THE DIGITAL REPOSITORY FOR THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
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Combining state of the art technology with traditional oral history to create a more robust and comprehensive resource has long been one of The HistoryMakers goals. Now, with the development of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, this goal has reached fruition in a unique platform. However, The HistoryMakers corpus is still largely unexplored, and is now ripe for exploration along interdisciplinary lines. As a burgeoning academic discipline, the Digital Humanities has already established itself as a collaborative space for scholars in varying areas to combine their expertise – elucidating new ideas and trends in data and the historical record that had never before been explored.
With over 9,000 hours of fully-transcribed time-aligned video content, robust search capabilities, and hundreds of thousands of fields of metadata, The HistoryMakers has amassed an impressive dataset for technologists and data scientists to experiment with, but through The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, this vast content is also accessible for those without background in analytics or quantitative fields. In order to encourage scholars from all areas to explore The HistoryMakers content more deeply, and to use it in the creation of innovative new projects, a Digital Humanities committee was formed within The HistoryMakers Higher Education Advisory Board, and a Digital Humanities Fellowship Award is now available in 2019.
Members of The HistoryMakers Digital Humanities Committee are made up of librarians, faculty, and researchers, focused solely on exploring methods to provide more context for The HistoryMakers collection, and to provide further entry points for students and researchers, using cutting edge digital techniques and data analytics. Led initially by work produced out of the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, this committee works collaboratively across institutions to conceive and implement projects that offer new ways of understanding and engaging with The HistoryMakers content, and that will surface latent themes and characteristics of the Collection.
Examples of the Digital Humanities Committee’s work include a text-modeling experiment using transcripts from The HistoryMakers Collection (http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/hm/) generated by Yale University’s Digital Humanites Lab. The 25-topic model used machine algorithms to explore themes based on word frequency and co-occurrence. Further examples can be found under TEACHING & LEARNING.
Boston University
Vika Zafrin; Digital Scholarship Librarian
Carnegie Mellon University
Mike Christel; Teaching Professor; Entertainment Technology Center
Howard University
Lopez Matthews; Digital Preservation Librarian
Michigan State University
Julian Carlos Chambliss; Professor; English, History
Rutgers University
Krista White; Digital Humanities Librarian and Head, Media Services
Stanford University
Hannah Frost; Manager, Digital Library Product & Service Management
Glen Worthey; Digital Humanities Librarian Co-Lead of The Center For Interdisciplinary Digital Research
University of Iowa
Thomas Keegan; Head, Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio
University of Richmond
Lauren Tilton; Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities
University of Virginia
John Unsworth; Dean of Libraries, University Librarian, Professor of English
Yale University
Catherine DeRose; Digital Humanities Lab Manager
Peter Leonard; Director, Digital Humanities Lab