From Ancient Rome to a Valley in Virginia: More Digital Humanities Projects

A majority of academics may view with suspicion what’s come to be called the digital humanities, but as I explain in this article (the first in a series on how technology is changing scholarship), the new alliance of techies and fuzzies is producing all sorts of experiments in presenting information.

Humanities 2.0

There were plenty of interesting projects that I didn’t have room to mention in the article. Many readers have written in about sites that are accessible to everyone. Take a look at:

Rome Reborn, a University of Virginia site that offers a 3D digital model showing the urban development of ancient Rome in A.D. 320, is one of my favorites. You get a sense of what it was like to stroll past the Coliseum back then.

Railroads and the Making of Modern America, developed at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, illustrates how America changed from 1850 to 1900 with the growth of railroads, telegraphs, steam ships and other technologies.

The Dante Project at Princeton is a favorite of poetically inclined readers. It presents an annotated electronic text with lectures, recordings, images and an online database of Dante commentators stretching back to the 1320s.

— The Spatial History Lab at Stanford produces visual maps of all kinds of data — from vice in 20th-century Philadelphia to the geography of the Holocaust.

The Valley Project, out of the University of Virginia, details life in one Northern and one Southern community during the Civil War era through letters, speeches, newspaper articles, diaries, church records and more.

We know there are many other projects under way, so send in your favorite sites to share with other readers.

An earlier version of this post misidentified the university that runs The Valley Project. It is not the University of Richmond.