Digital Humanities

Century of Black Mormons by Dr. W. Paul Reeve, History Professor, College of Humanities

Century of Black Mormons is a public history project designed to share not only the stories of black Latter-day Saints with the general public, but the primary source documents which chronicle their lives. 

Literary Field Guide by Dr. Lisa Swanstrom, English Professor, College of Humanities

Literary texts are environments unto themselves, complete with complex ecologies, varied geographic terrain, and intricate weather systems. The Literary Field Guide provides an overview of the textual ecology that you are about to read. Dry? Rainy? Sunny? Moist? Will you need an umbrella or sunscreen or both? Are there mountains to climb or rivers to ford? What is the flora? Should you fear the fauna? The Field Guide has you covered.

As a teaching tool, the Field Guide attempts to create a site and sense of engagement between the viewer and a complex literary ecology. As a provocation, the Field Guide creates data visualizations of literary landscapes in hopes of calling attention to the artificial and constructed natures of all such visualizations.

SongHelix by Dr. Seth Keeton, Assistant Professor of Voice, School of Music

SongHelix is an online song index that makes finding related voice recital repertoire easy to find. This tool helps vocalists of classical compositions discover songs quickly and easily using a novel search interface. 

Future Death of the Library by Anna Neatrour, Elizabeth Callaway, and Rebekah Cummings, Marriott Library

The Future/Death of the Library project out of the Digital Matters Lab used the digital humanities technique of topic modeling to reveal interesting patterns in a corpus of library-themed literature focused on the future and/or death of libraries. While only time will tell what is in store for libraries, mining library documents from the past several decades did reveal interesting insights into the trends and resiliency of libraries, librarians, and, yes, even the physical book. 

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon at Carnegie Mellon University

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network that scholars and students from all over the world can collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. Unlike published prose, Six Degrees is extensible, collaborative, and interoperable: extensible in that people and associations can always be added, modified, developed, or, removed; collaborative in that it synthesizes the work of many scholars; interoperable in that new work on the network is put into immediate relation to previously studied relationships.

Mapping the Republic of Letters at Stanford University

Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. The Republic of Letters project visualizes this network of correspondence through the use of sophisticated mapping tools and robust metadata creation. 

Torn Apart/Separados at Columbia University 

Torn Apart/Separados is a rapidly deployed critical data & visualization intervention in the USA’s 2018 “Zero Tolerance Policy” for asylum seekers at the US Ports of Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed. 

Women Writers Project at Northeastern University

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.