Digital Humanities Projects in Institutional Contexts
Digital Humanities scholarship depends, at least to some extent, on institutional support. Many academic institutions now offer programs and degrees in the subject, and a large number of courses in areas related to the digital humanities are available in many colleges and universities, both large and small. The examples discussed below describe various digital humanities research and educational initiatives.
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln
An example of an institutional academic center devoted to digital humanities scholarship, education, and outreach is the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). The center was established as a conscious effort to promote collaborative research in building digital content to create and disseminate humanities knowledge. The Center is a joint initiative between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the College of Arts and Sciences. Its focus is trans-disciplinary digital humanities scholarship involving scholars in English, history, modern languages and literature, religion, anthropology, and geography. Many projects, both large and small, are associated with this Center.
The Center has undertaken several major projects. One area concerns thematic research collections such as the Walt Whitman Archive, the Willa Cather Archive, and Omaha Indian Artifacts and Images. Work in tool development is also performed, such as a tool for ensuring the interoperability of arbitrary XML-encoded text collections. The Making of Modern America project has a geo-spatial focus, and explores social developments and the influence of transportation and communication systems in the latter half of the 19th century.
There is a large number of projects underway at the Center. Casting Digital Nets focuses on what is now known as Lake Andes in South Dakota, U.S. The project has a pronounced geospatial and historical emphasis. It explores the historical significance of the area as originally the possession of the Yankton Sioux in South Dakota, subsequently being commercialized as a bass fishing area, and finally to a federal wildlife refuge. The project covers topics in economics, fishery ecology, changing legal doctrines, and international treaties. Several historical maps provide geographic and historical context. A large collection of documents with metadata are available in TEI-encoded XML.
Another project is Across the Spectrum: The Interdisciplinary Life and Letters of John G. Neihardt. An extensive searchable digital archive contains the collected professional and personal letters, essays, and reviews of the work of the American writer and poet, who lived from 1881 to 1973. The Willa Cather Archive [https://cather.unl.edu/] is a large project providing resources, including images, audio, and videos, to study the life and writings of American writer Willa Cather (1873 – 1947). The archive also contains a large collection of digitized secondary literature. Textual analysis and visualization techniques for analyzing the archive are also described.
Digital humanities in Mexico
Digital humanities initiatives are not evenly represented internationally, as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, some European nations, and Australia are predominant contributors to digital humanities scholarship. Although activity in Asia, Africa and Latin America are not as well represented, researchers in these areas are involved in initiatives and projects related to the digital humanities (See Claire Warwick, Institutional Models for Digital Humanities). For example, several digital humanities projects are being undertaken at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) (UNAM), the largest university in Latin America. One project focuses on the digitization of 17th century manuscripts from Mexico. The texts were encoded in TEI. Another project is the creation of an electronic corpus of a history of Mexican Spanish. Visualization work includes the 3D visualizations of pre-Hispanic archeological sites. Most of these projects were relatively small, with limited incorporation into larger institutional structures.