DH Projects

The list below provides a sampling of Digital Humanities Projects that are live, working, and freely available on the web (As of August 2019).

(IMPORTANT NOTE: This list is NOT meant to represent a full account of the Digital Humanities. Many important projects have probably been omitted, some by mistake, others because of editorial decisions I have made based on my perception of the specific needs of my specific students. My goal in compiling this list was to have a useful list of known working projects for my students, not to attempt to answer that endless question “What are the digital humanities?”)

I’ve sorted the list into categories based on some of the key things many Digital Humanists do: build archives, distant read texts, visualize data, remediate information, and create games/interactive stories. These are odd, fuzzy categories, and they certainly don’t encompass everything Digital Humanities scholars might work on! Still, I think they provide a good starting point for understanding some of the important ways humanistic scholarship and the capabilities of digital technology intersect.

I’ve also highlighted some undergraduate student work in the digital humanities that students may find useful as models for their own work.

Archives/Digitization Projects

One of the first tasks for digital humanists was the conversion of vast paper archives of sources into a digital form. This work, which is still ongoing, is much more challenging than it might first appear. In addition to digitizing texts, archivists need to carefully create metadata that describes those texts and user interfaces that allow readers to discover and access them. In some cases, laborious hand-transcription of handwritten text is needed. When this is the case, mass collaboration techniques may be employed to help distribute this work.

Institutional Archives

These projects present the digital holdings of a University, Public Library, or other large institution. As such, they need to find ways to help users navigate large, diverse collections of material.

Author Archives

Archives that focus on an author important to one or more humanities disciplines. These archives tend to focus on putting primary sources and commentary into conversation, providing access to letters or other unpublished work, and helping readers better understand the author in question.

  • Digital Thoreau (Digital edition of Thoreau’s Walden, plus visualizations, commentary and more)
  • Melville Electronic Library (Collection of digital work associated with Herman Melville, including image scans of manuscripts, and annotated digital editions of Melville’s novels)
  • Papers of John Jay (Collection of image scans of John Jay’s letters etc.)
  • Thomas MacGreevy Archive (Materials related to 19th century poet and critic Thomas MacGreevy)
  • The Walt Whitman Archive (Published texts, manuscripts, images, etc related to poet Walt Whitman)
  • The Willa Cather Archive (Collection of the novels, poems, letters and other writings of American writer Willa Cather. Also includes biographical information about Cather, images, and scholarship)

Subject Archives

Collections of (usually) primary sources related to a subject of interest to one or more humanities disciplines. Usually these archives focus on providing finding aids that will help scholars discover the sources they need for research purposes.

  • African American Experience in Athens (Project by UGA documenting the history of African Americans in Athens, GA – where UGA is located. Includes accounts of lynchings in the region, and material documenting attitudes 19th century UGA community members held about slavery. Built as Omeka exhibits)
  • The Archaeology of Reading (Archive of early printed books with reader’s marginalia. Marginalia is annotated and searchable.)
  • Archival History of Computing at MIT 1950-62 (Student project exploring archive of historical computing at MIT, includes fun simulation of IBM 704 mainframe)
  • Civil War Washington (Collection of text, images, and data connected to “social, political, cultural, and medical/scientific transitions provoked or accelerated by the Civil War” as they unfolded in and around Washington DC. Includes maps of period DC locations)
  • Database of Religious History (In its own words, “a massive, standardized, searchable encyclopedia of the current best scholarly opinion on historical religious traditions.” Includes some interesting attempts to visualize historical and geographical extent)
  • Digital Dead Sea Scrolls (Digital access to images of Dead Sea Scrolls alongside transcriptions and translations of text)
  • Digital Himalaya (Collection of ethnographic materials from Nepal, including maps, musical recordings, photographs, etc)
  • Dynamic Dialects (Sound samples and ultrasound tongue images (!!) of native English speakers from various regions pronouncing selected English words. Presented via a map and a chart)
  • Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine (Collection of messages inscribed on durable materials, such as stone surfaces, from ancient Israel/Palestine. Includes a map for browsing inscriptions by location of discovery, a search tool, and a series of “stories” that contextualize the inscriptions within their historical situation)
  • Making of America (Collection of 19th and early twentieth century American books and articles.)
  • Papers of the War Department (Collection of the pre-1800 papers of the United States War Department, previously believed lost in a fire. Includes a mass-collaboration transcription project, but the larger focus is on the collection itself)
  • A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland ( A project that, “collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens.” Built using Omeka)
  • Perseus Digital Library (Collection of digitized historical/archaeological materials including text scans, images of buildings/artifacts etc.)
  • Philadelphia Immigration (Project organized at WCU with significant student involvement. Collects oral histories, stories, exhibits and more connected with the experience of immigrants in Philadelphia. Built in Omeka)
  • Preserving Society Hill (Archive of Oral Histories, Photos, other sources related to Philadelphia’s Society Hill neighborhood and the “urban renewal” project that occurred there. Map based tool for exploring sources.)
  • R-CADE (Not an archive, exactly, but a lab hosting meetings where the historical and cultural significance of digital technology are discussed. The lab maintains a collection of presentations from those meetings, along with a selection of digital hardware artifacts scholars are free to tinker with)
  • Starkville Civil Rights (“Through oral history interviews and digitized archival documents, this site highlights the civil rights story in Starkville, MS, and the voices of its participants.” Built using wordpress)
  • Scottish Chapbooks Project (An archive of 18th and 19th century pamphlets on various topics published in Scotland. This project is built using Omeka and includes listings for chapbooks with associated metadata and exhibits that contextualize and explain the chapbooks)
  • Truth Tobacco Industry Documents (Searchable archive of internal documents from Tobacco companies released during litigation. Similar archives for the drug, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries are also available)
  • Valley of the Shadow (Archive of primary sources related to the Civil War experiences of two US counties, one north and one south)

