Macdonald-Kelce Library: Open Educational Resources (OER): Digital Humanities

What is the Digital Humanities?

The digital humanities (DH) is typically defined as a marriage between computational technologies and the Humanities disciplines (the study of human society and culture). Since the dawn of 20th century computing, the definition of DH has expanded as digital technology has evolved and now encompasses all disciplines. We include digital humanities projects on this guide because they are often used as teaching and learning tools free to use online. Here's a longer definition and history.

You may have already browsed websites that have employed digital humanities techniques. DH projects apply data-sets to produce text, graphs, maps, images, audio, and video as an interactive interpretation of the topic being examined. Examples include geospacial or GIS sites that map out census information, museum and archival collections that use 3-D scanning or high resolution photography, textual analysis of a novel, simulations of future climate change, and many many more.

DH has been around for a while now, and you can earn a degree specializing in the digital humanities (here's a program at CUNY). If you are into data-visualization and the pursuit of knowledge, take a close look at all the projects listed on this page. These tools are a great way to supplement what you are learning in your Art History, English, Philosophy, or Sociology course.

These are just a small sample of what's been developed. Get in touch with a librarian if you have questions.

University DH Programs and Projects

Digital Humanities at MIT
"Digital Humanities serves the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences as an incubator for collaborative research and teaching initiatives that are vital to the school. We are a vibrant community developing digital tools and computational methods to enrich the humanities, arts, and social sciences."

Digital Humanities Bibliography from Duke
A comprehensive bibliography of DH books from the Duke Library, Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.

CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide
A collaboratively produced introduction to the field of Digital Humanities from CUNY.
Digital Humanities @ Stanford
Digital Humanities at Berkeley
"Digital Humanities at Berkeley supports the thoughtful application of digital tools and methodologies to humanistic inquiry." Browse their projects here.

DH Journals

Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ)
An open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.
International Journal for Digital Art History
DAHJ brings together people, projects, and ideas that comprise digital art history.
Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy (JITP)
JITP promotes open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research.

Art & Visual History

Closer to Van Eyck
A detailed visual history about the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece, Netherlandish painter Jan Van Eyck's masterpiece.
Digital Art History Directory
The Digital Art History Directory (DAHD) is an open-access publication containing a database of digital art history projects and information on data sources, best practices in Digital Art History project construction, preservation, and web archiving. Intended to be the largest, most comprehensive, and inclusive collection of information on Digital Art History and to function as a tool and living resource, rather than a static publication, the DAHD provides a platform for discovery, sharing, and research of Digital Art History.
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Created by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS)
Inventing Abstraction
A site accompanying MoMA's exhibition of the same name which diagrams the intricate connections between abstract artists and writers from the years 1910 - 1925.
Mapping Gothic France
"With a database of images, texts, and maps, Mapping Gothic France invites you to explore the parallel stories of Gothic architecture and the formation of France in the 12th and 13th centuries."
Medieval Kingdom of Sicily Image Database
"A collection of images made by travelers, mapmakers, historians, architects and artists of medieval and early modern monuments and cities of Southern Italy. It includes prints, drawings, ground plans and elevations, paintings, photographs, and any other type of image of sites from roughly 1100 to 1450."
Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP)
"The SPP utilizes a range of digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist DH practices engender new historical narratives about the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain." Developed by students and faculty at Bryn Mawr College
Vincent van Gogh: The Letters
A contextual collection of the all the surviving letters written and received by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) developed by the Van Gogh Museum and Huygens ING. Includes relevant artworks, footnotes, biography, and history.

History

American Panorama
"American Panorama is an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps."
Digital Harlem
"The Digital Harlem website presents information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in the years 1915-1930."
Digital Silk Road
Digital Silk Road Project is a digital humanities research project about creating digital archives of cultural heritage based on collaboration between informatics and humanities.
SlaveVoyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Contains over 35,000 records of slaving voyages from 1514-1866. A single multisource dataset of trans-Atlantic slave voyages featuring interactive maps, timelines, and 3D video reconstructions

Literature

Digital Dante
Digital Dante offers original research and ideas on Dante: on his thought and work and on various aspects of his reception. Includes the original text of the Divine Comedy, extensive commentary, lecture videos, original research, images, audio recordings, and music. Conceived and updated by multiple departments at Columbia University.
Google Books Ngram Viewer
When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years. Use it for analysis of when certain words or phrases came into popularity.
Modernist Networks (ModNets)
ModNets is a federation of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies.
Perseus Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library Project collects the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman and Arabic world and offers these texts, both in their language of origin and in English, as in a contextualized format.
Women Writers Project
"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."

Music

Dig That Lick
"This project aims to develop innovative technological and music-analytical methods to gain fresh insight into jazz history by bringing together renowned scholars and results from several high-profile projects. Musicologists and computer scientists will together create a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of jazz in its social and cultural context."
Measuring Polyphony
"Digital encodings of late Medieval music" This project presents digitizations of polyphonic compositions from 13th and 14th century manuscripts and links to digitized manuscripts and audio files.
The Musical Geography Project
Explore a variety of maps that visually interpret music history in America and abroad.
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"Inspired by pedagogical need, this project combines musicological methods with digital humanities theory and tools to produce maps that serve students, scholars, and the general public."
Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica
"Musical Passage tells the story of an important, but little known record of early African diasporic music." The site displays and interprets Hans Sloan's 1707 Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica."