-style articles, scholarly work, student work, editions, and literary texts to locations on the map.

The Mark Twain Project Online's ultimate purpose is to produce a fully-annotated, digital, critical edition of everything Mark Twain wrote. MTPO is part of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. It is produced 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.

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (NCSE) is a free, online edition of six 19th-century periodicals and newspapers. It is intended to be of use for anyone with an interest in 19th-century literature, history or culture, as well as those interested in the history of the press, or print culture more broadly. It combines easy-to-use browse functions with advanced searches of both metadata and content.

NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) aims to gather the best scholarly resources in the field of 19th-century scholarship and make them fully searchable and interoperable, as well as to provide an online space in which researchers can create and publish their own work. NINES also hosts (and uses) several software programs for work with digital collections and in the digital humanities, including Juxta, Collex, and IVANHOE.

The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive (CDA) is a long-term digital project gathering a broad range of cultural records of Concord, MA into an interactive digital archive. Current work includes digitization of the Concord Town Reports, 1834-1863; literary and historical texts related to the dedication of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery; various historical maps; and the U.S. Census Records from 1830-1860.

The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. The 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. Particular emphasis is given to texts which are rare, less familiar and/or difficult to obtain. The project's texts, ranging in publication date from 1526 to 1850 and including a variety of authors and genres, are collected in the Women Writers Online database, available through CUA's subscription.

This crowdsourced effort run by George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media invites participants to assist in the transcription of War Department documents from the period between 1784 and 1800. The documents consist of copies and reconstructions of more than 50,000 documents previously lost in a fire in 1800. Guidelines are provided for volunteers.

Papyri.info is dedicated to the study of ancient papyrological documents. It offers links to papyrological resources, a customized search engine (called the Papyrological Navigator) capable of retrieving information from multiple related collections, and an editing application, the Papyrological Editor, which contributors can use to suggest emendations to the Navigator's texts.

The Perseus Digital Library (PDL), run by Tufts University, aims to bring a wide range of source materials to as many people as possible. Its collections encompass Greek, Roman, Germanic and Arabic materials, resources on the Renaissance and US history, and humanist and Renaissance Italian poetry, in addition to an image database. The PDL also provides a variety of specialized searches, language tools and maps for use with their collections.

Pleiades is a community-built, historical gazetteer which collects and associates names and locations in time, and provides structured information about their quality and provenance. It also provides a vocabulary for talking about the geography of the ancient world within Linked Data sets, and has been referenced by research projects such as Google Ancient Places and PELAGIOS.

The Poetess Archive is a resource for studying the literary history of popular British and American poetry, specifically writings in the flowery“poetess tradition" used between 1750 and 1900. The archive serves as a customizable bibliography which users can search by author, by collection, and by criticism. It is also intended to be a full-text resource, and is working towards providing full, edited texts, a scholarly apparatus, and images of material books.

Project Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary effort that brings together humanities scholars, librarians, and information technologists with the aim of developing technological tools to further arts and humanities research. Future goals include creating core tools for research, developing a support infrastructure, and exploring the evolving capabilities of e-research environments.

The Rhizome ArtBase is an online archive containing over 2,500 works of digital art, which encompass a range of projects from artists all over the world. It provides an online home for works which use software, code, websites, moving images, games, browsers and other similar materials towards aesthetic and critical ends. The mission of the ArtBase is to provide free, open, and permanent access to a living and historic collection of seminal, new media art objects.

The Rossetti Archive facilitates the study of the 19th-century painter, designer, writer, and translator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Archive provides access to all of Rossetti's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials. It aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of Rossetti's works, alongside a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.

Sherman's March and America: Mapping Memory consists of a series of interactive maps representing the established facts of the March, soldier and civilian experiences, tourism and travel accounts, and fictional representations of the March. On each map, locations of interest are plotted and linked to photographs and other related media. Users can also view each map at various points on a timeline from Nov to Dec 1864.

The Suda is a massive, 10th-century, Byzantine-Greek historical encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world. The purpose of the Suda On Line is to open up this work by means of a freely-accessible, keyword-searchable, XML-encoded database with translations, annotations, bibliography, and automatically-generated links to a number of other important electronic resources.

UC Berkeley's SunSITE builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide. Its tools and digital collections cover a wide range of subject areas, including various aspects of American history and culture (particularly that of UC Berkeley), a database of 15th century texts (incunabula), a small collection of Catalonian manuscripts, and a forum dedicated to anthropological discussion of the mapping of the Icelandic genome.

The primary objective of University of Michigan's Text Creation Partnership is to produce standardized, digitally-encoded editions of early print books which may be useful for the long-term needs of libraries, scholars and society in general. Obtaining material primarily from, and by agreement with, commercial database companies, the TCP produces digital editions by a combination of manual keyboard entry, additional digital markup, and editorial review. Materials enter the public domain 5 years after their digitization is completed.

The World of Dante is a multi-media research tool intended to facilitate the study of, and allow users to interact with, Dante's The Divine Comedy. The project's resources include an encoded Italian text for search/analysis, an English translation, interactive maps, diagrams, music, a database, timeline and a gallery of illustrations.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) represents the first effort in the humanities to produce a large digital corpus of literary texts. Its goal is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present era. TLG research activities combine the traditional methodologies of philological and literary study with advanced features of information technology.

The Thomas MacGreevy Archive is a long-term, interdisciplinary research project that explores the life, writings, and relationships of the Irish poet and critic, Thomas MacGreevy (1893-1967). The archive initially aimed to present an on-line bibliography of writings by and about Thomas MacGreevy, which has been completed. It now includes several additional collections of resources relating to MacGreevy, as well as a database of people and organizations mentioned within its collections.

Transcribe Bentham, run by University College London, is an effort to transcribe the original and unstudied manuscript papers philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) through public involvement. The project, which is open to anyone, invites volunteers to help transcribe manuscript pages and to collaborate with other users on the site.

Universal Subtitles is a free and open-source project, run by a non-profit organization, which works to subtitle videos ranging from news reports, to instructional videos, to popular internet videos and more in as many languages as possible.

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's work easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. The archive, a dynamic work-in-progress, now includes all six editions of his work, 'Leaves of Grass,' an extended biography, contemporary reviews of his work, annotated photographs, a comprehensive Whitman bibliography, and links to his notebooks at the Library of Congress. The archive is also working towards making Whitman's poetry manuscripts available.

What's on the Menu, a project of the New York Public Library, invites users to help transcribe the library's collection of 40,000+ historic restaurant menus, which range in date from the 1840s to the present, dish-by-dish.

The William Blake Archive is an online hypermedia environment intended to provide access to high-quality, electronic reproductions of Blake's work. The Archive works towards incorporating as much of Blake's pictorial and literary canon as possible—with both images and texts organized, interlinked, and searchable—thus providing access to the major intersections between Blake's illuminated books and his other creative/commercial works.

The World Archives Project, run by Ancestry.com, invites volunteers to view and transcribe a variety of historical documents including student records, marriage registries, voter lists, newspapers, and more from around the world. These transcriptions are indexed and attached to Ancestry.com's database.

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.