The team behind America’s Essential Data, with support from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP), and The Impact Project, has curated a list of United States federal datasets, variables, and data tools which have been terminated or removed from public online access in 2025.

This resource – briefly renamed “Dearly Departed Datasets” during Halloween 2025 – attempts to capture losses to federal data that go beyond routine updates or removals, and is a direct response to federal agencies’ move to comply with White House executive orders since January 2025 that are aimed at removing language related to gender, DEI, and climate change from the public record.

A longer blog post authored by Denise Ross (Federation of American Scientists, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist) provides a more in-depth look at the methodologies used to identify threatened data and the broader implications of their removal.

OutHistory is a public history website dedicated to generating, presenting, and promoting high-quality, evidence-based LGBTQ+ historical research for broad audiences, with a non-exclusive focus on the United States and Canada. Founded by Jonathan Ned Katz, the platform’s core mission is to foster broad community participation in the process of discovering and writing LGBTQ+ histories, prioritizing under-represented narratives. The site hosts over 200 scholarly and community-curated digital exhibits and timelines, such as the collaborative living resource The Transgender History Timeline, all of which use primary source materials to analyze how gender and sexuality have been discussed, defined, and lived over time.

OutHistory is an actively maintained resource, serving as a vital digital counter-archive against historical erasure and distortion. Recent highlights include exhibits documenting recent government censorship, such as the “The Queer History of Women’s Suffrage: Scholarship and Censorship in 2025” exhibit. This project archives historian Wendy Rouse’s original essay after the National Park Service (NPS) unilaterally altered and deleted it, specifically by removing all references to gender-nonconformity, transgender, and non-binary people. Other efforts include the exhibit “Trumping the Trumpians: OutHistory and American Oversight, 2025“, which reprints Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed to investigate federal actions against LGBTQ+ history. Furthermore, OutHistory cultivates new scholarship through the OutHistory Fellowship Program (OFP), which provides a US$1,800 honorarium for projects on under-represented topics relating to LGBTQ+ history in North America.

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s War Crimes Documentation Initiative (WCDI) recently launched new online tools to make fragmented archival materials about Japanese war crimes in Asia and the Pacific during World War II more accessible to students, scholars, and the public. Led by historians, librarians, and GIS specialists, the initiative brings together trial records, survivor testimony, and spatial data, supporting deeper inquiry into the scale and impacts of wartime atrocities.​

Among the new resources is an interactive ArcGIS map visualizing crimes against ethnic Chinese communities, drawing on documentation from postwar Allied war crimes trials and highlighting patterns of targeted violence. Additionally, a new text-searchable archive, digitized using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards, offers access to statements from General Imamura Hitoshi’s 1947 war crimes proceedings, providing insight into prisoner abuse and the Allied trials.

UH Mānoa’s Hamilton Library plays a pivotal role in stewarding, hosting, and contextualizing these materials for public use. As WCDI project lead and history professor Yuma Totani observes, “WCDI has a terrific team of librarians whose expertise in digital technologies, knowledge in the humanities, and commitment to collaborative work have been invaluable.”

Save Our Signs (SOS) is a rapid-response digital archive working to preserve U.S. National Park Service interpretive signs and exhibits at risk of removal under new federal mandates. The initiative began as an urgent response to Executive Order 14253 and Secretary Order 3431, which directed NPS sites to review and replace materials seen as “inappropriately disparaging Americans past or living.” As the team notes, “Real history is not just happy stories,” and this effort seeks to safeguard the fullest possible record of narratives told on park lands.​

Led by librarians, data experts, and public historians in partnership with the Data Rescue Project and Safeguarding Research & Culture, SOS invites the public to join a continuing effort to build a community archive of signs, exhibits, and texts threatened with removal. Anyone is encouraged to contribute by photographing park signage and submitting images, helping the archive grow and document a diverse spectrum of American stories.​

More than 10,000 publicly submitted photos are already available at saveoursigns.org, released to the public domain for unrestricted research, teaching, and advocacy use. By inviting ongoing public participation, SOS models how collaborative, crowdsourced preservation efforts can secure access to endangered histories.

The Post45 Data Collective announces a new dataset, “Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction.” According to the website, “this dataset contains metadata for 2.5k English-language narrative works set in the future, each marked with the year it was released and the year it takes place.” From the website:

The Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction dataset collects 2,552 English-language narrative works set in the future, each marked with the year it was released and the year it takes place. These works include films (960), prose fiction (761), television series and episodes (377), video games (325), comics (75), radio drama (36), and other media. The works were published between 1733 and 2024, with ~94% published after 1945. The futures they depict range from 1840 CE to 100 trillion CE, though most depict near futures; a quarter of the works are set within a decade of their release date, 58% within fifty years, and 69% within a century.

To our knowledge, this is the first project that systematically measures the depiction of the future in fiction. Despite SF’s [speculative fiction’s] rich history of fan-led bibliographic data collection projects almost since the inception of the genre (Forlini et al. 2016) and a growing number of data curation projects in academic SF studies (Boswell 2021), a dataset of future narrative dates across authors and narrative universes hasn’t been collected until now.

This dataset will be of interest to researchers in SF studies, as well to scholars interested more broadly in the history of cultural attitudes toward the future and in ways of conceptualizing narrative time. Analyzing and visualizing the data could suggest trends in the evolution of how speculative fiction has imagined the future. This dataset could also be productively compared with data tracking the depiction of the past in works of historical fiction (English 2016; Manshel 2023). Possible research questions this dataset could support include:

• Does critical acclaim within literary or genre-specific communities correlate with near- or far-futures?
• Are works of climate fiction now set closer to the present as the effects of global warming are felt more acutely in daily life?
• Do near- versus far-future settings correlate with stylistic differences in the texts? Are far-future settings de facto less realist, less concrete?
• How does future-orientation correlate with the artificial delineation between so-called “soft” and “hard” science fiction?
• There’s an assumption in SF studies that the past twenty years have seen the genre shift toward nearer-future visions, in part because accelerating technological change makes it difficult to project beyond a decade or two from now (Hollinger 2006). Is this true?

