Current Projects
Archiving a Pioneering Grassroots Publication: The Committee on South Asian Women Bulletin
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Jyotsna Vaid
The Committee on South Asian Women (COSAW) Bulletin was started in 1983 at Michigan State University by scholar-activists of South Asian descent to highlight research and grassroots women’s activism across South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Afghanistan). At the time there was practically no media coverage of South Asian women’s issues. The Bulletin was the first pan-South Asian independent feminist publication. It developed contacts with women’s groups in every region of the subcontinent and with several small South Asian groups that were emerging in the US. Over time, it recruited emerging and established scholars to contribute articles, book reviews, and essays on a wide range of social science and humanities topics. The original editorial collective dispersed after the first year to take up academic positions in their respective fields. I became the primary editor, taking it with me to UC San Diego and then to Texas A&M, where I continued publishing the Bulletin until 1996.
As a first step, I plan to establish a digital repository of the complete back issues of the Bulletin.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Britt Mize
The purpose of The Beowulf's Afterlives Bibliographic Database is to offer the most complete and correct documentation of Beowulf representations, versions, and adaptational engagements from their modern beginnings—in Humphrey Wanley's transcription of two segments of the poem in 1705—through the present. The range of materials is defined inclusively, extending from the most conservative reproductions, such as photographic facsimiles and manuscript transcriptions; to academic mediations, like editions of the Old English text and traditional translations; to all types of freer adaptations and remakings that refashion Beowulf or salient elements of it into new creative works, such as novels, lyric poems, plays, comic books, and films. The BABD covers works in all languages, genres, and media forms.
The Carlyle Letters Online, originally launched on 14 September 2007, is the electronic version of Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, published by Duke University Press since 1970 and recently completed with the publication of volume 50. In addition to featuring the letters published in the print edition, the site also features materials such as the Carlyles' photo albums, and the collection held at Duke's Rubenstein Rare Books Library, and will soon include images of the letters found too late for publication in the print edition, as well as undated letters.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Ira Dworkin
Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” is one of the most widely anthologized poems in twentieth-century U.S. literature. And yet, despite its canonical status, there is no clear consensus on which version constitutes the copy text. There were two significantly different versions of the poem, both published in 1925 in major volumes. In March 1925, the poem appeared in the Alain Locke-edited issue of Survey Graphic (which was republished in expanded form as The New Negro later that year). In October 1925, Harper and Brothers included a significantly longer version of the poem in Cullen’s first collection, Color.
History for Lawyers
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Katherine Unterman
Today, many Supreme Court justices and appellate judges interpret the Constitution through the lens of originalism, looking to the nation’s history and traditions in their decision making. Yet judges rarely draw upon works by professional historians, nor do they use a wide range of primary source material. Some of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of the past decade — including cases involving abortion and the Second Amendment — have relied upon historical arguments. Therefore, it is important that the history in these rulings is grounded in the archival research and careful analysis of trained historians.
My project involves the eventual creation of a collaborative, public-facing website that will build a bridge between the historical and legal communities. This website will not take a political stand, nor will it advocate a particular outcome in judicial cases. Instead, it will focus on making well-researched history, which is relevant to contemporary legal issues, accessible to the wider public. This will include annotated bibliographies, images of primary sources, and analytical content.
Faculty Principal Investigators: Dr. Matthew Campbell | Dr. William Klugh Connor III
As part of Performance in World Cultures (PERF 301), A&M students have produced hundreds of oral histories, hours of multimedia performances, and dozens of musical instruments, artistic works, and interdisciplinary research projects while exploring the folkloric diversity in their own backyards. Lorefest, our public-facing festival, is a unique opportunity for Texas A&M students and scholars, local artists and business owners, family and friends, to explore and expand theirs and their neighbors’ cultural heritage through intercultural and multimedia storytelling in a variety of mediums and venues.
