Digital Humanities

Applying computing or using digital media in the humanities disciplines

Researchers Working in this Area

Related Research Projects

AEOLIAN (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organizations)

Time frame
2021-2023
Investigator
Glen Layne-Worthey
Total funding to date
$49,820.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

Many digital archival collections are limited due to factors such as privacy concerns and copyright. AEOLIAN combines innovative AI methods and the knowledge of scholars from multiple cultural institutions to address the accessibility of these collections, ultimately making them more accessible. Additionally, the project aims to foster collaboration amongst scholars and practitioners from…

artificial intelligence

Broadening Access to Text Analysis by Describing Uncertainty

Time frame
2020-Present
Investigator
Ted Underwood
Total funding to date
$73,122.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

A project to study errors and paratextual noise in optically transcribed digital library texts, and the consequences of these errors on historical and humanistic conclusions measuring trends across time.

The noise associated with digital transcription has become an important obstacle to humanistic research. While the errors in digital texts are easily observed, the…

describing uncertainty in research

Data Capsule Appliance for Research Analysis of Restricted and Sensitive Data in Academic Libraries

Time frame
2017-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$32,500.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Indiana University, in partnership with eight other academic libraries, will enable new kinds of computational research while ensuring librarians remain expert stewards of information collections. In the last decade, there has been a nearly exponential increase in the volume of digital content, much of which could be valuable for computational research. However, not all datasets can be made…

Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources

Time frame
2015-2018
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$398,844.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

Librarians and digital humanities scholars from the University of Illinois in partnership with colleagues at Indiana University, Northwestern University, Lafayette College, the University of North Carolina, and the HathiTrust Research Center will develop a shared curriculum for use in academic libraries and a train the trainer series designed to assist librarians in getting started with the…

HathiTrust + Bookworm Project

Time frame
2014-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$504,373.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is partnering with the Cultural Observatory team that developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer together with Google. The goal of this collaboration is to implement a greatly enhanced open-source version of the Cultural Observatory’s open-source “Bookworm” text analysis and visualization tool designed to assist scholars to meet the challenges posed by the…

HathiTrust + Bookworm project

HathiTrust Research Center Phase 2

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$535,292.00
Funding agency
HathiTrust

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

HathiTrust Research Center: New Opportunities through Computational Analysis of HathiTrust Digital Library 2014-2018

Time frame
2014-2018
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$1,000,000.00
Funding agency
HathiTrust

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$15,000.00
Funding agency
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Music prints and manuscripts created over the past thousand years sit on the shelves of libraries and museums around the globe. As these organizations digitize their collections, images of these scores are increasingly accessible online. However, the musical content remains difficult to search.

Google Books and HathiTrust have already made it possible to search the content of text…

Text Mining the Novel: Establishing the Foundations of a New Discipline

Time frame
2014-2020
Investigators
Ted Underwood, J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$142,000.00
Funding agency
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

This HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) project seeks to produce the first large-scale cross-cultural study of the novel according to quantitative methods. Ever since its putative rise in the eighteenth century, the novel has emerged as a central means of expressing what it means to be modern. And yet despite this cultural significance, we still lack a comprehensive study of the novel’s place…

Textual Geographies

Time frame
2016-2019
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$15,536.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

Textual Geographies uses named entity recognition and geolocation to extract place names from multilingual (English, German, Spanish, and Chinese) printed volumes held by the HathiTrust digital library and to associate those names with detailed geographic information. The project corpus currently includes about 10 million volumes published between 1700 and the present day.

Textual Geographies logo

The Computer Music Project

Time frame
1984-Present
Investigator
Sever Tipei
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Arts, UIUC Campus Research Board, School of Music

Founded in 1984, the Computer Music Project is a facility dedicated to computer music research and teaching. Through its existence, it has supported the development of new tools for composition, sound design, sound analysis, sonification, sound visualization and automatic notation along with the creation of new musical compositions. Software created at CMP benefits, in turn, classroom and…

computer music at U of I

The Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Madelyn Sanfilippo
Total funding to date
$16,818.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Knowledge commons refer to the institutionalized community governance of sharing, creating, and curating a wide range of intellectual and cultural resources. This project will establish a Research Coordination Network (RCN) designed to build a research community that will advance these scientific principles. In doing so it will aid in the development of empirical and theoretical insights into…

black & white photo of book stack

The Internet of Musical Events Digital Scholarship Community and the Archiving of Performance (InterMuse)

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$100,840.00
Funding agency
University of York

This project arises from longstanding recognition of the challenges associated with the documentation of, and access to, collections of performance ephemera, for which the British Library is a key repository in the UK. Live musical events play a vital role in community life across the globe, yet they often leave only faint traces on the historical record, even in modern times. Sources can be…

sheet music

Understanding the Needs of Scholars in a Contemporary Publishing Environment

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigator
Allen Renear
Total funding to date
$1,000,000.00
Funding agency
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“Understanding the Needs of Scholars in a Contemporary Publishing Environment,” better know as Publishing Without Walls (PWW), is a digital scholarly publishing initiative that is scholar-driven, openly accessible, scalable, and sustainable. PWW will directly engage with scholars throughout the research process. It aims…

WCSA+DC

Time frame
2016-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$1,170,000.00
Funding agency
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

This project builds upon, extends, and integrates two developmental research threads within the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC). The first thread originates from work that was conducted in the Workset Collections for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA): Prototyping Project. The second thread continues the work of…

News Stories