The website includes:

• A data table that can be fully downloaded (CSV, JSON, Excel)
• Interactive data visualizations made by Grant Wythoff with additional help from Melanie Walsh.
• A detailed description of the data
• Discussion of the selection process & ethical Considerations
• An overview of the data collection process, including how the data were cleaned and standardized
• Statement of reuse potential

Not only is this a rich dataset that can support a wide range of research questions, it also models how data can be shared in context, describing and making transparent the way data were collected, and the complex choices the creators made in standardizing the data. Digital humanities library workers will surely find the content of the dataset as fascinating as the description of the process.

The Internet Archive has released a new digital collection, the Drug Policy Alliance Library. An Internet Archive blog, authored by Caralee Adams, describes the source of the collection and the impetus for digitization:

For many years, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) maintained a large library of books on drug use and policy at its New York City headquarters. As researchers shifted to working online, DPA’s Jules Netherland said she noticed fewer people coming into the office to use the collection.

“It became clear if we really wanted people to benefit from our resources that digitization was the way to go,” said Netherland, managing director of the Alliance’s Department of Research and Academic Engagement. It was also an opportunity to add to the growing collection of the Substance Abuse Librarians and Information Specialists (SALIS).

The digital collection comprises 2,260 items, ranging from “volumes on historical and cultural analysis of drug use, policy and politics around drugs, pharmacological studies, and books specific to a particular drug.” The Drug Policy Alliance also created a resource guide to the digital collection, providing tips for users on how to engage with and use the materials.

The Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA) brings together scattered archives of 19th and early 20th century Black women intellectuals, organizers, and activists. From the project site:

BWOA moves Black women unapologetically to the forefront of recovery and Black digital history projects to highlight Black women’s often lost, erased, or forgotten contributions to our intellectual histories and social movements. Comprised of students, faculty, and librarians based at the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk, at Penn State University, BWOA works in collaborative partnerships with community arts organizations, academic institutions, and repositories throughout the US, Canada and abroad to locate, digitize, transcribe, and share the collections and papers of Black women organizers, activists, and intellectuals.

Learn more about the project by registering for their upcoming virtual talk to be held on Tuesday, April 29 at 12:00 PM EDT, in which project leaders Shirley Moody-Turner (Penn State University) and Sabrina Evans (Howard University) will discuss the origins, values, and partnerships that have shaped the Black Women’s Organizing Archive. They will also present the resources available on the site for researchers and educators looking to engage with these materials. This presentation may be of interest to those seeking to create a digital project, archive or edition that is community centered.

Zine Bakery released the zine, Footpath for the People? A Zine Companion to a Data Quilt about the Appalachian Trail  by Claudia Berger (Pratt Institute), a companion piece to “Footpath for the People?” analog data quilt, created as part of Berger’s Virtual Artist-in-Residency with the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab. The Zine Bakery post describes the background and purpose of the data quilt and its accompanying zine:

This quilt is an exploration of the Appalachian Trail and who the American outdoors was made for. American national parks were founded on the idea that nature can only exist without people, and that to preserve it all people who were living in it (Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities) had to be displaced. Since the parks were founded with these beliefs, it is likely still ingrained into its design and who feels comfortable in them. Through the pages of this zine, and the blocks of the quilt, we will look at the history and present of the Appalachian Trail (AT) and the people who travel it.

This zine serves as a resource and example to follow for data physicalization and making in DH.

The Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary (PEMM) project is a comprehensive resource for the 1,000+ “miracle stories” written about and the 2,500+ images painted of the Virgin Mary in these African countries, and preserved in Geʿez between 1300 and the present. It was developed by collaborators in the Department of Comparative Literature and Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

PEMM was recently awarded the 2025 Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize by the Medieval Academy of America. The award committee noted, “This project truly achieves the most important goals of digital resources: sustainability, usability, and a commitment to the ongoing preservation and access to often-overlooked and unknown stories, texts, and histories. We applaud this monumental achievement.”

The Digital Humanities Awards are annual, community-driven awards recognizing innovation and expertise in digital humanities. Resources are nominated and voted on entirely by the public. This year, over 90 resources have been nominated across eight categories, including “Best Use of DH for Fun,” “Best DH Dataset or Model,” and “Best DH Resource.” These awards aim to spotlight diverse digital humanities projects and showcase the breadth of digital humanities work. Voting for the 2024 Digital Humanities Awards closes April 4, 2025.

Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online is a scholarly platform for introducing concepts, terms, projects, and resources for teaching and working with the art, architecture, and visual culture of Islam. The project was founded in 2020 by a team of researchers and students, lead by Professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, Christiane Gruber, but has continued to grow in content and pedagogical offerings since. In addition to teaching resources (worksheets, lesson plans, glossaries, etc.) and off-shoot projects that engage with the project’s content, the platform is free and open-access, providing examples for scholarship and teaching. From the project’s homepage:

Besides aiding educators, curators, librarians, and other professionals to create dynamic and interactive learning environments through our roster of talks, pedagogical resources, and translations, Khamseen‘s mission is to help all individuals learn more about Islamic art in general. Over the last three years, our pages have been viewed from all over the world over a quarter of a million times. Propelled by a shared vision, Team Khamseen is dedicated to expanding and enriching our content and, above all, to building bridges across cultures through the arts.