Category: Project

Digging into Early Colonial Mexico (DECM Project) is an effort to share and analyze datasets of the Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España, 16th and 17th century documents that provide insight into indigenous and colonized groups of the Virreinatos, or regions of the early Americas that were being colonized by Spanish viceroys.  The project combines language processing and geospatial analysis to answer questions about how information was collected and preserved, specifically:

How can language technologies and geospatial analysis facilitate answering important questions about the early colonisation of America? How did the Spanish colonial authorities portray and use information about the newly conquered territories and people? Can we identify, map, and analyse the geographies associated with the colonial period of Mexico, and what was said about them in historical sources, through expedite computational means?

The project team comprises interdisciplinary scholars from the UK, Mexico, and Portugal, with expertise in history, archaeology, geography, and computer science. All datasets are linked to the project’s Github accounts, and the results of their methodological explorations and data analysis are shared through regularly updated posts on the DECM website.

Claudia Berger (Sarah Lawrence College/Pratt) and Gabriella Evergreen (Pratt) created Pockets of Information: Community Care in a Speculative New York, a StoryMap as a companion to an in-person exhibit. Project of Information “imagines how data could be shared in the aftermath of severe flooding and climate change in New York City. It is a garment-based resource map inspired by WWII bomber jackets, which were lined with maps to assist pilots in case their planes went down. Instead it is a chore coat, a garment associated with care and maintenance, with the map on the exterior of the jacket so others can view and benefit from the information.”

The StoryMap was created for Data Through Design 2024, “an annual exhibition celebrating tangible and multimedia expressions of New York City’s Open Data. It provides space for creative engagement with data and new perspectives and understanding of its role in our society.” This year’s exhibit centered around the theme of Aftermath:

We live in a perpetual state of aftermath. The data we collect today represent reverberations of past events; edited, interpreted, and distilled to tell a story of history. Data drives our narratives and shapes not only the future but also our vision of the future — a narrative of us and where we expect to be. Who is telling that story, and how does the aftermath of events shape how it’s told?

This year, we invited artists to explore how data reflects (and does not reflect) these lived aftermaths and to interpret the idea of aftermath through data. How does data define and organize time and space in our articulations about the world? How has the past molded our present and how will we sustain our future? Will we drown in a flood of information or make meaning from the mess…?

Sara Woodbury (William & Mary) created the StoryMap, “The Federal Community Art Center Initiative, 1935-1942: Mapping Art Access in the Great Depression.” From the introduction,

In 1935, the Federal Art Project (FAP) launched one of its most ambitious arts-sharing initiatives when it opened its first community art center in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in cooperation between the FAP and local community groups, federal community art centers (CACs) introduced viewers to historical and contemporary art by sharing exhibitions, staff, and other resources on a national scale, with approximately one hundred centers opening in more than twenty states between 1935 and 1942, and around 15 million people experiencing their services [1]. Although less remembered today than the post office murals of the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) or the various workshops affiliated with the FAP, community art centers were no less ambitious in their scope [2].

This project represents a preliminary effort to map the FAP’s community art center initiative. It is also a place for readers interested in CACs to share their research, with the eventual goal of collecting all data under a singular project. All participants who share their data will be credited as researchers and collaborators in this initiative.

A Collections as Data pilot project at the University of Delaware, the network dataset for Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s correspondence is now available for download via the UDel institutional repository.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was an African-American civil rights activist, author, educator, wife of notable poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; the correspondence collection contains her literary, professional, and personal papers, and “[t]he dataset contains tabular data listing all the letters in the general correspondence section, Series II. The dataset can be used for network visualization, data analysis, and data visualization describing the life and network of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.”

More information about the context, scope, and contents in the collection are listed in the online finding aid.

Project collaborators Kayla Abner and Britney Henry (University of Delaware Library) shared an overview of their workflow and “Collections as Data” approach to developing this dataset in a DLF presentation available online: “Building Data from Correspondence.”

An interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students, library workers, and faculty from Carleton College and Grinnell College are using 3D modeling and VR technology to explore the social and cultural roles of Viking longships, in collaboration with museum professionals from the Viking Museum Haithabu and the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County.

The Virtual Viking Longship Project was recently spotlighted in a Carleton News post by Josey MacDonald, where readers can hear from project collaborators on what they have learned so far from the project and where they are headed next. From the post:

“The project was designed to test how we can do virtual reality development on campus with undergraduate researchers,” said [Austin] Mason. Mason expects that virtual reality will evolve to play a larger role in educational settings and historical research. At the present, it is best suited for what Mason calls “low-hanging fruit”—gaming and technical training for high-stakes tasks such as surgery, rather than aspects of culture or daily life. But just as history evolved to focus less on big events and more on marginalized voices, Mason sees virtual reality eventually encompassing more voices and “diversifying the number of options available for people to experience.”

The project received funding from an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, which supports the creation of the 3D longship models and VR experiences, such as games that educate users about the contents of a Viking’s sea chest or that teach users how to row a longship. The grant also supports the documentation of their workflows and learning outcomes in order to provide recommendations to other institutions that wish to develop similar experiential learning opportunities for undergraduates working with VR.

The Mapping Racist Covenants project highlights neighborhoods and properties in the Tuscon, AZ area that contained racist language in their covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CCRs) during development, focusing on CCRs from 1912-1968. From the project’s website:

• The MRC project will deliver an interactive web-based map highlighting the geography of racist CCRs in Tucson that prevented African American, Asian, Mexican-American, Native American, Jewish individuals, and many other marginalized populations from living in certain neighborhoods.
• The map will also include race/ethnicity data from the 1930, 1960, and 2020 decennial U.S. Census so Tucsonans can connect racist CCRs with historical and present-day racial segregation in Tucson neighborhoods.

The project was funded by a 2022 Mellon Borderlands grant, created with collaboration from  African American Museum of Southern Arizona, the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, the Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center, the Southwest Fair Housing Council, and the City of Tucson Department of Housing & Community Development, and created by faculty, staff, and students in both the School of Geography, Development & Environment, and the library.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s American Religious Ecologies project has received another grant to continue the work, focusing on the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. The materials are an important source of information about American religious institutions and the project is working on transcribing them into datasets that can be used for a variety of forms of analysis.

Visualizing Caribbean Literature (VCL) is an interactive database of literary works by Caribbean people or about the Caribbean experience, led by Schuyler Esprit (Create Caribbean Research Institute) and the students of HIS115: Digital Humanities Research at Dominica State College. From the home page:

The database includes authors and titles that represents the diversity of the body of work that is Caribbean literature in language, genre, author country of origin and publication location and institution. The project also represents works in translation from the authors included in the visualizations. VCL is a student project, a capstone production of the Research, Technology and Community (RTC) Internship at Create Caribbean Research Institute…

Visualizing Caribbean Literature builds on existing work in Caribbean digital literary studies, including In the Same Boats, Caribbean Literary Heritage and the 2020 effort of The Caribbean Digital VII to create a database of Caribbean digital scholarship, collectively annotate the works of Aimé Césaire and produce a generative collection of keywords that inform the constellation of Caribbean Studies.

VCL has an open call for reviewers “who are scholars or experts on authors, eras or areas within Caribbean literary studies to review content and provide feedback to improve the quality of the database and to extend its impact to users in all capacities.”

Periodical Poets is a digital humanities project containing over 500 poems printed in New York-based, nineteenth-century periodicals run by Black editors. Created by Charline Jao with the support of the Cornell Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities, the project is sponsored by Cornell University Library & Society for the Humanities. As explained in the project’s about page, “In the nineteenth century, New York City’s print culture was largely dominated by Printing House Square, a lower-Manhattan collective of media groups including The Sun, The Tribune, Scientific America, The World, The Day Book, and Hearth and Home. Only blocks away, Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm published the first Black-owned newspaper Freedom’s Journal and Thomas Hamilton edited the first  Black literary magazine The Anglo-African Magazine. Poetry – both original and reprinted – was a regular part of these periodicals.”

