LibGuides: Digital Humanities: DH Projects

Napoleon's March

Information graphic of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 created by Charles Minard. The graph display several variables in a single image:

Fluctuation with regard to the size of the army
Geographical coordinates
Direction that the army was travelling
Location of the army with respect to certain dates
Weather along the path of the retreat

To see a larger image please click here

Interactivity and Data Visualization

Data mining and text encoding projects are often paired with interesting visual representations, multimedia, and interactive tools. Here are some hallmark examples:

Mapping the Republic of Letters
Interactive map showing intellectual networks from the 17th to 19th Centuries, based on location data from 55,000 letters by 6400 correspondents. User can link to letter texts from map.
Mapping Texts
Using data mining and visualization tools, this collaboration between Stanford University and the University of North Texas experiments with new methods for analyzing over 200,000 pages of digitized newspapers.
The World of Dante
Web-encoded (TEI) Italian and English versions of Dante's work with the people, places, creatures, deities, structures, images, and music associated with each canto.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive
Searchable WWI poetry archive, supplemented with comprehensive multimedia artifacts to provide historical context for the poetry, intended for learning, teaching, and research.
The Book of Curiousities
An encoded translation of a 12th-13th C. Arabic text principally about astronomy and cartography. Interactive digital images of the text include digitized Arabic and translations.
The Grub Street Project
Views of literary London via interactive digitized nineteenth century maps. Under development.

Digital Archives

One of the principal projects of digital humanities has been to make historical and literary texts available as online and fully searchable. Many projects make use of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, which allows any scholar to undertake a variety of forms of computer-aided data analysis. Digital archives also often provide scanned images of original documents as well as other analyses.

Corpus Thomisticum
The project to digitize the entire corpus of St. Thomas Aquinas' work by Roberto Busa is often cited as the beginning of digital humanities.
Mark Twain Project
TEI encoded critical editions of Twain's letters and major works. The ultimate aim is to encode & make available the entire corpus of Twain's work.
The Newton Project
TEI encoded texts of Newton's notebooks, scientific papers, and religious and alchemical writings. Interactive transcriptions showing additions, deletions, and changes. Normalized versions also available.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive
The University of Virginia gathered maps, literary works, portraits of notable people, and documents including court records, record books and personal letters regarding the Salem, MA witch trials. Some materials are transcribed; others are images of original documents.
Charles Darwin's Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has created a virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin that draws on original copies and surrogates from other libraries. As of early 2012 there were 330 titles of the 1480 in his library.
Who Speaks for the Negro?
A digitized collection of print and transcribed audio materials used by Robert Penn Warren in his book of the same name.
Women Writers Project
The Brown University Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding.
Decameron Web
Housed at Brown University, the goal of this project is to enhance the spirit of Decameron by use of technology and allow users to collaborate, enhancing the spirit of the original text.
Dickinson Electronic Archives
Devoted to the study of Emily Dickinson, the DEA focuses on Dickinson's writing practices, writings directly influencing her work, and critical and creative writings generated by her work.
The Thomas MacGreevy Archive
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 is fully XML-compliant with texts encoding according to the TEI guidelines.