Mass-Collaboration-Based Transcription

These projects invite volunteers all over the world to help transcribe handwritten texts. As such, they focus on providing easy-to-use transcription tools for volunteers to use, and social elements that can help motivate volunteer participation.

  • Ancient Lives (Participatory project for transcribing ancient Greek papyri fragments)
  • DIY History (Participatory transcription project for U of Iowa library materials)
  • Transcribe Bentham (Crowdsourced effort to transcribe manuscripts of philosopher Jeremy Bentham)
  • What’s on the Menu? (Collection of digitized historical menus with crowdsourced transcription and mapping in progress)

Distant Reading

Distant reading uses a variety of techniques to discover and count features in large collections of text. Frequently, this means simply counting words, though more complex features may also be measured. Distant reading then uses various quantitative methods to measure, compare, and contrast texts based on these features.

While Distant Reading projects often use graphs and other visualizations to display their results, they are distinct from Data Visualization projects (see below) in that they don’t necessarily rely on these visualizations to discover patterns in their data. This is a very fuzzy boundary, notice that many of the projects below engage with both distant reading and visualization.

Many Distant Reading projects are published as books or articles, rather than on the public web. In keeping with the spirit of this list, I’ve included some articles published in open-access journals, but you also want to check our library resources for restricted-access work.

Data Visualization

Data visualization projects (and I’m using the term “data” rather loosely here) use maps, networks, 3d models, and other visual displays to help readers discover patterns in information. These visualizations may be exploratory (allowing the user to explore and transform the visualization and look for patterns the original author might not have anticipated) or explanatory (using visualizations to explain a set narrative decided on by the author).

Like Distant Reading, visualization projects are often published in journals and books. Again, I have provided selected examples from open-access journals below.

Graphs, Maps, and Networks

These projects use scatter-plots, line graphs, digital maps, and network analysis to display patterns in humanities data. Each of these 2d visualizations are a method unto themselves, but all are useful for discovering patterns in large amounts of information.