The project “reflects on literary trends, nineteenth-century reading practices, and the role of poetry in abolition and protest. Users will find familiar names such as Phillis Wheatley and Alexander Pope in these pages, (in addition to an extensive number of anonymous, original poetry) discussing topics such as abolition, temperance, nature, and religion.” In addition to the collection of 500 poems, there are six exhibits:

• British Poets
• Deaths and Elegies
• Hymns and Songs
• Maps
• Pen Names
• Women Poets

 

Source: Auto Draft

The Colored Conventions Project announced the launch of a new online exhibit, “Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Herstory in the Colored Conventions Movement.” The exhibit “examines the work of activist, educator, and newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary within the Colored Conventions Movement. Drawing on various scholarship on Shadd Cary, this exhibit also centers her work as an organizer and writer beyond the movement. It is a timely celebration of Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s 200th birthday, as we commemorate her in this year’s Douglass Day. Honoring Shadd Cary’s legacy, this exhibits shows how she shaped generations of women leaders.”

From the exhibit’s introduction:

Mary Ann Shadd Cary is remembered for her contributions to nineteenth-century Black activism, journalism, and editorship through the Canada-based newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. This exhibit examines her life’s work in political organizing by closely studying her participation in the Colored Conventions movement, as well as the ways she influenced the movement from its margins as an agent in other movements. Over the course of her life she wrote for several Black newspapers, delivered public addresses and lectures, and fundraised for various initiatives. In so doing, she advanced the causes of racial uplift, Black nationalism, emigration to Canada, and Black women’s political and economic empowerment. Her savvy outspokenness ensured she could leverage the Colored Conventions wide support and influence, without sacrificing her commitment to issues that were unpopular with convention leaders. This exhibit is made possible by the extensive archival research and analysis of Shadd Cary’s biographer Jane Rhodes, the collection of conventions records and research by the Colored Conventions Project, and growing scholarship on Black women’s work in the conventions from our project’s partners and contributors to our edited volume.

By using Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s activism as a lens, this exhibit redefines the Colored Conventions movement in order to center those whom Shadd Cary represented: Black Canadian emigrationists, Black women, and marginalized voices in the press. Black Canadian scholars Rinaldo Walcott and Kristin Moriah remind us that these identities and communities were flexible and mobile, calling into question the borders and social division that tried to define Shadd Cary and her allies. This exhibit moves beyond the convention minutes and proceedings to examine her impact on the movement through broader terms.

Shadd Cary used the Black press and networks to engage and influence the agendas and outcomes of the conventions on behalf of her community. Writing herself into public debates and working in organizations and fields crucial to Black political organizing, she shaped how various Black communities were represented, where they moved, what financial support they received, and how they defined and pursued freedom and racial uplift. By tracing the ways the Colored Conventions weave in and out of most of Shadd Cary’s life (and vice versa) we can rectify the histories and places where she has been forgotten. This exhibit also strives to unite the pieces of her legacy, separated by national borders, generational divides, professional silos, and disparate communities of her familial and cultural descendants, to connect to one another as we embrace our shared inheritance of the legacy Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s Black freedom struggles.

The exhibit was created by the main curator, Brandi Locke, PhD Candidate in English and Committee Chair. Further Acknowledgements to the CCP Exhibits team for creating visualizations, editing, proofreading and revising this exhibit:  Samantha Q. de Vera, Nneka Dennie, Rachel Fernandes, Lauren Cooper, Wendyliz Martinez, Eden Mekonen, Courtney Murray, Gabrielle Sutherland, and Kaitlyn Tannis.

 

Source: Auto Draft

An interdisciplinary, multi-year, and collaborative digital humanities project, American Soldier in World War II explores previously uncirculated soldier commentaries, primarily from aggrieved Black soldiers serving in the segregated military during the Second World War. In addition to historical essays that contextualize these commentaries, the website offers several resources, including lesson plans and datasets for teaching, as well as reflections throughout the project on how they approached crowdsourced transcription and data-fication with natural language processing.