Projects
Pittsburgh is full of interesting DH projects. Find a selection of them here. If your Pittsburgh-affiliated project doesn’t appear, feel free to add it (in an alphabetically appropriate spot) via the GitHub link at the bottom of the page.
[Editor’s note: this page is still quite sparse, but will be updated soon]
Directory
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
C
Center for Midnight. A three-day writing experiment to produce a short account of the Center for Midnight, a fictional artistic movement of the late twentieth century. Each sentence represents a meticulously-crafted collaboration between humans and a recurrent neural network trained on artists’ biographies and other corpora. Led by author Robin Sloan and Scott B. Weingart, hosted at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry in 2018.
D
Digits. An A.W. Mellon-funded initiative to put digital scholarly objects on equal footing with print scholarship. Project team includes Matt Burton (Pitt), Matt Lavin (Pitt), Jessica Otis (GMU), and Scott Weingart (CMU).
E
Encyclopedia of the History of Science. The Encyclopedia of the History of Science (ETHOS) publishes up-to-date, peer-reviewed articles on topics in the history of science and technology, broadly construed. All articles focus on a single topic in the field, presenting an interpretive overview of the subject while also surveying relevant published literature. The project development team included Chris Phillips (CMU), Amanda Katz (CMU), Jonathan Kiritharan (CMU), Matt Lincoln (CMU), Drew Stimpson (CMU), Dan Evans (CMU), Heidi Bartlett (CMU), Patrick Fulton, and Scott Weingart (CMU).
F
Frankenstein Variorum. A digital collation of five distinct versions of the novel produced between 1816 and 1831, appearing alongside annotations. The project team includes Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar (Pitt-Greensburg), Steven Gotzler (CMU), Jon Klancher (CMU), Matthew Lincoln (CMU), Rikk Mulligan (CMU), John Quirk (CMU), Emma Slayton (CMU), Raffaele Viglianti (UMD), Scott B. Weingart (CMU), and Avery J. Wiscomb (CMU).
Freedom and the Press Before Freedom of the Press. See Print and Probability.
From Collection Records to Data Layers: A Critical Experiment in Collaborative Practice. Collections as Data: Part to Whole is an Andrew K. Mellon funded initiative that aims to encourage implementation and use of museum and library collections as data, and to foster the development of broadly viable models that support these endeavors. This Part to Whole implementation supports experimental pedagogy to engage students in creating “data layers” to augment serials and ephemera representing traditionally excluded or marginalized perspectives. A collaboration among Matthew J. Lavin, Tyrica Terry Kapral, Aaron Brenner, Gesina Phillips, and University Library Services at the University of Pittsburgh.
H
Humanitiesdata.com. A collection of links and metadata for open data relevant to humanities scholarship (https://humanitiesdata.com) to help increase the overall number of digital pathways to humanities data, and to make it easier to search for datasets by their relevance to specific subfields. Maintained by Matthew J. Lavin.
I
InPhO and InPhO Topic Explorer. Formerly known as the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project, we took the metaphysics out of ontology, using machine reasoning to build and dynamically update a human-oriented but machine-readable taxonomy of philosophical ideas (and related thinkers) using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Then we took the ontology out of InPhO with our Topic Explorer project, which grew out of our attempt to build usable interfaces to topic models of the SEP. Members of the InPhO group are currently working on projects involving corpora from the HathiTrust Digital Library, Darwin’s readings and writings, the ancient Chinese “Handian”, and Thomas Jefferson’s library and correspondence, as well as providing quarterly updates to the SEP models. Maintained by Colin Allen (Pitt) and Jaimie Murdock (Sandia National Labs), the InPhO project has been generously supported in the past by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities.
L
Latin American Comics Archive. A curated exhibit of comic strips and comic books created in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico between the 1920s and the present. The project team includes Felipe Gómez Gutiérrez, Rikk Mulligan, Daniel Evans, Allison Paige Kuester, Olivia Wikle, and Scott Weingart.
P
Print and Probability is an interdisciplinary, NEH- and NSF-funded project at the intersection of book history, computer vision, and machine learning that seeks to discover letterpress printers whose identities have eluded scholars for several hundred years. Led by Christopher Warren and Sam Lemley at CMU, the team of book historians, statisticians, computer scientists, and librarians tackles bibliographical mysteries by modeling the material conditions of early modern print shops.
S
Secret Pittsburgh. An online guidebook to Pittsburgh’s “secret” places created by undergraduate students in the University of Pittsburgh’s Secret Pittsburgh Literature classes. The course was inspired by the series of Secret city guidebooks published by Jonglez Press, marketed as “local guides by local people.” Each semester, more places are added to this online guide to reflect the work of recent participants in the course. Technically led by Matthew J. Lavin.
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network that scholars and students from all over the world can collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. Unlike published prose, Six Degrees is extensible, collaborative, and interoperable: extensible in that people and associations can always be added, modified, developed, or, removed; collaborative in that it synthesizes the work of many scholars; interoperable in that new work on the network is put into immediate relation to previously studied relationships. The project team includes Christopher Warren (CMU), Daniel Shore (Georgetown), Jessica Otis (GMU), Scott Weingart (CMU), John Ladd (WashU), and many others.