  • Biomapping: (Project by Christian Nold that asked volunteers to wear a device that measured “galvanic skin response” (similar to what a lie detector does) while they navigated around a city. The device was designed to detect “emotional arousal” and demonstrate how particular places might have emotional resonance. (NOTE: the “view map” link for map projects does not seem to be working, possibly a flash problem, use the “download map” link to retrieve and view a pdf version of the map))
  • Citational Network Graph of Literary Theory Journals (Uses a co-citation network, which links articles and books that are cited together, to build a network of literary scholarship. Clusters within the network show how authors group together into shared communities of influence. Based on modified code from a previous co-citation publication. You can also view a dynamic version of the network graph.)
  • Digital Humanities and Russian & East European Studies (Uses network visualization, topic modelling, and other tools to explore the history and influence of Russian and East European studies. Link is to project write-up, click “view project” for visualizations and other material)
  • Digital Harlem (Mapping project designed to help the reader explore everyday life in Harlem in the early 20th century.)
  • Early African-American Film (Project exploring the world of pre-1930 “race films,” movies by African-Americans intended for an African-American audience. Uses network analysis to trace connections between actors, directors, and others working in the world of race film. Also documented in the Journal of Open Humanities Data)
  • The Emotions of London (Maps the emotions associated by the authors of novels with various places in the city of London. Another of the Stanford Literary Lab Pamphlet series)
  • Forced Migration of Enslaved People in The United States (Project uses mapping to help the reader understand the forced movement of enslaved people in the American South. Large-scale maps are complimented by narratives of enslaved individuals)
  • New Haven Building Archive (Map of New Haven buildings based on student work documenting each structure)
  • Philospohy Co-citation Network (Another Co-citation network, this one for Philosophy. More background in the author’s blog post)
  • Map of Early Modern London (Digital Edition of 1561 Agas Map of London, with associated place annotations)
  • Mapping Dante (Exploratory Visualization of places named in Divine Comedy)
  • Mapping the Republic of Letters (Large scale project using network and spatial analysis to explore correspondence networks of early modern thinkers)
  • The Migrant Letter Digitised: Visualising Metadata (Project using network analysis and mapping to better understand the patterns found in letters written by migrants. Published in the open-access Journal of Cultural Analytics)
  • Passages to Freedom (Maps routes taken by authors of Slave Narratives in their escape from bondage. Includes text fragments from narrative alongside mapped locations)
  • Photogrammar (Uses maps and other visualizations to allow users to explore an archive of US Government commissioned Depression/WWII era photographs)
  • Placing Segregation (Uses maps to visualize racial segregation in housing in 19th century American cities.)
  • Tobacco Analytics (Allows users to generate graphs and maps exploring the appearance of key terms (eg “young people”) in the database of internal Tobacco company documents discussed under “Truth Tobacco Industry Documents” above)
  • A Visual Explorer For The Language of Greek Tragedy (Network graphs and charts for visualizing language used by characters in Greek tragedy and connections between these characters)
  • The Viral Texts Project (Visualizations of re-used texts in 19th century newspapers, including network analysis and annotated primary texts. Database features broken as of August 2019, but may be fixed…)
  • Who Reads What? (Visualization of readers active on Goodreads based on genres read)

Timelines

Unlike 2d visualizations, timelines focus on a single dimension, a line, to organize historical events. This one-dimensional display helps readers understand the sequence of history and think about causes and effects.

3d Models

These projects reconstruct 3d models of places, buildings, or objects. Unlike the 2d visualizations above, they tend to focus on communicating the particular details of a single subject, rather than looking for larger scale patterns.

  • 1853 Richmond and its Slave Market (3d reconstruction of Richmond, Virginia used to create a video “overview of the city in 1853, highlighting the auction houses and slave jails that were at that moment the nucleus of human trafficking in one of the most prominent hubs of the domestic slave trade.” Stills of building models are also available)
  • Gathering a Building (Uses 3d visualizations and annotated historical maps to explore the site of a newly build residential college complex at Yale)
  • John Ashbury’s Nest (VR Reconstruction of the home of American poet John Ashbury)
  • Paris, Past and Present (Collection of 3d models of important Paris buildings)
  • Smithsonian Digitization 3d (Collection of 3d models of Smithsonian artifacts)

Other visualization projects

These are some interesting, valuable, but difficult to classify visualization projects. Some engage with historical visualization techniques, while others use machine learning to discover visual connections between photographs.

  • Neural Neighbors (Uses machine-learning techniques to discover similar images in a database of historic photographs)
  • PixPlot (Uses machine learning to arrange images according to similarity)
  • The Shape of History (Introduction to the 19th century data visualizations of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, with interactive tools for building digital versions of Peabody’s historical grids.)

Remediation

Remediation, the translation of a text from one form or medium to another, is part of many of the projects above. However, for the projects below, the act of remediation is central to the work they are doing. Translating work into a new medium creates an opportunity to reflect on the nature of media, and their influence on the stories we tell. In many cases, these pieces include an element of mash-up or remix using the remediation as an opportunity to combine and juxtapose elements in a creative way.

(Note: for some texts I have linked to the Electronic Literature Organization’s collection page for the piece. This is handy since it lets you read the piece’s artist statement and some other background info. To see the text itself, be sure to click the big, green “begin” button. Also, be sure to check out the rest of the Electronic Literature Collection, especially volume 3. I’ve selected some easy-to-access pieces here, but there is more great stuff to explore!)