Maps, Soldiers, and Nostalgia in the European Theater of Operations, 1944-46
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Adam Seipp
During the summer of 1945, hundreds of U.S. Army units in Europe produced souvenir maps for their soldiers to take home. This project is digitizing and annotating the 130 maps in the collection at Texas A&M's Cushing Library - the largest in the world.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Susan Egenolf
The NEH-funded Maria Edgeworth Letters Project is a collaborative, open-access digital edition of letters written by the Anglo-Irish novelist and educational writer Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and shared by over 30 archives around the world. Letters will be posted in raw text, TEI encoded, and, in most cases, accompanied with a photograph of the manuscript letter pages. The project is led by editors Jessica Richard (Wake Forest University), Hilary Havens (University of Tennessee), Robin Runia (Xavier University of Louisiana), and Susan Egenolf (Texas A&M). We've completed the first stage of our crowd-sourced transcriptions at Maria Edgeworth Letters | Zooniverse.
Nautical Lexicon Project
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Deborah Carlson
Graduate Student Principal Investigators: Bethany Becktell | Claire Zak
In 2020 lexicographer Alan Hartley donated his collection of over 6000 handwritten 3x5” index notecards to the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) at Texas A&M (TAMU). The only stipulation of this gift was the digital curation of the cards. Hartley’s archive offers a precious opportunity to salvage years of data acquisition and textual interpretation, and package those data with the visual evidence brought to light by the excavation of shipwrecks.
Navigating the Intersection of Digital Humanities, OER, and Open Pedagogy
Faculty Principal Investigator: Sarah LeMire
This project uses Manifold as a tool to look at the intersection of open educational resources (OER), open pedagogy, and digital humanities by creating texts centered around literary recovery.
Director: Dr. Robert Stagg
Digital Editor: Dr. Katayoun Torabi
Associate Digital Editors: Dr. Kris May | Dr. Dorothy Todd
The New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (NVS), which began with the publication of Romeo and Juliet in 1871, is now published open-access in digital form, beginning with two editions, The Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The digital NVS has been designed with three main goals in mind: 1) to teach students and early career researchers the concepts behind variorum editing through interface design as well as tutorials; 2) to enable searching across and within volumes and variants using Modern English and major Act-Scene-Line numbers; and 3) to be interoperable with, and allow access to, other major Shakespeare digital resources including bibliographies of criticism, digital copies of editions published since Shakespeare’s time, images, and videos (set for third-phase development). Following the practice of state-of-the-art digital humanities projects, we aim to render Shakespeare’s texts and international criticism available world-wide.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Tianna Uchacz
This project analyzes the shared visual and rhetorical features of a never-before assembled corpus of European ornament prints, ca. 1550–1620. Issued in series introduced by title pages, these prints claim that their designs are useful for particular yet divergent artists, from sculptors and painters to goldsmiths and embroiderers. O:D:T queries its corpus for visual cues indicating how designs on paper could be translated by artisans carving wood, brushing paint, casting silver, and embroidering threads.
Graduate Student Principal Investigator: Alexandra E. LaGrand
Points Like A Man: The Shakespearean Breeches Performance Catalogue curates records of major performances of Shakespearean breeches and disguise roles by women from 1660-1900. This project began by focusing on performances by actresses in London, but has since grown to collect records of breeches performances from around the world. Breeches roles are male character roles played by women actresses, and disguise roles are female character roles, played by women actresses, that disguise themselves as men during the play. Shakespeare plays are particularly rife with these kinds of roles, and the period between 1660-1900 can be considered a golden age in theatre history for these kinds of roles.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Britt Mize
Reord is a software plugin that works with an existing open-source screen-reader called Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) to make Old English more accessible for visually impaired students. Dr. Mize worked with Graduate Student Rebecca Baumgarten to develop the tool.
Graduate Student Principal Investigator: Bruna Braga Fontes
Royalist Book Trade in the Interregnum: A Network Analysis of Eikon Basilike’s Printers Using Gephi aims to create a Gephi network visualization of early modern royalist booksellers who published the Eikon Basilike, especially during the 1650s.
