Past Projects
Faculty Principal Investigator: Dr. Laura Mandell
The Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) is an overarching organization that provides support, coordination, and a set of evolving standards for five period-specific virtual research environments (VREs), or nodes. As a hub of humanities research nodes, ARC contains resources spanning the bulk of existing Western written documents, from medieval times to the early 20th century. Each ARC node contains data about existing documents, scanned page images (with text transcriptions), scholarly research related to the node’s documents, and teaching and research tools, including open-source software, that helps humanities researchers to work with digital text and images. ARC coordinates the various resources of the nodes, combining them into a single catalog of metadata, images, and texts, and the ARC nodes provide peer-review for research projects derived from the ARC resources.
BigDIVA
BigDIVA (Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application) is a dynamic environment for browsing, searching, and interacting with the ARC (Advanced Research Consortium) catalog. This interface allows users to view all their search results at once rather than paging through endless lists of returns and hoping the search engine has put the most relevant items towards the top.
TypeWright
TypeWright is a tool for correcting the text-version of a document made up of page images. These text versions are crucially necessary: they are what enables full-text searching, datamining, preserving, and curating texts of historical importance. Right now, the text running behind the page images of these texts has been mechanically typed, leaving behind errors that need to be corrected by human eyes and hands. TypeWright is a tool supported and maintained by 18thConnect.
Researcher: Dr. Eduardo Urbina
The Cervantes Project consists of an online, scholarly variorum edition of Don Quijote; an extensive collection of Quijote textual iconography (replete with metadata), consisting of over 60,000 illustrations spanning over 1,700 editions; and a collection of hundreds of Quijote themed ex-libris labels. The variorum edition was the first of its kind—the result of a 5-year project started in 1998 with funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Cervantes Project was conceived of (and has been directed by) Dr. Eduardo Urbina, Professor Emeritus of the Hispanic Studies Department at Texas A&M.
The Coding for Humanists book series provides an introduction to technologies applicable to digital humanities scholarship without assuming the reader has prior technical background.
Researcher: Dr. Gary Stringer
DigitalDonne constitutes volume 1 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Indiana UP, 1995- ), a collaborative edition drawing on the labors of over 30 scholars from the United States and abroad. The edition’s primary aim is two-fold: to produce a newly edited critical text based on exhaustive analysis of all known manuscript and significant print sources of Donne’s poetry; to present a complete digest of critical and scholarly commentary on the poetry from Donne’s time to the present.
The Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) aims to publish an open source OCR workflow, improve the visibility of early modern texts by making them fully searchable, and form a community of scholars and institutions interested in the digital preservation of these texts. Its goal is to foster collaboration among various disciplines, and, in doing so, cultivate inter-institutional and international relationships that make possible new kinds of humanities research.
Researcher: Dr. Laura Mandell
The Feminist Controversy in England is a cultural analytics and data visualization project. The goal is to postulate non-binary gender terms that have been derived from texts themselves, and to demonstrate how this procedure offers an alternative method for historicizing gender.
Researcher: Dr. William Bedford Clark
As pianist and teacher, Herbert Ricker was a significant force in the cultural life of the Southwest in the middle-third of the twentieth century. He could trace his musical pedigree back to Beethoven through a series of renowned artist/teachers and was himself a gifted composer. This project aims at preserving the complete body of his extant work. Privileged to have studied with him as a young man, I naturally had a personal interest in making these scores available to present and future generations, but the quality of the music itself justifies preservation and wider dissemination.
There are six Intermediate-level instructional pieces that combine charm with sophisticated harmonic and technical elements, and Ricker's most ambitious piece, Sonatine (in reality a full-fledged sonata), was performed publically by the noted Czech pianist Rudolf Firkusny and highly regarded by a number of influential contemporaries. It clearly warrants revival. Scholars of local and regional history and the interplay between "provincial" and elite cultures should likewise find this archive valuable, an invitation to future research into the cross-pollination between the vital, if often overlooked, arts scene in the American heartland and coastal "high" culture.
The Interiority Research Project
The Interiority Research Project consists of an interdisciplinary collaborative group who come together around the broad question: What is the status of an “inner life” in contemporary cultures organized around technology, entertainment and capitalism? Each participant is working on an individual research project connected in some way to interiority as a human capacity. An interactive, digital working environment will allow participants to collaborate, share resources, and comment on each others’ work.
Principal Investigator: Dr. Bryan Tarpley
CoDHR participated in a $5,000,000 grant awarded to Canadian Higher Ed Institutions called the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS). This grant project addresses the following problem: Humanities scholars have unprecedented quantities of data for addressing complex social processes, but are hampered by the lack of meaningful connections between, and by the incompatibility of, online materials. Most continue to interact with cultural data only through reading rather than by leveraging algorithmic processes to answer major questions about human culture. Humanities researchers need a smarter, “semantic” web whose links will elucidate the diverse causes, effects, and significance of human action and expression.
The Mexican Reintegration Project (MRP) is a global research initiative aimed at supporting the international community by conducting research of the complexity of deportation phenomenon. By focusing on Mexico and the United States, we conduct research that can document the challenges deportees experience in efforts to reintegrate into Mexico. Our website provides data from our ongoing research as well as resources from other organizations that can support deportees in the reintegration process.
Montemayor's Diana
Montemayor's Diana is a digital scholarly edition of Bartholomew Yong’s English translation of Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral romance Los siete libros de la Diana, one of Shakespeare’s sources for The Two Gentlemen of Verona (and other plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night).
Networks for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture
Networks for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture is designed for scholars, students and those interested in exploring topics and questions emerging at the intersections of religion, the internet and new, social and mobile media. The Network offers an interactive space for researchers and others wishing to learn more about this growing research area to share related resources and highlight news items as well as events.
Researcher: Dr. Laura Mandell
The Poetess Archive constitutes a resource for studying the literary history of popular British and American poetry. The Poetess Archive Database now contains a bibliography of over 4,000 entries for works by and about writers working in and against the "poetess tradition," the extraordinarily popular, but much criticized, flowery poetry written in Britain and America between 1750 and 1900.
Redes Migrantes
Redes, migrantes sin fronteras is a non-profit digital initiative that connects migrants with support associations by providing a directory and a map of shelters, organizations, and programs. It is also a forum of expression to motivate volunteering to help the most vulnerable population.
Reord
Researchers: Dr. Britt Mize, Rebecca Baumgarten
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.
Reverberations of Racial Violence documents a historic NEH-sponsored conference on the centennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation. The conference took place at the Bob Bullock State Museum from January 31 to February 1, 2019.
The Victorian Female Detective Archive provides transcriptions of Victorian literature featuring female detectives.
The Women's Book History Bibliography is a database of secondary sources on women's writing and labor. Primarily its sources are in English, and non-English sources have a rough translation included. The database is a thorough snapshot of studies that take women as their primary subjects.