In a new post on its digital scholarship blog, The British Library has announced a collaborative transcription project that will help “to create a freely available ground truth datataset for anyone wishing to advance the state-of-the-art in optical character recognition (OCR) technology for handwriting.” This project is a proof of concept exploring whether the creation ...

Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University has just announced Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade, a “constellation of software and services built to address the challenges of connecting archives, databases, and collections that record the histories of slavery and enslaved peoples.” Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon ...

A story at the UCLA Daily Bruin details the development and release of Early African American Film: Reconstructing the History of Silent Race Films, 1909-1930. Seven digital humanities students found 759 entertainment industry professionals involved in early silent race films and compiled them into a centralized database for the first time. The students, as well ...

Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) wrote about the launch of The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC), describing CWRC / CSÉC’s support for various digital scholarly editing projects and acknowledging CWRC Project Leader Susan Brown’s role in conceptualizing and managing the effort: The Collaboratory is a distributed editing ...

In a post on the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled “History Through the Eyes of College Women,” Mariam Abdullah features College Women, a project of the division of preservation and access. … a searchable collection of diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and photography from the archives of the earliest women’s college in the United States, the Seven ...

In “The Book Biography Machine at the Medieval Academy of America,” the authors of the metaLAB (at) Harvard blog discuss the development of The Book Biography Machine, an “interface that permits humanities scholars to map the diffusion of written works across geographic space and time in order to ask new questions about the history of ...

In a post at the Library of Congress Blog, Erin Allen announced the online launch of the Rosa Parks Papers. The website includes nearly 2,500 digitized photographs, letters, and documents from the collection, which was opened to researchers in 2015. From the collection description: The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk ...

In the New York Times, Joe Karaganis (Columbia University) and David McClure (Stanford University Library), announced the Open Syllabus Project, an open platform that aggregates more than 1 million syllabi and allows users to explore them via its Syllabus Explorer tool. At present, the Syllabus Explorer is mostly a tool for counting how often texts ...

Note from the dh+lib Review editors: Please see the updated version of this post. David Weinberger (Harvard Library Innovation Lab) announced the launch of the Open Syllabus Project (OSP) and its Syllabus Explorer in a recent blog post: The OSP is an open platform that so far has aggregated over a million syllabi. At the beta version of their ...

Bernard C. Moore (Michigan State University) has published a post on MSU’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative blog, detailing the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Truth and Reconciliation Commission website. Moore opens by describing the impetus behind the project and its construction. Launched in coordination with the South African History Archive in 2013, in commemoration of ...