  • The Agrippa Files (An archive of materials related to William Gibson’s 1992 self-erasing digital poem, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). Listed in this section since the core of the work is an effort to re-mediate the 1992 software poem, which had become un-runnable, for modern machines. Some content is itself now difficult to run, because of the use of Flash, but a YouTube video version of the poem in action is still easy to view.)
  • Arduino Pseudo-Theramin (Very simple build that demonstrates how Arduino can be used for on-the-fly remediation, in this case from light/movement to sound)
  • Beyond Limitation (Uses machine-learning to create new choreography based on a motion-capture database of improvisational dance)
  • Conversnitch (Automatically transcribes overheard conversations, via Mechanical Turk, and tweets them)
  • Daniel Rozin’s Mirrors (Physical objects that use video cameras and micro-controllers to “reflect” people standing in front of them)
  • El 27 (Website that automatically translated a section of the Mexican constitution into English every time the NY Stock Exchange finished in positive territory)
  • Enter:in Wodies (Installation piece using microsoft kinect sensor for interactive art. Source code available)
  • Evolution (Machine writing project that attempts “to emulate the texts and music of poet and artist Johannes Heldén”)
  • Fluxkit (Not a DH project per se, but Jentry Sayers cites it as a favorite project. Demonstrates the artistic potential of made objects)
  • Frequency (Poetry assembled by computer program out of lines composed by hand. Only the 200 most common English words were used to compose each line)
  • First Screening (A series of short “kinetic poems” first composed in 1984 using BASIC on the Apple IIE. Re-created in javascript for modern web-browsers. Source code of original and re-mediated versions available.)
  • Gaffe/Stutter (Interactive multimedia work based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze)
  • The Illuminator (Using a portable projector for activist speech. #TheStreetsFindTheirOwnUsesForThings)
  • Kimchi Poetry Project (Audio recordings of poems are played when the user opens a jar filled with paper poems. The user is invited to submit their own poems via twitter)
  • Mary Lee & Katherine (An automated twitter account that sends out fragments of prose and poetry every time one of two satellite-tagged Great White Sharks logs its location. The author explains his reasoning and creative intent in this interesting blog post)
  • Narrated Reality (Uses machine learning and various displays, including thermal printing, to create installations that write narrative descriptions of things in real time)
  • Playing With Shakespeare (Collection of crowdsourced video of people performing Shakespeare)
  • Pu Gong Ying Tu (Dandelion Painting) (Interactive painting using LEDs to render dandelion blooms that grow, mature, and blow away)
  • Shakespeare in Sheets (Student project that restores Shakespear’s work to its original printed medium, foldable sheets of paper)
  • The spectacles_xix twitter bot (Tweets the descriptions of Parisian stage plays that premiered on that day 200 years ago. Part of a larger digital project that seeks to better understand Parisian theater of the Napoleonic period)
  • Twitter mood light (LED light responds to hashtag use on twitter)
  • Z Lab (Project that build physical computing driven devices for use in theater performance)

Games/Interactive Texts

Digital technologies allow users to interact with texts in ways that print could not (or at least, in ways that print was never very good at). Digital Humanists, artists, and others have made use of this interactive potential by creating games and other forms of interactive text (including interactive stories and poetry).

(Note: for some texts I have linked to the Electronic Literature Organization’s collection page for the piece. This is handy since it lets you read the piece’s artist statement and some other background info. To see the text itself, be sure to click the big, green “begin” button. Also, be sure to check out the rest of the Electronic Literature Collection, especially volume 3. I’ve selected some easy-to-access pieces here, but there is more great stuff to explore!)

  • The 1619 Project (New York Times project documenting the history of race in the United States. In no way a game, but a hypermedia story with significant opportunities for the reader to dig into particular parts of the text they find of interest)
  • Böhmische Dörfer (Prezi poem about the 1945 expulsion of the Sudatenland Germans)
  • The Brain Drawing the Bullet (Hypertext story about an author working on an account of Burroughs’ infamous killing of his own wife. “An unreliable text with an unstable narrator”)
  • The Center for Midnight: A History in Fragments (Not an interactive story in the sense that the readers interact with a digital text, but rather one in the sense that the authors interacted with a machine-learning system in the process of writing the text. A write up explaining the motivations and process behind the piece is also available)
  • Digital: A Love Story (Interactive fiction/game “set five minutes into the future of 1988.” Download the app from the lower right to play)
  • Dwarf Fortress (Cult-classic game in which the player must attempt to create a functioning outpost for stubborn dwarves in procedurally generated world. Losing is fun!)
  • First Draft of the Revolution (“An interactive epistolary novel set in an alternate version of the French Revolution.” Readers are invited to edit and send letters composed by characters)
  • High Muck a Muck (An interactive poem about the Chinese immigrant experience that uses maps and other images to provide a non-linear interface for the user to experience the poetry)
  • Hunt for the Gay Planet (Twine game about Queer representation in fiction)
  • Molleindustria (Indy producer of small games with fairly radical political messages. Subjects include drone warfare, mass shootings, eugenics, and capitalism. Some games NSFW)
  • Persuasive Games (Project building games designed to communicate and convince. Clients include non-profits, news organizations, business and government. Actual games produced listed under “games.” Many are playable in-browser.)
  • What Will Football Look Like in the Future? (At first glance, a sbnation blog post about football’s future. In fact, anything but. Not an “interactive” story, exactly, but one that engages in creative ways with the multi-modal nature of text on the web)

Student Work

These are also listed under the appropriate category above, but I pull them out separately here so students can get a sense of what is possible for undergraduate work.

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