Digital Scholarship Project Examples

Mapping

Geography of the Post: U.S. Post Offices in the Nineteenth-Century West. Stunning visualization anchored within the discipline of history, but ripe for critique because it’s hard to discern the scholarly argument, as the project lead himself acknowledges.

Globalization of the US: 1789–1861. Exemplifies collaboration between digital collections and special collections. Included both a digital and physical exhibit.

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. This project maps cities based on risk assessment data supplied by government agencies, which was used to make or deny loans at the time, often helping codify and expand practices of racial and class segregation.

Network Analysis

Kindred Britain. Network of nearly 30,000 individuals—many of them iconic figures in British culture—connected through family relationships of blood, marriage, or affiliation.

Mapping the Republic of Letters. Networks of early modern correspondence, seeking to reveal academic social networks and the ways in which scholarship and ideas were disseminated.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. Collaborative, crowdsourced digital reconstruction of early modern social network.

Numberic and STEM Data

CT Scans – #ScanAllFish. CT scan data for a number of species. Example of data organization, documentation, and presentation. Uses the Open Science Framework, a free platform.

R Code and Output Supporting: Used-habitat calibration plots: A new procedure for validating species distribution, resource selection, and step-selection models. Code and data (underlying a journal article) archived in University of Minnesota’s DRUM repository.

Varieties of Democracy. Data on various indicators of democracy from around the world. An interesting example with regard to data documentation, analysis, and visualization.

Text Encoding and Digital Editions

The casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634: a digital edition. In the decades around 1600, the astrologers Simon Forman and Richard Napier produced one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. The Casebooks Project transformed this paper archive into a digital archive.

Making and Knowing: A minimal edition of BnF Ms Fr 640 in English Translation. HIST GR8975: What Is a Book in the 21st Century? introduced graduate students at Columbia University to techniques of working with texts in digital environments. During one semester students collectively created this minimal digital edition.

Women Writers Project. Longstanding research and teaching project that encodes texts of primary sources using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. Should appeal to humanities liaisons, as well as metadata specialists.

Text Analysis

Mining the Dispatch. Mining the Dispatch utilizes nearly the full run of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from November 1860 to April 1865. View and generate graphs and charts that reveal some of the changing patterns in the topics that dominated the news during the Civil War in the capital of the Confederacy’s newspaper of record.

Robots Reading Vogue. The Yale University Library, with access to the Vogue Archive and also a purchased perpetual access license, utilizes over 2700 covers, 400,000 pages, 6 TB of data for research using a variety of methods and in a range of disciplines.

Digital Collections and Exhibits

Detroit 1967. Community-based oral history project commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the urban uprising in Detroit.

Goin’ North. Omeka site showcasing stories, biographies, and oral histories of African Americans in Philadelphia related to the Great Migration.

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. Launched in 2005, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses Omeka to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights. Digital public history project. Exemplifies library-community partnerships, working with historical actors.