Hey! Just happened upon this post and thought the list is really worth expanding as I’ve studied some DH myself!
Check out Around DH in 80 Days where there’s a list of 80 DH projects from around the world that were picked to be featured. You can also find their GoogleDocs spreadsheet for the full list of suggested projects. Their efforts to highlight global DH projects are ongoing, and they’ve created this new website as well!
Would also love to share one of my favorite digital projects called Diarna, a geomuseum documenting and mapping sites of Jewish heritage from all over SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and Central Asia!
And for those interested in learning about or studying different Arabic dialects, I want to share MADAR corpus which is a database collecting Arabic sentences as spoken from 25 Arab cities. This website details how to use it.
Cheers!
Digital Humanities is a really cool field.
It’s main goals is discovering how to use digital infrastructure and tools to do humanities research (linguistics, history, literature) and how to engage the general public in academic discourse of these topics.
From a historian's perspective this is very exciting as many people think history is boring or worse just names and dates. These tools and visualizations of history bring people to the forefront of history conversations and engage directly.
Not to mention these are very fun to play with. Video games for academic nerds.
Digital Humanities really encourages research and digital projects. It may be slowly becoming a passion of mine.
Here are some of my favorite examples:
Allow me to introduce with the Digital Humanities Forum at Miami University Oxford, Ohio. https://libguides.lib.miamioh.edu/c.php?g=1100099&p=8022726
Other universities host past digital humanities projects on their scholarly commons too:
Berkeley: https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/projects
https://orbis.stanford.edu/ Orbis is the interactive trade map of the Roman empire and is a very detailed digital humanities project. It's one of my personal favorites cause you can "Take walking tour to Constantinople"
Or perhaps you'd like to walk the silk road? http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/index.html.en
Image reading is very interesting too, this tool from google is what I I normal think of https://cloud.google.com/vision. The "Try the API feature" allows you to upload and analyze images to find descriptor terms. (Yes I hate google and AI, but I'm sorta okay with metadata for museum object files being made a bit AI, it's painstaking work and there are too many words and way of describing a freaking spoon.)
http://www.onodo.org/ Onodo allows network mapping and is a cool easy to use program. Check out the Gallery to find public published projects on the Mughals Emperors to Star wars.
Geospatial labs create digital products linked to maps and are also a form of digital humanities and is very applicable for the origins of an artifact and conceptualizing location. http://www.arcgis.com/ is a geospatial platform designed to make Story Maps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b2c6b618e7b24cebb4039ac59dc52f19
Makerspaces and 3-D modeling are also considered to be digital humanities as there is a digital component. So check out the Makerspace at your local library!
Omeka is a digital platform that can create very basic virtual exhibits and is a pain to work with (the backend is annoying as all get out, too many metadata slots) but kinda cool.
Virtual museum exhibits are also digital humanities!!! (I could easily make a series of posts about that) This runs the gambit from slides shows to video game like exhibits to videos of tours and click through tours. It's kinda a you name it it's a valid exhibit model.
I do know that Miami University of Oxford, Ohio has a virtual museum of the Archeology collection on campus, but I don't have a link. Sorry. The collection is made up of 3-D scans of artifacts and is really cutting-edge. I swear I've seen it and been on the website.
https://dsl.richmond.edu/ Is a really cool set of interactive history stats with maps, and primary resources discussing tough social issues like land acquisition and redlining. Even the history of party lines in the US House of Representatives.
https://voyant-tools.org/ Last but not least Voyant is great for analyzing literature. Or my thesis, just to see what the drinking word actual is. It will pick out most common words, make word clouds etc. So if your slide show on a author out of copyright need pizazz you can upload the NOT copyrighted work for some word clouds. Or see the depth of vocabulary used or check that your resume can be read by an API. Cause that's what this tool is an API. THIS IS NOT an AI generation detector it only counts words
Now most of these projects and tools are for English and are US directed, but I'd love to hear about how the rest of the world is doing Digital Humanities. I'd love to hear about your favorite projects and tools! So maybe add a few to this post?
« To quote the tomb of leftist Jewish Egyptian activist Shehata Haroun, the father of Magda Haroun, the current president of the few remnants of the Jewish community who remain in Cairo: ‘Every human being has multiple identities, I am a human being, I am Egyptian when Egyptians are oppressed, I am Black when Blacks are oppressed, I am Jewish when Jews are oppressed, and I am Palestinian when Palestinians are oppressed.’ »
— Massoud Hayoun, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History
« Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
And dance me to the end of love »
Leonard Cohen, Dance Me to the End of Love
« For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in a sense we were all here at once. »
Elif Batuman, The Idiot
« Exploring Kabul, I found, required the same principles that help in the reading of mystical Persian poetry, in the relationship between the zahir, or the overt, and the batin, the hidden or implied. This works on the tacit understanding that what is being said is an allegory for what is meant or intended. To talk of the moon, for instance, is to talk of the beloved; to talk of clouds across the moon is to talk of the pain of separated lovers; to talk of walls is to speak of exile. Such wandering leads through circuitous routes to wide vistas of understanding. Like walking through a small gate into a large garden. It is also a useful reminder that in this city, what is seen is often simply one aspect of the truth. What lies behind – the shadow city – is where layers are revealed. »
Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan
« What a beautiful girl you are,” he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of “important” itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky. »
Elif Batuman, Either/Or
« The town looked golden and antique and the mountains next to us were covered with thin pine trees. Beirut, from this bench, was like a dream, a winding staircase of awkward memories and people who no longer were, who one day would no longer be. »
Nur Turkmani, Black Hole (Source: Rusted Radishes)
“I undressed and left my clothes on the sand. I was not at ease with my body, not even in the darkness of night. It had been unloved, perhaps forever. Untouched by a lover for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it when it was not in conversation with a piano. Or how to respond to the way Tomas gazed at the green jewel pierced through my belly button.”
— Deborah Levy, August Blue
« Archaeology can impact in concrete and beneficial ways to bring about reconciliation and acceptance, rather than simply being the raw material for hostility. »
Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the East, by Lynn Meskell
This is the benchmark against which we should start judging how we do archaeology and how we use it in our modern times.
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
XXs | beirut, lebanonStoryGraph: @hakawatiyya Side Blog: hakawatiyya
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