A social media analysis of California rideshare driver’s narratives of collective identity during the passing of Assembly Bill 5 and Proposition 22
Graduate Student Principal Investigator: G Santee Riley
This project scrapes posts on FaceBook to investigate how rideshare drivers create meaning out of their work and develop individual and collective identities in the process.
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Daniel L. Schwartz
Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal is a digital project for the study of Syriac literature, culture, and history. Today, a number of heritage communities around the world have linguistic, religious or cultural identities with roots in Syriac language and culture. Syriaca.org exists to document and preserve these Syriac cultural heritages. The online tools published by Syriaca.org are intended for use by a wide audience including researchers and students, members of Syriac heritage communities and the interested general public. In order to meet the diverse needs of users, the design of Syriaca.org is inherently collaborative and fluid. The principle objectives are threefold: 1) to compile and organize core data related to the study of Syriac sources; 2) to create digital tools for widely disseminating this data and facilitating further research; 3) to create an online hub (cyberinfrastructure) to assist future research in the field of Syriac studies.
Grant funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will advance these endeavors for expanding the Syriac corpus through a new project, “Linking Texts and Data from the Medieval Middle East: Next-Generation Discovery and Access Tools for Syriac Cultural Heritage”, set to start in the Fall.
Digital Syriac Corpus
Digital Syriac Corpus is a curated digital repository of TEI encoded texts written in classical Syriac. The interface provides effective browse and search functionality. Individual texts may be downloaded to facilitate publishing projects, such as the production of critical editions, and research, such as more advanced corpus linguistic analysis. We invite users to submit corrections and to contribute digital texts.
The Srophé App
The Srophé App is an open source database designed to support digital humanities research in the history of culture. Srophé [pronounced, Srō-Fay] is an eXist-DB application which enables researchers to encode and link historical data, with a focus on texts, persons, geography, events, and material artifacts. The Srophé App was created as the digital publication platform for Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal and thus its original use case was pre-modern cultural heritage data associated with the Syriac language (a dialect of Aramaic).
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Tianna Helena Uchacz
In July 2021, in collaboration with the University Art Galleries, collectors and authors Bill and Linda Reaves launched the Texas Art Project. The Texas Art Project promotes the history and legacy of art in Texas through a major art donation, series of exhibitions, and pedagogical initiatives that draw on art collections across the state. TAMU was chosen as a collaborator for the Texas Art Project due to its land grant mission. Additionally, the permanent collection of the J. Wayne Stark Galleries focuses on American paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a strong emphasis on Texas art; Texas A&M University Press publishes the Joe and Betty Moore Texas Art Series, and PVFA offers a course on Texas Art History (ARTS 329).
Partnering with CoDHR to leverage the expertise and resources in the DH community was a natural step for the project. As a proof-of-concept for a collaboration, a small, self-contained subset of Texas Art was chosen: the oeuvre of Buck Schiwetz, who was an A&M faculty member and subject of a major Texas Art Project exhibition at the Stark Galleries (September 21 to December 16, 2023) that travelled across Texas until January 2025. Longer-term intentions are to build a broader, public-facing database of Texas art, drawing on works in public and private collections, facilitated by the Corpora database. Future iterations of ARTS 329 would have major projects dedicated to populating the database and documenting the works via archival research.
Dallas Women's Gallery
The Dallas Women’s Gallery (DWG) project is an interactive, multimedia timeline produced under the aegis of the Texas Art Project at CoDHR and in collaboration with Art This Week, a non-profit public arts education organization. The project conveys the pioneering and central role of the DWG in establishing communities and career paths for women artists in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area throughout the duration of its existence (1975–1988). The gallery was founded as a co-operative intended to promote women artists who were struggling to gain a foothold and visibility in a male-dominated art world.
Graduate Student Principal Investigator: Edudzi David Sallah
This project is an independent research into the episcopacy of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ), exploring and documenting particular information, events, and accomplishments of the lives of the bishops of the AMEZ from the church’s inception to date. The project at this initial stage serves as a final DH project for the award of a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at Texas A&M University. The project will continue to grow as a digital archive and an interactive blog website. This is a long-term project and will be regularly updated as and when data becomes available.