About Signature Projects

What is a Signature Project?

The Northeastern Humanities Center supports faculty-led, grant-funded, public-facing, digital archives, toolkits, and community initiatives that showcase interdisciplinary humanities research. Humanities Center Signature Projects have access to resources in the Center for Digital Scholarship, including workspace, a digitization lab, and consultation with the Humanities Center’s Digital Project Archivist. The Humanities Center’s Signature Projects make up a community of scholars engaged in the mission of public-facing digital humanities research.

What Exemplifies a Signature Project?

Signature Projects advance efforts to build community-informed partnerships in digital preservation, sustainable archiving, public history, and curricular support for educators.

  • The Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence is a community-based digital archive created to support Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, interpretations, and representations of the past.
  • The Digital Transgender Archive is an online hub dedicated to transgender history that features digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.
  • The Early Caribbean Digital Archive is an open access collection of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps, and images.
  • The Early Black Boston Digital Almanac is a collection of digital exhibits that feature material about the vibrant Black communities of Boston during the 18th and 19th centuries.
  • Mapping Black London produces interactive maps, dynamic digital exhibits, curriculum material, and other educational content that allows users to encounter and discover the varied contributions made by Black people to the development of London.
  • Homosaurus is an international linked data vocabulary of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) that intends to function as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies, such as the Library of Congress.
  • The Reckonings Project is a community-university collaboration dedicated to documenting, investigating, and archiving past and present injustices in housing and land ownership in Boston.

Becoming a Signature Project 

The Humanities Center welcomes proposals to become Signature Projects from faculty leading existing high-impact digital projects that support our vision as a locus of public- facing humanities research at Northeastern University. Projects should demonstrate recognition by peer review through a record of grant funding or other means. Interested faculty should contact Shireen Zaineb at [email protected] to discuss project eligibility.