Digital History Projects

Take a look at digital history projects and get ideas for your own study design.

ORBIS

“The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity.”

(Project: Walter Scheidel, Elijah Meeks. Published by Stanford University Libraries.)

View the ORBIS Project.

Old Bailey

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913, is a “fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.”

(Project: Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Sharon Howard, Jamie McLaughlin. Universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield, Open University. Published by HRI Online Publications. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Big Lottery Fund.)

View the Old Bailey Project.

Texas Slavery Project

“The Texas Slavery Project examines the spread of American slavery into the borderlands between the United States and Mexico in the decades between 1820 and 1850. […] Dynamic interactive maps show the changing flows of enslaved and slaveholder populations in Texas over time. The population database search engine allows users to discover the growth of slave and slaveholder populations in the region. Digitized original documents from the era provide an opportunity to hear the voices of those who lived with slavery in early Texas.”

(Project: Andrew J. Torget. Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia)

View the Texas Slavery Project.

Valley Project

“The Valley Project details life in two American communities, one Northern and one Southern, from the time of John Brown’s Raid through the era of Reconstruction. In this digital archive you may explore thousands of original letters and diaries, newspapers and speeches, census and church records, left by men and women in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Giving voice to hundreds of individual people, the Valley Project tells forgotten stories of life during the era of the Civil War.”

(Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia)

View the Valley Project.

The Roaring Twenties

“The Roaring Twenties is an interactive exploration of the historical soundscape of New York City.” It “offers an informational environment of media and data. Letters, forms, photographs, sound motion pictures, and other kinds of artifacts cumulatively constitute a network of content and context that engages the visitor’s historical imagination. The goal is to enable each visitor to chart their own unique journey through this material and thereby transport themselves back in time, constructing a historically-oriented mindset through which to perceive the images and sounds.”

(Project: Emily Thompson, Scott Mahoy. Produced through Vectors)

View the Roaring Twenties Project.

HyperCities

HyperCities is a digital humanities platform hosting a range of thick mapping projects like “Holocaust Survivor Stories” or “The Berlin Palace and its Reconstructions, 1450-2020,” among others. It is an interactive collection of geographical and ethnological data that creates historical narratives through multiple layers of sources.

(Project: Todd Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano. Published by Harvard University Press.)

View the HyperCities Project.

Historypin

“Historypin is a place for people to share photos and stories, telling the histories of their local communities.” On its website, the non-profit-organization Historypin hosts “365,951 stories pinned across 27,844 projects and tours – across 2,600 cities. Built by a community of 80,000+ storytellers, archivists and citizen historians.”

View the Historypin Project.

Click!

“Click! In the 1970s that word signaled the moment when a woman awakened to the powerful ideas of contemporary feminism. Today “click” usually refers to a computer keystroke that connects women (and men) to powerful ideas on the Internet. We aim to bridge the gap between those two clicks by offering an exhibit that highlights the achievements of women from the 1940s to the present. This exhibit explores the power and complexity of gender consciousness in modern American life.”

(Project: Clio Visualizing History, Inc.)