ComeUnity CAPACITY BUILDING

downloadable Digital Humanities tools that are largely free, aimed toward helping
students and others who lack access to funding or institutional servers. Free, open
source web publishing platforms like WordPress and Omeka are also popular tools.
Digital humanities projects are more likely than traditional humanities work to involve a
team or a lab, which may be composed of faculty, staff, graduate or undergraduate
students, information technology specialists, and partners in galleries, libraries,
archives, and museums. Credit and authorship are often given to multiple people to
reflect this collaborative nature, which is different from the sole authorship model in the
traditional humanities (and more like the natural sciences).
There are thousands of digital humanities projects, ranging from small-scale ones with
limited or no funding to large-scale ones with multi-year financial support. Some are
continually updated while others may not be due to loss of support or interest, though
they may still remain online in either a beta version or a finished form. The following are
a few examples of the variety of projects in the field:
Digital Archives
The Women Writers Project (begun in 1988) is a long-term research project to make
pre-Victorian women writers more accessible through an electronic collection of rare
texts. The Walt Whitman Archive (begun in the 1990s) sought to create a hypertext and
scholarly edition of Whitman’s works and now includes photographs, sounds, and the
only comprehensive current bibliography of Whitman criticism. The Emily Dickinson
Archive (begun in 2013) is a collection of high-resolution images of Dickinson’s poetry
manuscripts as well as a searchable lexicon of over 9,000 words that appear in the
poems.
The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for
Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University,
preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and
African-descended peoples in slave societies. This Digital Archive currently holds
Page 101 of 201