Essentially, I'm designing a research methods class / workshop for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers that introduces them to the many rich digital tools available to the humanities. The aim, however, is not to diminish the importance of text-only papers or books in favor of showstoppers filled with links and videos.
We have found over 800 cans of film in Amman, Jordan! With a small grant from King Abdullah, we were able to digitize 10 of them and found some very interesting content. The most exciting find was a film produced in Palestine in 1968, just after the Six-Day war. It has been confirmed by scholars and persons affiliated with the PLO that this film is the only surviving copy from what was the PLO film archive before it disappeared in 1985.
Still very much in its development stages, the project explores how Spanish women understood and represented their charitable work from the late-Enlightenment period through the end of the Spanish Civil War and the early part of the Franco dictatorship.
The Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive is a collaborative project providing online access to performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world as well as essays and metadata provided by scholars and educators in the field. The idea that Shakespeare is a global author has taken many forms since the building of the Globe playhouse.
The reprint discovery engine for nineteenth-century periodicals archives would be a tool not unlike the Google Ngram Viewer, but focused on textual reprint and reference. This project would likely start by investigating a database like the Library of Congress’ “Chronicling America” collection, which is open and includes “an extensive application programming interface (API) which you can use to explore all of our data in many ways.”
I imagine the reprint discovery tool developing in two stages:
To date, there is no open-access central resource for the study of 19th-century history and culture. Each such anthology is proprietary, often with password-protected web sites that accompany the hard-copy books. What is required is a website that provides this information in a free, expansive, searchable, reliable, peer-reviewed, easy-to-use format. I am creating a central resource for high school and university teachers seeking a comprehensive overview of the period 1789-1910.