HTRC Team to contribute to “BLACK DH” Digital Humanities project

Stephen Downie
J. Stephen Downie, Professor, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center
Glen Layne-Worthey
Glen Layne-Worthey, Associate Director for Research Support Services, HathiTrust Research Center

J. Stephen Downie, iSchool professor and co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for HTRC Research Support Services, along with partners in the University of Illinois Library, have been awarded $17,456 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities. The team will contribute to the University of Kansas project, "Building Literacy and Curating (Critical Cultural) Knowledge in Digital Humanities (BLACK DH)."

A three-year project, BLACK DH will address how digital humanities' reach into scholarly research and production can be paired with discussions of race and access to marginalized materials and experiences. Leading the project for the University of Kansas is Professor Maryemma Graham, who has focused her distinguished career on gathering and promoting African American literature. Graham founded the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW) in 1983 and has built upon that effort ever since.

"One essential element in the creation of a diverse and inclusive digital humanities community is what the BLACK DH project rightly calls 'critical cultural knowledge' of the DH field," explained Downie. "We're so happy that Professor Graham chose HTRC to share our critical cultural knowledge and long expertise in the field with this community of emerging scholars."

BLACK DH will also create an online platform, B2 Digital, to house the 4,000+ titles making up HBW's digital inventory. It also will provide a repository for completed and in-process digital projects related to the Black experience, as well as important but little-known collections along with digital humanities training webinars and resources.

To provide public access to B2 Digital resources in a digital library site that the B2 team builds, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library staff will develop a web interface integrated with the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN), a digital publishing initiative for archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums that want to make searchable digital collections of primary source material.

The HTRC team, who will serve as advisors on the BLACK DH project, will create and present a digital library workshop curriculum customized to meet the needs of the BLACK DH participants and the scholarly materials with which they will work. Team members with decades of digital humanities experience will also serve as formal mentors to early-career scholars in the BLACK DH cohort.

"HTRC staff have been invited to join a team of specialists in digital humanities and African American studies from around the country who are discussing ways to encourage early involvement in DH work in the HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) community and for Black students and scholars generally," said Layne-Worthey. "We've developed a needs assessment survey for those communities and, after it's administered, we'll work with the results to develop some recommendations for the project."

For the past two years, the HTRC team has worked with Graham on a project, Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD, pronounced "squared"), which received $500,000 in funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. That project focused on developing new methods for creating and analyzing digital collections, with an emphasis on content related to historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities.

HTRC, co-hosted at the iSchool and at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, enables computational analysis of works in the 17.5 million-volume HathiTrust Digital Library to facilitate non-profit research and educational uses of the collection.

Research Areas:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Education of Things named a SHARP Book Prize finalist

A book by Associate Professor Elizabeth Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762-1860, has been named a finalist for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) Book History Book Prize. 

Elizabeth Hoiem

iSchool alumni and student named 2025 Movers & Shakers

Two iSchool alumni and an MSLIS student are included in Library Journal's 2025 class of Movers & Shakers, an annual list that recognizes 50 professionals who are moving the library field forward as a profession. Leah Gregory (MSLIS '04) was honored in the Advocates category, Billy Tringali (MSLIS '19) was honored in the Innovators category, and University Library Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian Mary Ton (current MSLIS student) was honored in the Educators category.

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Dalia Ortiz Pon

Twelve iSchool master's students were named 2024–2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Dalia Ortiz Pon earned her bachelor's degree in Latina/Latino studies from San Francisco State University. 

Dalia Ortiz Pon

Debnath datafies "The Bulletin"

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

Tan Debnath stands casually with his hands in his pockets and smiles broadly at the camera. It's a sunny day