Creating and Developing a Digital Humanities Project - From Inception to Implementation and Dissemination: EXAMPLES OF NOTABLE LARGE-SCALE DH PROJECTS

Some examples of notable large-scale digital humanities projects:

Literary projects:

The "Victorian Web" (Brown University) (1987-present).

• The Victorian Web, which became a 501(3)(c) charitable organization in February 2020, originated in hypermedia environments (Intermedia, Storyspace) that existed long before the World Wide Web. One of the oldest academic and scholarly websites, it entered the Internet in 1994. The Victorian Web takes an approach that differs markedly from many Internet projects. Today the Internet offers many excellent resources — and we use them often! —  such as Project Gutenberg, the HathiTrust Digital Library, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and British Listed Buildings. These sites take the form of archives that quite properly preserve their information in the form of separate images or entire books accessible via search tools. The Victorian Web, in contrast, presents its images and documents, including entire books, as nodes in a network of complex connections. In other words, it emphasizes the link rather than the search tool (though it has one) and presents information linked to other information rather than atomized and isolated

The "Project Gutenberg" digital library

50 years of eBooks 1971-2021. In 2021, Project Gutenberg celebrated the first eBook for reading enjoyment and unlimited free redistribution. This eBook was created on July 4, 1971 by Project Gutenberg’s founder, Michael S. Hart. Read more about this lasting innovation.

The "Shakespeare's World" interactive website

This project invited people to transcribe manuscripts from Shakespeare's time, including letters, newsletters, and recipe books. The transcriptions are available on the Folger's website, Luna, along with images of the original manuscripts. The project also helped identify new words and word variants that were not previously in the Oxford English Dictionary

Historical projects:

The "Chronicling America" digitized newspaper collection (Library of Congress).

The Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection provides access to select digitized newspaper pages produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress. As part of the program, cultural heritage institutions apply for and receive awards to select and digitize newspaper pages representing the history, geographic coverage, and events of note for their state or territory. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.

The "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project (Stanford University)

Before email, faculty meetings, international colloquia, and professional associations, the world of scholarship relied on its own networks: networks of correspondence that stretched across countries and continents; the social networks created by scientific academies; and the physical networks brought about by travel. These networks were the lifelines of learning, from the age of Erasmus to the age of Franklin. They facilitated the dissemination and the criticism of ideas, the spread of political news, as well as the circulation of people and objects. 

But what did these networks actually look like? Were they as extensive as we are led to believe? How did they evolve over time? Mapping the Republic of Letters, in collaboration with international partners, seeks to answer these and other questions through the development of sophisticated, interactive visualization tools. It also aims to create a repository for metadata on early-modern scholarship, and guidelines for future data capture.

We have worked on the various individual projects showcased on these pages collaboratively, as part of a single team. In 2017 the founding members of Mapping the Republic of Letters published a co-authored article about doing historical work in the digital age. You can read this piece here: "Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project." 
A PDF version of the article is freely available.

The "The Valley of the Shadow" Civil War project (University of Virginia)

The Valley of the Shadow enables visitors to explore a critical part of the American past for themselves. The Valley project presents the complex historical record of the people of a northern community and a southern community, one in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia, both in the Great Valley that stretches across the Mason Dixon line, throughout the era of the American Civil War.

Art historical projects:

The "Artstor Digital Library"

Artstor was a digital library of images and associated data for research and teaching. It had over 2.5 million images from around the world in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences. Images covered many cultures and time periods, including painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and more. On August 1, 2024, the Artstor website was retired and its content, resources, and functionality were moved to JSTOR

The "Google Art Project"

The Google Art Project, available on multiple platforms, is a collaboration between Google and cultural institutions to make art and culture accessible online. It includes works from over 6,000 artists and tens of thousands of artworks accessble in high-resolution images and videos of artworks, cultural artifacts, and street art. It offers Virtual tours: 360-degree tours of galleries using Street View technology. You can curate  your own collection.

The "Getty Provenance Index"

This vast collection of digital records is expanded and enriched on a regular basis. The quantity and scope of research material that is available varies by region, period, and type of document. These resources are currently accessible through two interfaces: 
(A) The Getty Provenance Index^® (GPI) provides access to archival inventories, sales catalogs, and dealer stock books. (B)The Getty Provenance Index: Additional Databases provides access to the Collectors Files, Payments to Artists, and Public Collections.

The "Digital Michelangelo Project" (Stanford University)

Recent improvements in laser rangefinder technology, together with algorithms developed at Stanford for combining multiple range and color images, allow us to reliably and accurately digitize the external shape and surface characteristics of many physical objects. Examples include machine parts, cultural artifacts, and design models for the manufacturing, moviemaking, and video game industries.

As an application of this technology, a team of 30 faculty, staff, and students from Stanford University and the University of Washington spent the 1998-99 academic year in Italy scanning the sculptures and architecture of Michelangelo. As a side project, we also scanned 1,163 fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome. We are currently back in the United States processing the data we acquired. Our goal is to produce a set of 3D computer models - one for each statue, architectural setting, and map fragment we scanned - and to make these models available to scholars worldwide.

The motivations behind this project are to advance the technology of 3D scanning, to place this technology in the service of the humanities, and to create a long-term digital archive of some important cultural artifacts. Our sponsor.s are Stanford University, Interval Research Corporation and the Paul G. Allen Foundation for the Arts

Linguistic projects:

The "Perseus Digital Library" (Tufts University)

For detailed information about this project see The Mission of Perseus ; Browse the collection ;  Search the catalog

The "Early English Books Online" (EEBO)

More than a decade ago, Early English Books Online (EEBO) debuted with 125,000 works, microfilmed over 70 years from more than 250 libraries worldwide. Today, with over 146,600 titles and associated bibliographic records, EEBO is one of the most successful digitized research collections ProQuest has ever produced, trusted by students and scholars in thousands of universities and research organizations worldwide. See the Online brochure.

The "Corpus of Contemporary American English" (COCA) 

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was created by Mark Davies, and it is the only large and "balanced" corpus of American English. COCA is probably the most widely-used corpus of English, and it is related to other corpora from English-Corpora.org, which offer unparalleled insight into variation in English.

The corpus contains more than one billion words of text (25+ million words each year 1990-2019) from eight genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, TV and movies subtitles, blogs, and other web pages.